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:
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.
Books have collected in piles and so I’m going to post a few “not quite” book reviews, call them teasers. They are about books that I want to share and that I hope will pique your interest so that you check them out at the library or nearest bookstore.
A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk (trans. by Amelia M. Glaser & Yuliya Ilchuck) – shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
From Sarajevo with Sorrow by Goran Simić (trans. by Amela Simić)
Halyna Kruk’s book is new and currently shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, it reminded me of Goram Simić’s collection that I have read and reread many times. They each offer accessibility and insight on the horror of war, Kruk’s Ukraine and Simić’s Bosnia.
In a poem titled “war,” Kruk writes: “… a human walks in the woods like an echo, / lost in thought, distracted // some bullet moves with its own trajectory, let loose / in a right or left hemisphere. somebody’s. the earth’s.” In another poem titled “we act like children with our dead,” Kruk writes, “… as if none of us knew until now / how easy it is to die / everyone still hopes they’ll lie there for a while and rise again ….”
In the introduction, Kruk is quoted as saying that her“poems have changed since the outbreak of war.” She says they no long pay attention to “form and style, now my poems are almost entirely focused on content — they document the reality of war, literally, emotionally, and sensually….” They are intense. I can read only three or four at a time. They are beautiful. They are horrific. And something about them made me go to my bookshelves and take Goram Simić’s Sarajevo collection down to read alongside Kruk’s poems.
Simić says of his poems: “In Sarajevo hell I wrote these poems as epitaph and testimony.” One poem I always search for among the many “flags” stuck to the pages of his book is “Love Story.” It describes a scene on a bridge that seems to me more chilling than the rest. I quote from that poem in a book review that I previously posted. You can read it here.
Available through your local bookstore or online:
A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk, trans. by Amerlia M. Glaser & Yuliya Ilchuk (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), ISBN: 9798986340197.
From Sarajevo with Sorrow by Goran Simić, trans. by Amela Simić (Biblioasis, 2005), ISBN: 978-0-9735971-5-8.
UPDATE: I’ve just come across this Youtube post: Amelia M. Glaser, Yuliya Ilchuk, and Halyna Kruk interviewed by Griffin Trustee Aleš Šteger. You can view it here.
Wayside: a small boat, a vacant lot, a man(Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Press, 2026)
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:
“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, Spring 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.)
I had a fixed purpose when I put to sea (line 632).
This post is more impression and thoughts about translation than it is book review. Beowulf – we likely read it at some point during our education – Anglo Saxon / Old English and all that. Seamus Heaney gives us a “modern” translation and it is beautiful to read, vivid, alive. I’m afraid that I won’t do either Beowulf or Seamus Heaney justice, although I loved the book and read cover-to-cover (3182 poetic lines / 260 pages of text and illustration) in only three sittings (and then read it again, and then skimmed it this morning). What I really love even more than the poem is Heaney’s introduction.
Although written by an early English Christian between the middle 7th and the 10th century (about 1,500 years ago) the action took place (if it actually took place) before the arrival of the Anglo Saxons and it wasn’t even an “English” story. The oral story took place during the pagan period before the King Author legends that we’re familiar with through various books and films.
Beowulf, the poem, describes the life of a Nordic prince, a warrior, an honourable man who fights monsters and a dragon. It is the re-telling of an heroic narrative that seems to have taken place in what we know as Scandinavia. It’s important book, Beowulf being the first written in English and is, therefore, historically significant. The original is kept in the British Library. But besides being the first, Heaney calls Beowulf, “a work of great imaginative vitality.” (An aside: J.R.R. Tolkien also translated Beowulf, and the poem’s influence can be seen in Tolkien’s writing.)
Heaney tells us the context of Beowulf is within “a pagan Germanic society governed by a heroic code of …conduct….” He says, “the poem possesses a mythic potency” (ix). I wished, as I was reading the book, to see a copy without the Christian overlay, see it as the bards of old might have told the tale.
One thing that clung to me as I read the epic, was Heaney’s introduction that reflects on the experience of translating (which took Heaney 35 years from the initial contract – he put it aside for long periods). Heaney writes: “I noticed that without any conscious intent on my part certain lines in the first poem in my first book conformed to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics. These poems were made up of two balancing halves, each half containing two stressed syllables – the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging. I look down’ – and ‘down’ across the caesura. Part of me, in other words, had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start (xviii).
In the process of translating, Heaney writes:
In one area, my own labours have been less than thorough-going. I have not followed the strict metrical rules that bound the Anglo-Saxon scop. I have been guided by the fundamental pattern of four stresses to the line, but I allow myself several transgressions. For example, I don’t always employ alliteration, and sometimes I alliterate only one half of the line. When these breaches occur, it is because I prefer to let the natural “sound of sense” prevail over the demands of the convention: I have been reluctant to force an artificial shape or an unusual word choice just for the sake of correctness (xxii-xxiii).
What poet wouldn’t love Seamus Heaney?
Before we meet Beowulf, we meet Grendel, the monster who is attacking the Danes: Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, / nursed a hard grievance. I harrowed him / … (lines 86-87), and we begin by seeing the story through the monster’s eyes before we learn what Beowulf and the Danes’ experienced. The story, as you might imagine, takes twists and turns until Beowulf meets the dragon and the climax is reached. You might call Beowulf fantasy; you might call it metaphor.
Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf is a very good read, even in the 21st century.
Available through your local bookstore or online: ISBN: X003XQKRA7
Something small and dark was rolling in the waves, in and out it went, what’s that, what’s that. And then stayed a sailor’s hat come right to my feet (18).
