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 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.
You who remove me from my house / are blind to your past / which never leaves you, / blind to what’s being done / to me now by you “[…]” (69-70).
In literature, an ellipsis is a narrative device indicating that something has intentionally been left out of the narrative, or it might suggest the passage of time. An ellipsis might also be a symbolic doorway, a gap, a silence. There is no statement in the collection as to exactly what Fady Joudah intends us to read into the space. […] is not only the book’s title, but also the powerful title of a series of poems, suggesting a number of things including the passage of time during the on-again, off-again conflict in Palestine, the generational trauma of the diaspora, the war, colonialism and so on.
Joudah is a Palestinian-American, physician, and prize-winning translator and poet. He writes “witness” poetry, although his poetry is not from the “battlefield,” as was my “teaser” review of A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk and the reminder of Goran Simić’s from Sarajevo with Sorrow that I published a few days ago. (You can read that review here.)
Joudah lives in the United States, a first-generation American of Palestinian-born parents. His experience of war is more like Keith Garebian’s whose subject is the Armenian genocide of 1915-1920. Garebian bears witness to the continuing trauma left in war’s wake. (In my review of Garebian’s Poetry is Blood, you will find notes on generational trauma, click here.) Joudah experiences the losses through his parents: “… What childhood does / a destroyed childhood beget? / My parents showed me the way” (12).
As with Garebian, Joudah lives with “home” missing. His past a mirage, a source of loss, a source of anger. The poem quoted at the top of this review, concludes:
You who remove me from my house have also evicted my parents and their parents from theirs: How is the view from my window? How does my salt taste?
Shall I condemn myself a little for you to forgive yourself in my body? Oh how you love my body, my house.
Joudah’s poems are also poignant with the loss of mother tongue, a people’s language, as in “[…]” (6):
From time to time, language dies. It is dying now. Who is alive to speak it?
Another narrative technique that Joudah uses is dialogue as in “[…]” (24):
“Your oppressor,” they said, “has suffered more than you have.”
“As have others,” you said, … .
Finally, there is one more poem I’d like to quote from: “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams,” #5:
… At a traffic light an old man hands me a rose and says, It’s for nothing. He meant, I don’t have to pay nothing
or sign a petition. How our faces appear to him. Quickly he walks away to let the weight
of the rose grow sovereign in my heart
to the extent it can on the eve of a new war.
(Note: maqam is Arabic for place.)
Fady Joudah won the Giller International Prize (2013) for his translation of Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me and Other Poems. In the preface, he writes, “Ghassan Zaqtan’s poems, in their constant unfolding invite us to enter them, exit them, map and unmap them, code and decode them, fill them up and empty them, with the living and nonliving, the animate and inanimate, toward a true freedom.” This could be said of Joudah’s own writing in […].
Available through your local bookstore or online: […] by Fady Joudah. Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA): Milkweed Editions (2024). ISBN 978-1-63955-128-6.
Poetry is Blood by Keith Garebian. Toronto (ON, Canada): Guernica Editions, 2018. ISBN 978-1-77183-279-3.
Liminal Spaces (a collaborative ekphrastic chapbook, Glentula Press, 2025)
Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (chapbook, Glentula Press, 2024)
A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (HBP/Hidden Brook Press, 2011). Review excerpt: please see here.
Calla & Édourd: Fiction. For an excerpt, please see here. (HBP/Hidden Brook Press, 2009)
The Farm & City Cookbook: Essays and recipes co-authored with Mary Lou Morgan. (Second Story Press, 1995)
FORTHCOMING:
Wayside: a small boat, a vacant lot, a man, Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Press, March 2026 (21 poems)
“Detroit River Jazz,” “Of Wine & Fire,” “The Sky and the River,” “April 7” have been accepted for the anthology Kinds of Cool: A Collection of Jazz Poetry, February 2026
“Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, forthcoming Fall, 2025 — The editors wrote: “Our reviewers enjoyed reading your poem, which highlights moments when opposing forces come together—whether in nature or within ourselves. We also admired the choice of words, the use of enjambment and punctuation, and the masterful use of meter.”
“Unmarked: A Lament for the Children Buried in the Unmarked Graves of Residential Schools,” Strong Hands Stop Violence poetry anthology, ONWA, Vol. 9 (December 2025)
“On that Forbidden Evening,” “Willow Dream,” and “Albinoni’s Adagio,” Live Encounters, Volume Four, 16th Anniversary, November-December 2025
“Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, (2025-09-22)
“She Sings Only at Twilight,” “Company of Wayfarers,” “A Blizzard Blows,” “Phantasm,” and “Beloved,” Lothlorien Poetry Journal Volume 28 (print and online) Sept. 30, 2023).
