Early in his long poetic career, Mahmoud Darwish became known as “the poet” of Palestine. Each time I read through Almond Blossoms and Beyond, I become more aware of how deeply tied the words he chooses are to the metaphors and symbolism of Palestine and Palestinians.
One of my favourite poems in the collection is “To Describe an Almond Blossom.” It begins: “To describe an almond blossom no encyclopedia of flowers / is any help to me, no dictionary. / Words carry me off to snares of rhetoric / that wound the sense, and praise the wound they’ve made.” He searches. He questions. He writes: “Neither homeland nor exile are words, / but passions of whiteness in a / description of the almond blossom.” He concludes the poem without having written the national anthem that he set out to write in the 1960s. Palestine is not yet free.
The almond blossom – metaphor of resilience and hope – is a presence in the collection, along with many other symbols: horseman and gazelle, pomegranate blossoms, the olive, bridge, moth, and that is the beginning. These metaphors and symbols are easy to research and doing so will deepen your understanding of place (Palestine) and the loss of place, the anguish of exile.
In reading and rereading the collection, I experience the poems as witness to the diaspora that began in 1948, and of the agony of exile. “Exile” is the title of half the eight sections that structure the book (Exile V to Exile VIII). Each is a long poem occupying pages 49-95. (In a review I wrote on my blog on February 10, 2020, I quoted Carolyn Forché’s definition of witness poetry. You can find it here.)
The poems in Almond Blossoms & Beyond are among the last poems Darwish wrote, and they overflow with the fullness of his passion and the skill of his years.
Almond Blossoms & Beyond by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), translated by Mohammad Shaheen (Interlink Books 2024; first published in Arabic in 2009)
No wonder the land is so rich / Blood is the best water
(“Battle of Books”).
Songs of Exile by Bänoo Zan (Guernica Editions, 2016)
Last fall, I met Bänoo Zan at the Northumberland Festival of the Arts literary event where she read. What a pleasure! I purchased a copy of Songs of Exile and have enjoyed (maybe not the best word for a book that unsettles) many read-throughs. Since then, Bänoo has received The Writers’ Union of Canada’s 2025 Freedom to Read Award. If you haven’t read Songs of Exile, My Father, or any of her other published work, I suggest you visit your library or bookstore. Bänoo Zan writes with passion, insight, and skill.
as it worms between leaves, squeezes into folio, witness to textured weave, to signatures bound in faux leather, in paperback, translations between rows of beans, pods of verbal clauses dangling from stems while fields lie fallow, forests burn perforated pages where words, who paragraphs steak justified in columns, sliced cubes of letters under crumble of Pink Pearl erasers as the system of nature, like absented rivers, flows unmarked in the margins (“systema,” 11)
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is Renée M. Sgroi’s second poetry collection. With its varied forms (traditional and experimental) and play of voices (the poet’s and those of plants and animals) we enter a world both multilayered and accessible. Beautifully conceived and delivered, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding delights and intrigues.
Grounded in the garden, the poems are dirt under the fingernails, both real and metaphor. Reading In a Tension… we learn about the inhabitants of, and visitors to, the garden. We sense grief. And we learn about the gardener – her intense stare, touch, involvement – her leap into “other.”
To distinguish the voices of poet from “other,” Sgroi shifts margins. The poems on the left margin are in the poet’s voice. Others, she tells us are “centred in the middle of the page, a sign that the imagined voice of the onion, the carrot, the grasshopper is bounded by the margins of what is knowable and what is not” (“In other words, two,” 113).
She also plays with form in other ways. For example, the words in “Morphology” box a rectangle, a garden. Words in the seven “visitations” poems are scattered across the pages like birds visiting a feeder. Sgroi experiments with form in still other ways. In “MIXED METHODS EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ACER SACCHARUM IN SITU, WITH PROGNOSIS BY ARBORISTS AND LINGUISTS ON THE FUTURE OF INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION: AN INVESTIGATION” (45-49) Sgroi’s form mimics a research paper under the headings of abstract through conclusions.
Some poems reveal, some stir questions like riddles in a caldron. Some poems, like the titular poem connect us – mothers and daughters – to trees and leaves:
…
sweetness is the sound a pen makes or a spine’s crack when first opened
as a birth canal binds daughter, mother into a book of doubled pages
and into the sweep a willow branch extends low beside the river,
This review has been published by FreeFall Magazine (December 2024)
Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead by Erina Harris Wolsak & Wynn (2024)
Academic and poet, Erina Harris, has several interests and concerns, many find their way into the subjects and themes of her second poetry collection, Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.
