Ferocious collection of poetry mixes decay and beauty
Devolution
By Kim Goldberg (Caitlin Press, Halfmoon Bay, B.C., 2020)
$18 | 96pp
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Take B.C. poet Kim Goldberg’s new collection, “Devolution”.
On the cover is a painting by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte, a haunting image of a monstrous figure — half fish, half woman — lying on the beach, just at the boundary between the sea and the sand. Above the sea, the sky is the dirty greyblue of pollution.
The cover image tells you a lot about Goldberg’s aesthetic and her intentions in this elegant and ferocious collection of “poems and fables.” Like Magritte and other surrealist painters, Goldberg is fascinated by dream-like images dredged up from the muck at the bottom of the mind, and she deploys these images to reflect on our intertwined crises of environmental collapse and social injustice.
Goldberg creates a dream world in her writing, full of nightmarish loss, fragmentation and decay juxtaposed with shards of radiant, resonant beauty. Like Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”, Goldberg shows us where to look amongst the garbage and the flowers.
In an earlier book, “Red Zone”, Goldberg focused lovingly on the lives of those living homeless in Nanaimo, and her compassionate concern is audible again in “Devolution”.
But in this new book, the author’s craft is even more developed than it was in her earlier work. (This is her eighth book.) She can write lines that literally take your breath away, and creates images that will remain with you long after you close the book.
She has not forgotten her homeless neighbours and writes powerfully about them and their ruined urban environment. For example, in “Twilight on Esplanade Street,” one of the book’s strongest poems, she opens with “Roll me the curled lip of chainlink, the ragged kerf/of metal fang on flattened psyche/ scraping under. Play me the singsong/down -staircase of white -crowned sparrow flinging last hope/ off creosoted hydro pole. Weight me with peeled/logs strapped to flatcars/travelling nowhere — lifeless old bones.”
Sometimes the agonizing clarity with which this poet sees the world and our shared dilemma can move toward despair, as it does in the desolating “Curtain Call.” But beauty and humour prevail, even over the nightmarish realities of species extinction and social injustice.
Goldberg takes us “where magic leans across the path” and it is worth our while to travel with her. As she reminds us in “Somewhere a Creature,” “Once the drift toward meaning has begun/ It is a thing that can never be undone.”