“Musical Invocation” poem profiled and read/recorded, Jerry Jazz Musician (September 2023).
“Journey,” “Ashes,” This Wine into Water, a chapbook anthology (Forward by Lorna Crozier, Wintergreen Studios Press, December 2018.)
Earlier writing was published in literary journals including the Fiddlehead (#130 Summer 1981) Descant (#32-33 1981) and Northward Journal (#20 June 1981) as well as anthologies such as The Wisdom of Old Souls (2008), Grandmothers Necklace (2010), Close to Quitting Time (2011). (Some early poems published as Kathryn Deneau.)
In this life, we are visitors no matter where we go / on this earth, the headstones remind us.
— “The Rooks in the Sycamores at the Tomb at Dunn” (98-107)
Galestro, of the book’s title, is the name of the mineral-rich and stony soil of Tuscany. It’s the hard till that nurtures the Sangiovese vines and the Chianti that flows through poems like love. Smooth-flowing Chianti and stony hard till are wonderful metaphors that thread throughout the collection. Perhaps it is for this “flow” that Bruce Hunter has arranged the poems without distinct sections. However, the poems have been carefully organized. In the initial poems, Hunter reflects on his youth and working years; the middle section celebrates Tuscany and love; and the last poem circles back, exploring a theme introduced early on. Individual poems are constructed on a framework of details, which of course creates the pull of authenticity, but we also find allusion, together engaging both our love of facts and our love of fancy.
One poem that reflects on Hunter’s young years in and around Calgary surprised me with the flavour of a Patrick Lane poem. In no way does the poem mimic Lane, which makes it hard to put my finger on what exactly made me sit up in my chair when I read “Skyhooks” (30-33). In the poem, Hunter begins by describing kites:
Each of them angling for light, strung between existence and dream trolling for skyfish or errant angels lost in the lure of clouds.
But then he quickly moves to a tough work scene, the stuff of early Lane (and of Tom Wayman, too), before he brings humour into the poem. A complex juggle of tone, beauty, and grit.
The primary subject of the first sixty-five pages is the geography and people of Hunter’s childhood in Calgary and his adult life in Toronto, although there’s a wide range of themes and metaphors layering the poetry. Then, to celebrate his actual retirement, Hunter travels with his wife to Italy. It is here we gain the benefit of Hunter’s apprenticeship as a gardener and arborist (as he tells us in “Lost and Found in Cortona,” p 90-93). This deep knowledge creates the details that make the Italian poems so fascinating. It is also here, in these Tuscany poems that we see Lisa as lover-muse. For example, in the title poem “Galestro” (p 76-83):
I learned to read soil in my apprenticeship, and sky and wind, on the highest point of land, where rain is made, and wine, somewhere between alchemy and prayer, reverence and ritual….
Hunter is sensitivo in his knowledge of gardening, but there’s been a subtle switch and suddenly Lisa, his wife, is sensitiva:
…the woman who teaches the heart, who reads my eyes, who calms the animals, heals the beloved.
This is Bruce Hunter’s tenth book. His writing apprenticeship has led to multi-layered poems that offer at once a clear, straightforward read and, if you sit with them, a complex understanding of life, love, and endings. Much of my recent reading has included single-theme collections and book-length poems. Reading Galestro has forced a re-think. Hunter’s voice, as you can see, is wide-ranging. I’m breaking free of my mold.
For another example of Hunter’s versatility, “Ligurian Poppies” introduces the poet as witness:
Bomb cracks in the University of Bologna. The missing towers of the Castello. Neptune can hold back the sea but not the vile will of hard men.
The collection is all metaphor.
In “The Rooks in the Sycamores at the Tomb at Dunn” (98-107), the final poem in the collection, Hunter reflects on a visit to the far northeastern edge of Scotland, Caithness, the Tomb of Dunn and of Hunter’s forebearers:
The tomb’s open now, pillaged. The plank lid torn off and left where it landed. Vines cover the chapel’s window-less walls. The roof long ago gone….
//
And there’s an alder sapling between their graves. Seeds from the ancient forest brought up by gravediggers. One day the alder will crack the stone. Trees stronger than stone in their kinetic lift.
When we search for the ancestors, for what are we searching? Hunter takes us on a journey through language and naming, through mythic and physical places, concluding the poem and collection with: and if I had one wish: / I be that tree, / stronger than stone in its lift. / And that my friends, is the gist.
What is there to say after that?
Galestro is a big book (8 x 10 inches, 122 pages) of poetry by Bruce Hunter, translated from English (on the left page) into Italian by Andrea Sirotti (on the right). It is a pleasure for word-lovers to see how the words fall and follow, a treat to compare and imagine how they sound and what they evoke in the second language.