According to Harris’ profile on the University of Alberta website, where she teaches, her research interests include fairy tales, rhyme and nonsense verse, gender and women’s writing, subjectivity and relationality, experimentalism and more. Given this array, Harris meets the organizational challenge of creating a cohesive collection by structuring the poems into an abecedarium. But the complex weaving of varied subjects and themes into a whole is not the only thing that readers will notice. As in her first book, The Stag Head Spoke, the poetry here is highly original and experimental.
Readers are treated to rhyme and nonsense verse, word-play and music, a taste of Dadaism and Surrealism among other isms. The poems are subversive. They inform, create context for her research interests, while shifting perspective in unusual ways. They play with form, structure, ideas – and in the case of “Letter B: Bestiary Rondo” with sound.
… in the breath, in the breeze, that the breathing beasts breathe in, the breaths of the bees breathing trees’ breaths, the breeze breathes the bee-breaths with trees breathing beast- breaths, breath breezes in beast-breathing bees breathe the bee-breath-ing trees in the breath-tree will be in the breeze of the bee in the tree-bees will breathe with breeze-breaths will beasts bleed …
[Da Capo] (3)
Harris is a skillful weaver of words.
…
Please go to FreeFall‘s website by clicking on this link to read the rest of the review.
Last night the lake rose to meet me as I crossed. “Future Ghost” (13)
Writing “in time” with a brain tumour diagnosis is an amazing feat that Jim Johnstone does with honesty and grace. I offer a small look at the beauty and tone he achieves while writing through uncertainty.
Who can say why specific poems speak louder, but five seem to always surface with each reading, always curled up in a big old armchair – somehow comforting. Of the five, “Kracken” (43) rises to the top:
KRAKEN
Slip of the tongue, slip of the sea’s eight arms, and the whirlpool begins to compress its armour; failed spears, failed reel, a lens to enlarge the pericardial inferno threshing like an ocean
…
the wine-dark whine of the unseen.
The others among my favourites to reread over and over again include: “Invitation (Set to Summer Radio)” (53), “Three Sons” (56-57), and “Slice-Selective Excitation (Brain Scans 1-5)” (63).
The final poem “This is the End” (89-95) haunts with insight and intensity. These lines from the middle speak to the fear: “The future is as uncertain // as the body // it inhabits / and multiplies rapidly” (93).
Near the poem’s end: “The future // (heart) // heath // hearth // is coming // When it climbs through / an open window // we’ll know // it’s the end. / Ghost orchid, clover, crab- // grass grown to replace / evidence // … (94-95). The words are space openly on the pages, the future open-ended.
The King of Terror is a poetry collection to read slowly and to reread.
Available through your local bookstore or online: The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone, Coach House Books, 2023, ISBN 978 1 55245 470 1
Only the squelch of her footfalls, / slap of small waves, wind ruffling. Still / Corot was with her and took her up…. [“A Woman in a Painting but Not So,” 17]
Earlier this fall, I reread The Sparrow: Selected Poems by A. F. Moritz (Anansi, 2018) in preparation for an opportunity to join the poet and a small number of others to discuss our poetry, a wonderful privilege provided by Third Thursday Reading Series (Cobourg, Ontario). That evening Al Moritz read from his newest collection, Great Silent Ballad.
I had read a review by Colin Carberry that was posted on The High Window blog (August 1, 2024). I have now read Moritz’s newest collection more than once. However, I’ve decided to share The High Window’s review because I can’t do better than Colin Carberry. Even the poems that he discusses as favourites are also favourites of mine. Nevertheless, I would like to mention two additional poems.
Great Silent Ballad contains a section that reflects on social issues (Carberry discusses “The Tawer” and the idea of exploitation and restitution.) Another poem from the section of that name is “The Tradition” (115). I like the poem for different reasons on different readings, always with an undercurrent of sadness that haunts. It suggests to me the impossibility of rising above subjugation and of Isobel Wilkerson’s book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents.
The Tradition
He descended to the dead, wrapped an old towel around his waist, cooked the soup, manhandled the huge tin vat to the trestle table, ladled into bowls, handed to hands, listened to lappings and suckings, watched sad eager lips. So my grandmother did the same.
