Divided, we fall ... for Linda Frank’s poetry
Linda Frank’s new book of poetry, “Divided,” is reaching us only now, like light from a star, several years after its delivery.
Such are the vagaries of publishing. Maybe it’s a good thing, from the standpoint of thematic emphasis.
The poetry in “Divided,” after all, covers those yawning distances and angles of remove — clinical, zoological, sexist — whereby we mistake knowledge and utility for close intimacy, possession for love.
“Jewel Wasp” is a case in point. In it we learn how the maternal jewel wasp lovingly prepares the optimum obstetrics for the survival and comfort of her young — by syringing poison into the brain of a cockroach, then laying her egg in the bassinet of its paralyzed abdomen.
When the larvae emerge, they eat their way into the roach’s body and consume its organs one by one. All of this time, you must understand, the wasps are careful to keep the roach alive, and for as long as possible. Isn’t that nice of them?
But lest you think, on the basis of this, that the insect world is simply remorseless and grotesque, more is in store.
There are balancing beauties: The lyricism of bugs skipping on water, the spider’s thread in sunlight and the metaphoric versatility of the dragonfly — “Devil’s darning needle,” “water witch.”
And when the poet turns to the commerce between human and insect (and nature in general),
she does not go gentle on us.
Her poem “Capture,” a user’s guide of sorts on how to impound and pin a butterfly, is as ironic and chilling a portrait as I’ve read about the everyday psychopathic ease with which the “human” distorts admiration, curiosity and passion into methodical, compartmentalized murder.
In the poem, this is all conveyed by suggestion and perfectly modulated overtone.
The “divided” of the book’s title, Linda says, derives partly from the Latin root resonance of “in sections;” divided animal.
But, of course, we really are the “divided” (from nature) and “dividing” animal, not the least of our divisions being gender.
“Who didn’t have to dissect a frog in school,” Linda asks rhetorically as we talk about the
germ of her idea for a book on division.
Everything in the book about insects can be read — though it doesn’t have to be — as reflection on us, externalized psychology, from the cannibalizing sex of mantises to the omni-voracious locust.
And while “Divided” starts as though it might be all about insects, it becomes much more — there are takes on tadpoles, whitefish, birds.
And a prominent structural element of the book is a series of narrative-driven poems drawn from the biographies and practice of historical scientists like Darwin, often contrasting male and female science experiences.
Her poem on environmentalist pioneer Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” and the difficulties
she faced as a woman in science, is especially evocative and powerfully turned.
She also trades the magnifying glass of the insect watcher for the telescope of the astronomer in poems on William Herschel and his sister Caroline.
Linda Frank is one of Canada’s pre-eminent poets, winner of such awards as Banff Centre’s Bliss Carmen Poetry prize.
Growing up in Montreal, she almost became a biologist. Another division — a personal choice between the sciences and the humanities as a career.
She is still wonderstruck by nature and science, and uses them beautifully in this book to draw out the most myriad and finely observed insights, on everything from sexual politics and bedroom intimacy (or the lack of
it) to species extinction, the swiftness of life, religion, control, capture, the call of the wild and children (Linda, by the way, has just become a grandmother).
She does this in poetic rhythms and language that leave in the reader a sensation of phosphorescence, they are so lit.
Even when the subject matter is gruesome, the expression of it hypnotizes with splendour: “She twists her metallic/ emerald body around him, glitters with captured/ lights, wrestles her way to his head, slips/ her stinger through his exoskeleton ...”
These flights are measured against other sparser lines, aphoristic in their weight. Of the locusts, she writes: “They behave as they must.”
Linda’s book would have arrived much earlier but she changed publisher and could not be happier. The volume produced earlier this summer by Hamilton’s own Wolsak and Wynn is a thing of beauty unto itself.