String of new gems offer uncomfortable truths
Featured works tackle social and economic ills, climate crisis, racial inequality, literary reflection
Since April is National Poetry Month, it’s not surprising there are a deluge of notable new collections — along with a stellar book of criticism.
Unease is arguably the dominant mood of our cultural moment — and Karen Solie taps into it brilliantly in her fourth collection, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, 92 pages, $19.95), a follow-up to her Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Pigeon. Uncertainty and the fallibility of perception lie at the heart of many of the poems — the existential challenge is to accept that as the human condition. The Toronto-based poet often expresses this tension in metaphor, and with wry wit. “Where land ended/and the water began was indiscernible,/though I was not afraid. Because I didn’t know/ what I was seeing,” she writes in one poem.
Solie keeps the reader on edge, much as the mole in one poem disrupts the surface order of a backyard (“the concrete sundial could use a tilt and while he’s at it/he’ll make a disaster of the borders”). The unease isn’t limited to the personal, for Solie has an acute eye for the wider social and economic milieu. In the foreboding poem “Bitumen,” for instance, she ponders the consequences of our dependence on oil; as she puts it, “Combustion is our style.”
A really good dictionary is a helpful companion to Madhur Anand’s debut collection, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (McClelland & Stewart, 102 pages, $18.95). Anand is a professor of environmental science at the University of Guelph, and she frequently draws upon that discipline’s concepts and specialized jargon to address issues such as climate change, the melting of the polar ice-caps and deforestation. This can be challenging for the general reader, but it ultimately leads to new insight — not only into the workings of the natural world, but also about forms of expression.
Anand doesn’t always rely on technical terms to describe the fix our planet is in. In one poem, she writes of a swath of grass that was once ancient Rome’s largest stadium; the image of “grandeur and ruin” is a potent reminder of how civilizations come and go, and the final line of the poem sounds a blunt warning: “Less than a degree is more/than necessary to account for new fiascos.”
Austin Clarke is renowned for his fiction (including the Giller Prize-winning novel The Polished Hoe); he brings his deft storyteller’s touch and knack for strong characterization to In Your Crib (Guernica Editions, 55 pages, $20), his second foray into poetry.
In this book-length poetic monologue, an older black man addresses a young, disaffected black man whose arrest he happens to witness. At first, the speaker of the poem, a veteran of the civil rights movement, distances himself disapprovingly, and sees only their differences (“your lexicon is filled with new words:/ your ‘wheels’, your ‘piece’ ”). But over the course of this soul-searching meditation, he comes to have sympathy for the younger man and his defiance of authority. In Your Crib looks both inward and outward, offering an incisive take on racial inequality and the violence that has claimed many young black men’s lives in our city. On Elizabeth Bishop (206 pages, $24.95) by Colm Toibin is an inspired bit of literary match-making by Princeton University Press. The acclaimed Irish fiction writer offers an illuminating meditation on the work of that major American poet (who had a significant Canadian connection, since her early childhood was spent in rural Nova Scotia). But the book is also part memoir, for Toibin writes of his own life and why her poetry so affects him. They are clearly kindred spirits in literary terms, for their writing shares a reticence that nevertheless hints at deep feeling. As Toibin puts it, Bishop’s late poems have a “devious power” that “comes from what is said and what lies beneath; they use exact detail to contain emotion and suggest more, and then leave the reader unsure, unsettled.”
Toibin is a sensitive reader and an eloquent writer; the combination makes for a wonderful reminder of how powerful poetry can be. Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer and the Star’s poetry columnist.