I’ll mention one more favourite that Carberry doesn’t, “Would have Taken Up” (107-108). Like other poems at the end of the collection, the poet reflects, writes a lament. It begins: “I rise, the sun too. / It passes over and I work. / I work and it passes farther.” Time goes on. The poet asks, “What have I done”? And at the end:
…O if I’d written her what I wanted, everything that composed itself in my heart, a sung world as glorious as this one in a moment of thought, it would have taken up my whole day. Sweetly, And then: sleep. It would have taken up all my life.
It’s a pensive and thoughtful poem on many levels, while suggesting that while one focuses on work other things are missed. As in my previous review of still arriving by Bruce Kauffman, Moritz is a poet of a certain age, and perhaps this reflection (even if imagination and not a personal experience) does come through in the collection. What I haven’t mentioned is the boyhood section of Great Silent Ballad: buy or borrow the book and give yourself a treat.
Great Silent Ballad is a pleasure to read. The collection is Moritz’s twenty-second. These poems demonstrate craft, passion, thought, and so much more. Enjoy.
Great Silent Ballad by A. F. Moritz (Anansi, 2024) is available through your local bookstore or online (ISBN 978-1-4870-1296-0).
i’d like to believe / that when we leave / this world / we do it without / breaking stride
[“the final exit,” 68]
Still arriving is Bruce Kauffman’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, which earned an honourable mention in the Don Gutteridge Poetry Award (2022) competition. In addition to his full-length work, Kauffman has published four chapbooks. But writing is not the sole reason for the widespread recognition of his name. For those living in the Kingston area, Bruce Kauffman needs no introduction. In 2020, he was presented with the Mayor’s Arts Champion Award; his work in the community as a poetry booster was featured in The Queen’s Journal (April 2, 2021).
I met Bruce in 2011 during the launch of my first poetry collection and more recently know him as a poetry editor for Devour: Art and Lit Canada, an online journal. Our paths crossed again at the Northumberland Festival of the Arts (NFOTA, September 2024) where he read during the WOW! Words on a Wire event. That is where I found a copy of still arriving, drawn to it by Bruce’s reading and by the quiet pensiveness of the cover image.
The poems have a haunting quality to them, yet feel immediate. In the Queen’s Journal article, Kauffman is quoted as saying, “A lot of my work seems to be sort of nature-drive, sort of Zen-like. Where I get inspiration is in a process called intuitive writing […] I find it important to not think. That’s the first step.” In this sense, the poems are experimental, if not in form. It is easy to accept that some of the poems, such as “unfinished notes from a journal #15” (43) were written using this method. They are reflective, a bit like notes-to-self.
Besides a peek into his journals, Kauffman alludes to Greek mythology, reminding readers of Virgil’s Charon who ferried the dead across the River Styx. Kauffman’s “ferryman” (14) waits. There’s a sense of mourning the impending loss of the self:
quiet comes the ferryman
the water before behind shows no trace of ripple wave
From whatever references or allusions Kauffman draws, they are well known, needing no explanation. His poems are direct, intimate – as if he’s talking to you over a glass of wine in a quiet spot – accessible, written by a man of certain years and life experience.
Early in the collection, the poet establishes the season of his life and the overriding tone of the poems, as in “autumn” (11):
we all in an autumn of our days
not simply any autumn instead perhaps that final one …
His meditative mood becomes an undercurrent running throughout the collection.
In “epiphany” (20) he seems surprised that his present view of life differs greatly from that of youth:
epiphany
for this poet this late in life
a reminder that lesser writ those mourning and vibrant poems of youth instead now these evening and mourning poems of and to the dead the dying
In “gone,” the mourning is for another. The poem begins: “this morning i packed up / the few things left of you / in a box,” and ends with “in the drought / of a lifetime // a last morning dew.” Although the book’s title looks forward, this elegiac feeling drifts across the pages.
Perhaps my favourite poem in still arriving falls midway between the book’s covers:
Zhivago, again
After Boris Pasternak’s novel, “Doctor Zhivago”, with reference to a scene in David Lean’s 1965 film based on the book
oh, Pasternak Zhivago how you arrive again in these days and my dreams to comfort to haunt
we both all torn inside outside by family place
yours and my fiction or not different era-ed distant but somehow parallel lives either of us married to ink as much as flesh
and this morning dear Larissa after I now too have become the deserter having crossed through blizzards over frozen tundra left my steed dead along the way
Despite Kauffman’s attempts to put a positive light on aging, “Zhivago, again” captures disquiet, loss, regret, the toll of being “married to ink.” This despite the theme suggested by the title and his neighbourhood walks, coffee in a corner café – the things that occupy the “intuitive” poems. This tension in the collection makes it interesting, but it also feels at odds, portraying a conflicted poet who wants a Zen-like life and death, but one who is living and facing it with some trepidation. Still arriving is a thoughtful collection written by a skilled and sensitive writer.
