Review by Kathryn MacDonald
Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y’s second full collection of poetry. It follows From the Shoreline and Merienda, which was nominated for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Tad-y’s “themes of kinship, diasporic geographies, and formations of the mind” continue in her new collection.
Steffi Tad-y makes poems out of the world she knows: the bipolar world of the title’s Ward. From the prologue poem, you will slip into Tad-y’s rhythm and her spell, her taut, compressed poems, the white space that works for her, and the way the poems resonate with each other, and you will lose yourself in Tad-y’s words, her craft. Accessibility and depth enrich these poems, a sign of a poet skilled in her craft.
The collection begins with the prologue poem, which introduces us to voice and form:
Episode
Illness, unpinnable.
In my head, I was mother
to a god,
god to a mother.
Body belonging to men.
The doctor reported
distorted, disheveled.
Desire taken to extremes.
We meet her mother, her father. She is offered
…fish stew & cake.
In an instant, I am
the days I covet,
the child in my dreams.
From the personal of “Episode,” she shifts to addresses the reader in “You Who The Earth Was For,” or is she speaking to the younger self she has just introduced? Here we witness one of the tensions within and between the poems. It holds me like a magnet.
The first poem following the epigraph, expands on the ideas expressed in the prologue poem, and it provides readers with more insight into what lies beneath the surface of the poetry.
You Who The Earth Was For
After Jean Valentine
You fleeing war, carrying a rooster with your shaky hand.
You trained to pummel, never the first to wince or flinch.
You who plant their sadness into dirt.
You whose questions have no gentle answers.
You who cook too close to the stove.
You at the table, missing the one.
You whose loss comes with wordlessness.
You beside the rubble, out to build again.
You in the backseat being loved.
You running towards water.
Knowing something of American poet Jean Valentine offers a clue to understanding Tad-y’s work. According to the Poetry Foundation website, Valentine’s “lyric poems delve into dream lives with glimpses of the personal and political.’ …David Kalstone said of her work, ‘Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of…short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.’ Adrienne Rich wrote of Valentine’s work, ‘This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in any other way.’” Something of the same can be said of Tad-y’s poetry, which is also political (i.e. mental health/the ward) and personal (kinship, diaspora). This high praise is deserving.
The collection includes twelve numbered poems that are sprinkled throughout the book; each is a numbered “Notes from the Ward.” #1 is a list poem – each stanza a single sentence, observations, setting. The second is disorienting, disconcerting. The third is “After Ocean Vuong’s ‘Reasons for Staying’ and lists memories, and “Seconds of optimism.”
To read the entire review please see The Temz Review here.
Kathryn MacDonald 