POETIC RESONANCE
Local poets take different paths to achieve insight, humour, depth
Here are two wildly different collections of poetry by two Saskatoon women, Sylvia Legris and Marion Mutala.
Where Legris’ poems are painstakingly constructed, even ornate in the smallest attention to sound and structure and on a subject often confined to labs and operating theatres, Mutala’s poetry is earnestly and happily populist, joyfully but sometimes angrily trumpeting the news of life, colour, love, pain and history.
Legris, who won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006 and whose work has lately appeared in such prestigious journals as The New Yorker, Granta and Poetry (Chicago), brings us her new, immensely learned and clever work, The Hideous Hidden.
Why the title? The book is divided into four parts, each a poetic reimagining of, first, directives from Hippocrates, father of medicine, second, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and notes of human and animal dissections, third, the glands and, finally, an atlas of skin diseases. This is the material that usually stays hidden and out of conversations. Sound enticing? Not at first. Rewarding? Actually, it is.
Legris has done hours and months of research in medical, anatomical and historical texts, then strained her findings through a finely tuned poetic sieve, giving rhythm, rhyme, a host of structures, bounce, fun and even blunt pronouncements to our often whispered body parts and ailments.
In her preface poem, Articulation Points, she ends: “The rush./ The crush./ The flesh,” then swoops into her opening Hippocratic poem, Fleshes, with the line, “Heat flows from the mother city, the cold and gluey metropolis,” our lungs, and ends “Ham-footed the dance/ to the unholy body. Within or without/ a complicated riddle of meat.”
That’s us, a complicated riddle of meat. Not what Shakespeare called us in Hamlet or the crown of creation we’re called in the Bible. But ask an anatomist. Or Legris.
In Vitals, a short prose poem, Legris quotes the famous Hippocrates dictum, “Tell no lies and do no harm,” then adds “Remove funny bone. Induce vomiting. Cup to skin. Scalpel to vein. Drain drain drain.”
Oh yes, once we’ve taken the humour out of the doctor’s office, it’s time to get down to business. But with morgue jokes in Capita Mortua, Memento marrow as a play on words in a poem about bones, talk of a renal makeover — “lend some love to the kidneys” — in Adrenals, and other such wordplay as “a settling of spores” and “Color me loblolly scabby ... Scratch me,” in The Rash Articulates Couplets, Legris aims to put a few laughs back in the grim science.
With a mind-boggling vocabulary — medical, Latin and general — stretched and prodded into alliterative, assonantal and fanciful lyrics, poems that read like songs or limericks, prose poems and the odd prosaically factual poem (Some Measure Stung) Pustulae, for instance, Legris enlivens the language of anatomy, dissection, disease and the naming thereof.
But, despite her jokes and double-entendres in this “jurisdiction of premeditated meat,” this occasional “butcher carnival,” she acknowledges “the soul that dwells within that architecture ... a thing divine” in the beautiful Anatomy of a Bear’s Foot and closes A Skull Sectioned with this gentle wish, “Have mercy/ on the little city. The merciful cadaver. The bony cittadella.”
Like scotch and fine cigars, Legris’ book is an acquired taste, but what reward for repeated readings in this “alliterative prickling charade.” The Hideous Hidden should be required reading in the anatomy lab as well as in creative writing classes.
And whereas the word “hidden” in Legris’ title can also apply to the poet, glimpsed rarely in witty asides, former teacher, now writer Marion Mutala is open, candid, and completely accessible in her first collection of poetry, Ukrainian Daughter’s Dance.
She uses the occasion of the 125th year of Ukrainians in Saskatchewan to expand her written output beyond her children’s books into this celebration of things Ukrainian, Saskatchewanian, Saskatonian, and generally everything to do with life as she exuberantly lives it.
Her poems range from the unapologetically sentimental — Memories, Washboard, Old Farmhouse — to poems celebrating her Ukrainian heritage — Cossacks, Proud, Bard of Ukraine — to angry poems of betrayal in marriage — Phony, Betrayal, Mad — to poems of gratitude for her life, her children, and another chance at love — Whoosha, Byron’s Backyard, and the collection’s title poem.
A wise critic once opined that it’s a flimsy poet who won’t risk sentimentality, and Mutala throws caution to the wind in that department, betting all her capital on the way she feels about her loved ones — “Love pouring from her hands on our dirty clothes” — to the way she feels when hurt deeply: “Call it what you will/I call it as you are/ Liar, cheat.” Mutala does not hide in any way behind words or clever renderings.
When she’s at her strongest, in poems such as Woman’s Dance, Crooked Trees, and Bowels — which, amusingly, goes right back to Legris country, and is “Based on real flesh and blood/ Not superficial” — Mutala can be powerful. Woman’s Dance encompasses all that a strong woman is.
That power, unfortunately, often bowls over her syntax, leaving her with incompatible verb tenses or lists of things that lack a parallel structure. In the lovely Crooked Trees, for instance, why can’t the first line be “Scientists came to investigate,” rather than the same sentence with the “to” left out? Here’s where some serious editing from Mutala’s publisher would have come in handy.
Whoever should have done the editing, Mutala’s is a small book jammed with fun and fury. You’ll know who this woman is when you’re finished reading.