Still arriving by Bruce Kaufman (Wet Ink Books, 2023) is available through your local bookstore or online (ISBN 9781989786819).
I was out sinking in the sea, thinking of Carthage, / the night making sense of someone’s feast / of blasted blocks, rebar spiking signals where missiles / fell, so much glass under arches / smashed. [“South Beirut”]
ALIEN CORRESPONDENT by Antony Di Nardo (Brick Books, 2010)
Earlier this summer, Antony said, “I am a poet of place.” He is also a poet of witness. Antony was living and teaching in Beirut, Lebanon, during the summer war of 2006 and he was still there in May 2008 during the three-day barrage of “shells and grenades.” The collection is insightful, balanced, and heartfelt and gives us an inside view of the city’s beauty, its people, and also the brutality of war without romanticizing or moralizing. Alien Correspondent is as relevant now in 2024 as it was in 2010. I heartily recommend the poetry collection to you.
Available through your local bookstore or the publisher.
If you like this review, you may like others of the same ilk:
I wish I’d had a lifeline to throw, / a silken cord for her safe passage back through time. – “Passage” (41)
Openwork and Limestone by Frances Boyle is a collection of poems to be read carefully. Boyle draws on many sources for inspiration. Her subjects include history, family relationships, art, nature, time/space, and five fascinating poems about Lil. But thematically, the collection is not as scattered as the range of subjects suggests. A line in the prologue poem, “Inhumed,” attunes us to a key theme – posed as a question that runs throughout the collection: “What flows unseen beneath our lives?” – holds it all together.
I am always fascinated by the way poets structure their manuscripts. Structurally, Boyle’s collection is divided into four sections, each beginning with an untitled poem.
In the first section’s prologue poem, the narrator asks: Shall I too play the scientist, / study prehistory in stone… as she imagines time-travelling with Le Guin. And she does travel, imagining Kate, my finespun grandmother who is leaving Ireland with No promise of a quick return (“That Faraway Place”). This poem includes one of the most haunting images of the collection: Kate leaves in a mothdance of handkerchiefs.
In the second section, we find tension between the blight-blasted and openings, and we continue to time-travel. In “Passage,” during the Solstice the family enters the passage tomb at Newgrange…
We squeeze along its length, shoulders brushing stone. Reaching the chamber, see chevrons, sheaves, triple
//
spirals faint-carved on rock. Charred bone-bits, soot- shadows. A tomb. Grave goods strewn on passage floor.
The daughter leaves; she couldn’t carry on. The poem concludes with …
I wish I’d had a lifeline to throw, a silken cord for her safe passage back through time.
Are you reminded of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, the spool of thread?
In the third section prologue poem, there is a silent buzz / of hivemind hysteria and it is this section that we meet Lil. There are five intriguing Lil poems, and I want more of this fascinating character. As my mind went to Greek myth in the previous quote, here my mind leapt to Lilith, first wife of the Biblical Adam. In “Lil’s Rounds, She won’t be sucked under. She won’t drown. In “Singalong,” Lil reminds me of Yeat’s “A Crazed Girl” improvising her music. / Her poetry, dancing upon the shore.
Singalong Lil was flotsam those years, never quite sinking. Maybe she landed there by happenstance; she wasn’t jetsam, no hands delivered the overboard fling. When she flew
on her feet, whirled with spun eloquence of fleet deer, she prefigured the bringing of birdsong, commentary written in runic, best executed in daytime, accompaniment dipping at twilight to dirge.
In the final section, hope breaks through. In “Endurance,” Boyle writes: We’re hulking ships mired in frozen seas, / but spring is creaking open. The poems reconnect with earlier ones, as they do in “Tide of Limestone” in which the speaker crawls through caverns: The stuck place. / Dark matter filters us, / flows through our invisible nets. / We leave handprints, / scratches. Scant record. The final poem – “What Letting Go Means” – time travels through memory etched in glass. The speaker admonishes her sister to stand back from the fire, a plea (a hope) for the future.
Lacework and Limestone is Frances Boyles second poetry collection.
