Poet weaves magic in fierce, lovely collection
For Vancouver performance poet Jillian Christmas, the heart is “one bloody pumping engine in the center/of a delicate fortunate beast.”
In her incandescent debut volume, The Gospel of Breaking, Christmas has given readers a chance to hear her heart beating.
Christmas, the former artistic director of the Verses Festival of Words and a popular live performer and organizer when pandemic restrictions allow, was born in Ontario but currently makes Vancouver her home. Her poems explore issues of race, gender, queer sensibility, family bonds, love and desire.
Like Amber Dawn, another local queer poet currently being showcased by Arsenal Pulp (and who contributes an enthusiastic cover blurb to this book), Christmas has a fraught relationship with feminism. This lover’s quarrel with the movement is voiced in Black Feminist, one of the strongest poems in this collection.
In Reasons to Burn, a powerful reflection on the nature of poetry, Christmas writes:
“Let me make of my words a fire/a purpose/a front line/a service/a choir/an engine/the matches/and the urn.”
She is clearly a writer who values propulsive rhythms, verbal polish and political relevance. All of these elements are present in The Gospel of Breaking and they work together to magical effect.
Butterfly in a Boneyard is another of this reviewer’s favourite poems from this fierce and lovely collection.
Invoking the monarch butterflies that take several generations to complete the migration hardwired into their genes, and the elephants “… revisiting graveyards/to caress the bones of ancestors they have never/known …,” the author addresses a former lover “… returning to the scene/of this crime after years of living apart and alone” and insists triumphantly that “… no space build/between lovers like us is ever as impossible/to cross as it may seem.”
Such assurance is hard won at any time, and it will be a particular comfort to readers who come to this remarkable poet during our current plague season, when human connection seems even more problematic that usual.
Christmas writes with hardwon optimism, the mature hopefulness that emerges even when the world breaks your heart. When the heart is broken, some Buddhist teachers say, compassion can flow through. The Gospel of Breaking can be read as a meditation on that truth.