Iolaire is a hybrid telling of one of Scotland’s worse maritime disasters, a story of an island’s grief, a woman’s loss, and by the end, a new (though haunted) beginning.
***
The sailor’s hat (of the initial quote, above), echoes throughout Iolaire by Karen Clavelle. The hat, washed up on the shore, becomes a haunting reminder for Is (short for the Gaelic Iseabail) that her love has gone missing in the waters off the Beasts of Holm. He was lost in the early hours of 1919 when the HMS Iolaire broke apart on the Beasts, the rocks at the approach to Stornoway. New Year’s Day was to have been the joyful homecoming of sailors to the Long Island (Lewis and Harris) at the end of WWI; instead, it is the saddest day.
The bride, Is, becomes a widow, a woman who writes letters to her missing love, letters that she bundles and puts away in a drawer. But the book-long narrative is told not only in the epistolary form, which allows readers to access the thoughts and emotions of Is, but the lyric also includes actual excerpts from newspapers, and transcripts from the navy’s inquiry, folkloric prophecies, the poet’s interjections, and poetry.
The first time we’re given a look at the poignant folklore is shortly before the disaster:
Now, at that time of year it gets dusk in the afternoon, and if you’re going to be seeing anything, that’s when you’ll be seeing it — at dusk. And that’s when he did — he saw the stag, him and his sisters. Standing in the path in front of them, it was, and it turned its head and it looked right at them, and then it was gone.
… And sure enough, the boat wrecked that very night. The sister’s husband, he was lost… (50).
Clavelle also uses her voice to interject observations and insights about the village where she lives during her research, and we readers time travel between then of the shipwreck and now. For example,
In the dream or out of it, I am absorbed in a village that boasts a school, a ceilidh house, a historical society, churches, a cemetery, and a tiny community shop, (the) Bùth, that besides offering groceries and hardware, houses the post office where Dorothy franks the mail with a date-stamp she changes daily by hand, and in the windows posts funeral announcements and community events (46).
Besides the village, Clavelle comments on the ship’s Gaelic name — iolaire sùil na grèine — sea eagle, a name in which irony brims: the boat named for the bird that foreshadowed war and disaster. Haliaeetus albicilla, its Gaelic name in the Seann-sgeulachdan (mythology): fior eun, the eagle, ‘the true bird’… (47).
Besides creative, lyrical, and factual prose, untitled poems also flow through Iolaire. One of my favourites is:
the tide bell rings
and I call for you in the heather and the thrift by An Cùl Beag in the low tide from the caves from the shadows of the stacks at Cala Ghearraidh
I call along the endless length of the Tràigh Mhòir. beneath the slopes of the sand-cliffs, the scarred hills, the tide pools; from the red seaweed I call from black-sinewed strand where in grace in death gannets lie feathers spread as though in flight, their eyes and bones picked clean and burying beetles labour their days
I call from the blanket bogs, through the mists and the wind from the shelter of the marram grass where summer blues the forget-me-nots on the machair where the greylag geese and hoodie crows, and the ewes call in their own so strong the pain of separation (98)
Iolaire is a poetic narrative weaving fictional letters, nonfiction articles, as well as documentary notes into a lyrical tale of love, agony, and grief. Cavelle uses many strategies to unravel the heartbreaking tale of the ship’s break-up on the rocks, the desperate attempts the sailor’s made to reach shore, the lingering anguish of the people from over 60 villages mourning 205 deaths (only 82 sailors survived).
This New Year’s Day (2024) marks the 105th anniversary of the sinking of HMS Iolaire. It is a good time to read Iolaire by Karen Clavelle and to remember one of the saddest moments to ever mark a military homecoming.
Available through your local bookstore or online: Iolaire by Karen Clavelle (Turnstone Press, ISBN 978-0-88801-611-9)
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.
What to look for when reading and what to aim for when writing:
This is the briefest of summaries, mere definitions of key elements in poems. It might be a good exercise to play with each one and then try combining them as your skill develops.
Details: naming; seeing, hearing – all the senses; every word working and, conversely, subtlety: a balance of specific and mystery / known and unknowable / sayable and unsayable. Is the monarch butterfly pinned to a board or does it fly free?
Engagement: poet’s presence, not only intellectually (ideas/abstractions/metaphors), but physical presence/immediacy; an invitation to readers to enter the poem, to be stirred, to connect.
Intimacy: the voice of the poet comes through; expressive words, perspective, insight – the surface narrative/lyric, but something written between the lines that speaks in the poet’s voice but that also touches me unearthing something that connects us (something beyond personal/universal/ah ha moment).
Movement: outward and inward.
Portal: the word, phrase, or stanza that shifts the poem from the surface theme into the deeper, more subtle one, the poem written between the lines.
Sound and rhythm: music; echoes in the language.
Twist: surprise, but also coherence, and subtlety: room for the unknown/unknowable.
Question: I want insight, but not a definitive answer (not overly generalized; respect for the individual); I want to be left with something to think about beyond the poet’s skill with structure and words, rhythm and other “tools” in the writer’s toolbox.
Wow factor: awe moment; not just by poet’s craft/skill/talent, but by the mind and heart of the poet.
Every poem does not have all of these things, but they are what I look for when reading and what I aim for when writing.
You may also be interested in reading How to Write a Good Poem? 6 Writing Tips. The blog looks at the advice of Jane Hirshfield, Robyn Sarah and Tony Hoagland. For more tips scroll through the category “Writing Tips & Workshops.”
Please share your thoughts and share this post. Thanks, Kathryn
Kathryn MacDonald 