Available through your local bookstore or online: Openwork and Limestone. (Frontenac House Ltd., Okotoks, AB, 2022). ISBN 978-1-989466-43-8
Poetry is wrestling with what lies behind the curtain – Simon Constam
I’ve been rereading Brought Down by Simon Constam since last fall, trying to understand what is layered beneath the obvious beauty of the poems. One middle-of-the night I scribbled on a piece of paper: These poems feel like Buddhist koans – a search for insight – tests. Or maybe, not to provoke “great doubt,” but to express both doubt and faith. It is with this idea that I’ve approached the review. The first poem is a good place to enter the collection, since prologue/first poems generally set the tone and subject for a book.
The first two lines of “Every Glory is Diminished by the Truth” establishes one of the issues nagging away at Constam: And do I flinch at the mention of Deir Yassin? / And do you flinch at the mention of Ma’alot? (The Glossary tells us that Deir Yassin is the site of a massacre of Arabs by Jews in 1948 and it tells us that Ma’alot is the site of a 1984 Palestinian terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of 25 hostages.) Brought Down was published in 2022 before the current war in Gaza; war is not what this collection is about. (Although it might be the backstory.) This collection is one man “wrestling with what lies behind the curtain.”
Writing in a “blurb” for the book, George Elliott Clarke says: “Constam appears as … a Seinfeld-mode Job, questioning God about his ‘masquerading as the dark.’ God is ‘arbitrary’ and we are fickle … .” A disquiet comes through Constam’s struggle, as in:
Simon Agonistes
I am hiding from Him, like Adam. Way down in the labyrinth of Tokyo’s malls, Eve knows nothing about it, she thinks it is just a trip, into the city.
Not to belabour the struggle aspect of the poems, I also want to quote from “HaMakom” (a name for God, also meaning place), and the struggle for place resonates across the decades. “[T]he mind wanders,” the people wander, the book is a jail daring the heart to accept. Finally, I am left with the suggestion of the diaspora.
HaMakom
We meet in a small place, a shel shul, beneath a tallis’ embrace. There is a book in my hands, but I do not need it. The text is a jail. Behind its black bars the mind wanders. Behind the music of the words, the meaning is obscure. Some say the words themselves are Prayer. Some say the emptiness behind them is the God who deigns to meet you there, dares you, some say, dares your heart, to be without meaning, to come unrooted as a tree would give in to the wind and a leaf would float to the sea.
Before turning to Domestic Recusals, let’s look at the title poem, “Brought Down,” the final poem in the collection. It begins: Blood is a river that will not stop and toward the end Constam writes … Everywhere we look, / there is an explanation of who we are and / who they are and what we might become. / In every room we gather, we see certain things / about ourselves but never speak them. We see how they [the ancestors] have suffered // and humanity suffers, every beautiful child / who came from long, long ago … .
There is beauty in the writing; there is pain in the struggle. Brought Down is poetry with subject, tension, music, and craft.
The poet’s conflict, found in Brought Down, continues in Domestic Recusals, but it is different. Simon Constam writes that the poems “come from experiences in and out of marriage, in and out of depression, into and out of different ideas of how men and women operate in relationships.” In these poems readers will find the seriousness cut with something close to humour:
Billet-Doux
Walking out this evening, wrapped against the snow, when I see the idea of home in the eyes of passersby.
I miss you deeply.
And when I am warm again in my rooms, my footsteps are alone. But I lie down with you. Listen, the future comes calling ceaselessly. I cannot keep even your absence Here for long.
The poems in Domestic Recusals are love poems with a twist of angst and self deprecation, although that might be too strong a word. But argument and God are still present although limited, as in the short poem “Certainty.”
Certainty
With certainty, we subdue the inexactitudes of God. With certainty, praise of Him comes easily. With certainty, no one, not even God disturbs us. With certainty, we’ve won the argument with ourselves.
In Constam’s writing, he argues with his loves, within himself, with his God, and with the forebearers who carry the weight of religion. His self-questioning even flows through the more earthy, lush, sensuous poems that run throughout Domestic Recusals. Consider the titles: “Come to Bed with Me Tonight, Solo Traveler,” “Little Black Book of Scars,” and “Seduced.” Constam’s undercurrent of arguing with himself is his voice, the voice that remains constant regardless of his subject. I am captivated by the way it holds me.
I admit that my first reading of these collections left me uncertain (not unusual for me) and so I returned again and again. The more I read the poems, the more certain I’ve become that Simon Constam is a poet to follow.
Available through your local bookstore or online:
Brought Down by Simon Constam (Resource Publications, Eugene, Oregon, 2022). ISBN 978-1-6667-3435-5.
Domestic Recusals by Simon Constam (AOS Publishing, Montreal, Quebec, 2024). ISBN 978-1-990496-47-9.
Kathryn MacDonald 