> POETRY: BARB CAREY
THE MORE By Ronna Bloom Pedlar Press, 88 pages, $20
The trouble I’m in, we’re all in,” Ronna Bloom writes in The More, her sixth collection. The Toronto poet and psychotherapist is referring to the human condition — the hunger for connection and the angst of mortality — but she also shows an appetite for life, as the book’s title implies. Most of the poems derive from being poet in residence at Mount Sinai Hospital, and bear bittersweet witness to the fragility of life and the inevitability of loss. Whether looking inward or outward, Bloom writes with directness, ringing clarity and a quiet wisdom. “Do not let the frame of some picture you have/of the past land around the neck of the future,” she writes; elsewhere, “Desire breathes like a tide, goes a long way out/and surprises when it comes back as a swell,/ the way grief does.” These are poems as luminous as the gorgeous Mark Rothko print that graces the book’s cover.
THE CHEMICAL LIFE By Jim Johnstone Signal Editions, 78 pages, $17.95
The Toronto poet and critic Jim Johnstone’s fifth collection is an unsettling plunge into the altered state of drug addiction and mental illness. Paradoxically, Johnstone’s language is spare and tightly controlled, despite its disorienting shifts in perspective and associative leaps.
He writes strikingly of sensations, of “skin horripilating/as if it had been kissed/and funnelled away in a storm” after taking the tranquilizer Alprazolam; elsewhere, he describes “senses multiplied/ like accordion bellows” and “synapses dimmed/ like gold rings bubbling/in glasses of champagne.” At times the ills of the individual and of the body politic bleed into each other, especially in the final poem “Lip Service,” where he wrestles with nihilistic despair, writing, in a bleak parody of the marriage vows: “do you take/the end of the world/the shelter of its black wings, to have/and to hold . . .” A visceral account of a troubled soul and a troubled world, The Chemical Life is dark but compelling.
SHORT HISTORIES OF LIGHT By Aidan Chafe McGill-Queen’s University Press, 64 pages, $18.95
Mental illness also casts a long shadow over this debut collection by the West Coast poet Aidan Chafe. In the book’s strongest poems, Chafe conveys his family’s struggles with mental illness in evocative turns of phrase and metaphors. He writes of his father “under the night’s shade/when the family is turned off,/he is wound up like a toy” and of an anxious household where “disquietude/ inhibits our thoughts, damming us within.”
Even when Chafe turns to the wider world he’s alert to distress, and the ravages of violence and disaster. As he puts it, “the chalice of darkness seeds many things.” But the light that shines throughout the book, alleviating the gloom, is his compassion. Observing his father in “Psych Ward Hymnal,” Chafe fears “when will this/monster inhabit me?” but he’s also tender: “I knew what it means/to hold a frightened child—// like balancing an egg/on a tiny spoon.”
PENELOPE By Sue Goyette Gaspereau Press, 96 pages, $19.95
In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus’s wife Penelope fends off suitors for 20 years, until he returns from his exploits and they reunite. She’s considered a model of marital fidelity, but in a supporting role. In her sixth collection, the Halifax poet Sue Goyette puts Penelope at the centre of her own epic, a book-length dramatic monologue in couplets that clips along at a lively pace. “I wake to visitors at the door. Can we get something/ to drink? I’m asked. Dutifully, I call for more chairs,” Goyette writes in the opening lines. “Can we get something a little stronger? they say. They say,/can you make us a sandwich while you’re up?”
Variations on the word “dutiful” occur on virtually every page, but Penelope also expresses the rage, longing and despair seething beneath her “appalling decorum.” Slyly subversive and often hilarious, Penelope is an entertaining, fresh take on a classic story.