Galestro, Quaderni del Bardo (2023) by Bruce Hunter
Available through your local bookstore or online: ISBN 9798376256602
I know // I know / nothing // of Armenia 1915 – “Admission”
In The Sleep Orchard, Amy Dennis reaches deep inside the life and myth of Arshile Gorky. She enters his paintings and photographs, reaches into the Armenian genocide’s impact on one man. She explores Gorky’s place in the history of art. And in attempting to understand Gorky, Dennis crosses borders of time and place.
In “On Waking,” the first poem in the collection, it is clear that Dennis has absorbed Gorky into her life. She writes: My lover says I have called out….
… I don’t remember. But know after waking I’ve scavenged
old papers to find antique recipes for ink, hungry for a hallowed liquid to write about Gorky. In dreams he is tall and looks into me.
Every morning his paint rattles my thin grasp on language.
In the second poem, “Greenware,” Dennis writes: …I’ve never before slit / my fingernails into this // wild apple and pistachio / where his mother wipes her hands. Gorky’s mother, who died in his arms when he was a boy of about fifteen years, becomes the monumental loss that haunts his paintings – and Dennis’s poems. In my reading of the collection, mother is at the root of the art connecting artist and author like the mycorrhizal network of tree roots. The theme begins with Gorky’s mother (Shushan der Marderosian), continues with his wife (Agnes Magruder, called Mougouch) who is mother of his children and, woven into the collection, is Dennis’s impending motherhood. Mother: a threaded root. Evocation: Mother. Armenia.
Arshile Gorky was a man who reinvented himself (his birthname was Vosdanik Adoian). In “Marny George at 36 Union Square,” Dennis writes: You were a Russian portraitist // Georgian prince, nephew to Maxim Gorky. Prodigy / who once studied in Paris. Gorky also reinvented art. Dennis traces his artistic lineage. For example, in “Shards,” she writes: he locates / shapes in these famous canyons:
Matisse’s Red Studio, Miro’s Still Life with Old Shoe, Picasso’s Plaster Head, The City by Léger.
Gorky penetrates / where these artists end / and he began…. He became known as the father of abstract expressionism, paving the way for Pollock and Rothko and Gottlieb and de Kooning (“Ambiguous Spaces, Seemingly Random Angles”).
Although Dennis’s poems place Gorky in the spectrum of art history, it is context, neither art history nor art criticism. Although Dennis describes paintings and photographs, the ekphrastic nature of the poetry is not the only technique Dennis applies to reach the heart of her subject: “A Response to Arshile Gorky.” The Sleep Orchard contains poems in which Dennis writes of his mother, where she inhabits Mougouch, and where she writes to his daughters. But this collection is not a biography. Dennis writes of her own experiences during the writing of The Sleep Orchard, but it is not memoir. She claims to know nothing about Armenia – I know // I know / nothing // of Armenia 1915 (“Admission,” the third poem), but the collection bears witness to the impact of that genocide. The Sleep Orchard is all of this and more. The collection is tapestry, the colours of Armenia, a search for Arshile Gorky.
Dennis’s collection is sensuous, passionate, lyrical. Her skillful writing draws readers inside, always evocative. My favourite poem in the collection happens to have one of the longest titles: “Meditation on White (traced Backwards), Response, to Charred Beloved /, 1946.” You can see her skill, hear her poetic voice:
Named after lilies, his mother Shushan warmed her infants in cradles lined with sand, grew daughters to face east and hail Mary. Each November, string-tied from ceilings, she dried pears, their skins distilled with rippled sugar and the deathly
look of withdrawal, the fruits parched as embalmed songbirds or small raptors swathed in Egypt. Her once son, his voice-
box drowned with balsam, would not speak until he was six, until six spoke only with birds. This, a small sacrifice for the close studies of such wings, white doves he let roost in his breaking.
You do not need to know a thing about Gorky’s art or ekphrastic poetry to be drawn inside the emotion of the poems. Dennis brings Gorky and his work to life, opening a door for readers to enter his world – and hers – whether or not you are an art afficionado. Art is the vehicle, but there is much more to The Sleep Orchard.
The Sleep Orchard (Mansfield Press, 2022) is available through your local bookstore, the publisher, or online (ISBN 978-1-77126-280-4).
You may also be interested in my review of Mechanics of a Gaze, Branka Petrovic’s poetry collection about Gustav Klimpt and Emile Flöge. (Mansfield Press, 2017). If this interests you, please also see The Painted Kiss (Washington Square Press, 2005) for my thoughts on Elizabeth Hickey’s fictionalized novel about Gustav Klimpt and Emile Flöge.
Kathryn MacDonald 