Canadians celebrate National Poetry Month
From a Cree poet whose work feels like a crisp walk in the woods to rhymes that delight, shake and flutter
“This world is too much for you, the enormity of it — how/can anything be this enormous?” writes Cree poet Dallas Hunt in “Teeth,” its sharp lines, and soft corners, easily cutting into and probing the depths: of grief and yearning, identity and injustice. The questioning is exact and forthright, pushing all of us to do the work, to learn the truth and not assume: anything (about being Cree, about histories we don’t know and understand). “And i won’t tell you about/the first peoples there/ … but i do encourage/ you to look it up, because/how informative would it be/to look up the communities/we plunder and/ pummel,” Hunt writes in “San Solomon.” With a gentle fluidity, Hunt’s work feels like a graceful yet crisp walk through the woods, each movement a conscious step forward.
The early poems in this collection from seasoned poet Kim Trainor lure you with their lush journeys through natural landscapes, with love of the Earth, climate despair and sexual desire all converging on the page in beautiful prose poems. “Tell me. Where do we go from here?/Score me with desire lines — write words for songs that have none/in the wrist’s blue margins, sparse language of the tundra.” You want to stay there, luxuriating and feeling soothed but, like the massive interruption humans have created on the planet, you can’t: the form of the book forks partway through, with more intensely scientific poems emerging, coupled with Trainor’s notebook entries, detailing COVID-19 news with cataclysmic (but not surprising) climate change updates. This book is indeed “A blueprint for survival” (the title pulling from an influential 1972 text in The Ecologist magazine) and one we should all attempt to absorb.
A debut collection from Ellen Chang-Richardson, “Blood Belies” is daring in its expansiveness. The poems ask, and create space, for contemplation, questioning, frustration and ultimately awareness, examining systemic and institutional racism (the “polite/hypocrisy/of Canada”) and personal and familial trajectories. They weave together stories of their father’s deep traumas leaving Cambodia, and “acclimation” to a new country, with their own physicality (“filaments flit/past my right eye/is it fruit fly or is it/brain/injury”), encounters with injustice, the climate crisis, and the cityscape and its possibilities. The poems are terrific in their untethered-ness, using experimental forms, supple rhythm and fervid language play — “whizzwhirr of insects/at worst tilted by staccato pops/we scratch surface until wounds burst/your touch is cold against my socks” — to unwind the mind.
The poems in this slim volume, the first from artist and songwriter Colleen Coco Collins, feel richly off-kilter, exciting as they bound from Earth, and the material and felt treasures, and on through the infinite. “Solitary vertebrates as/ seen through slits./Allometries again:/stutters, rifts./(The chassis is unchanged/but the genesis drifts).” It seems appropriate that they should be read aloud atop a balcony, dramatized for full effect (Shakespeare clearly one of many influences). It’s a delight to read rhyme — “site of the body/site of the blow/site of the stuttering peripheral flow” — and not be turned off. Instead it creates a shaking, a fluttering, followed by jolts, revolts and manoeuvres into directions unknown.