Fresh eyes on familiar surroundings
From reflections on displacement to snow-covered fields, Barb Carey highlights GTA poets to read this month
In her evocative debut collection, Laila Malik draws on memory, not only personal recollection but ancestral and cultural history. Migration has defined her family for generations; she traces “the undulating ocean road” from South Asia to East Africa to the Arabian Gulf and Canada, and reflects on what is lost or altered by displacement. The preparation of food figures prominently as a connection to culture; as she puts it, “taste is a resurrection of memory.” But food also symbolizes change: in the opening poem, Malik describes making a traditional stew, but the ingredients vary slightly, and “we will use forks/because we have forgotten how to use fingers.” Women’s lives, present and past, take centre stage and, in a number of powerful poems, Malik contends with the constraints on women under fundamentalist regimes: “better to pray/ within four walls and call it home, remain safely unseen and/unheard … knowledge is for the scholars, who do you/think you are.”
What’s in a name? For A. Light Zachary, it’s a marker of gender identity, which is non-binary in their case. In this introspective debut collection, the Toronto poet, who grew up in New Brunswick, reflects on being transgender and their struggle for self-acceptance and a sense of belonging. Finding a name they feel comfortable with is an existential challenge. As they put it in one poignant sonnet, “I have been seeking it in dictionaries, poetry … call me something ubiquitous, genderless, and sweet./As part of me as a hand that I hold out to shake.” Elsewhere, they write about navigating parental expectations as “a daughter-son” and of vulnerability in love affairs. The “interruptions” in the title refer to a sequence of poems in which Zachary disrupts quotations from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, to establish a queer presence in history, as in this wryly altered line from Juvenal’s “Satires,” “Pray for a sound mind in (another) body.”
“We carry mystery as gift,” Catherine Graham writes in one poem in this collection, which spans 20 years. True to that line, her poems are often enigmatic, dreamlike scenarios whose imagery echoes fairy tales or mythology. In one poem, the Toronto poet describes a snowcovered field and writes, “This brainy circuit breathes beneath” — metaphorically hinting that what matters is below the surface, much as the content of dreams reflects the subconscious and buried emotions. Recurrent themes include grief (both her parents died young) and transformation (in the opening poem, she imagines the Scythian lamb, a type of fern, as a lamb sprouting “hooves of parted air”). The most affecting poems feature emotionally charged images: “Grief is like waiting for fifty/giant black kettles to boil,” she writes in an early poem. The new work is more elliptical, but still packed with resonant phrasing, as in her description of “the Medieval with their pointy feet. Stiff, rigid cutouts.”
In his entertaining fourth collection, Jacob McArthur Mooney puts a “complexifier” spin on ekphrastic poetry, in which poets respond to artworks. Many of the poems are about pieces he hasn’t seen — they’ve been lost or destroyed or are simply imaginary. As such, they give rise to reflections on the nature of art and, especially, its consumption. The Toronto poet, who hails from Nova Scotia, sets up the central conceit by inventing a benefactor of the Art Gallery of Ontario (hence the title, “Frank’s Wing”), who “sowed the sprawl” as an urban developer. Thus, he also builds several poems around witty observations about civic life (“Arrière-garde domestic architecture/ is overlooked by cranes”). Mooney’s phrasing is playful, albeit idiosyncratic, and he’s at his best when poking fun at the commodification of art. In a poem about the immersive Vincent van Gogh exhibit, he writes, “I witness Wheatfield with Crows/projected in my wife’s hair … Farmhouse in Provence/is sucked out the exit.”