POETRY: BARB CAREY
Self Defence for the Brave and Happy By Paul Vermeersch ECW, 88 pages, $18.95
Paul Vermeersch explored beginnings and endings in his two previous books, so it follows that this ambitious sixth collection has a speculative “What next?” feel. In the first section, the Toronto poet and editor conjures a grim possible future where our faith in technology has spawned “user-generated/catastrophes” and the pillars of civilization — architecture, agriculture, transportation — have crumbled. Vermeersch captures our culture’s anxieties in these eclectic poems, which range widely in form and draw from pop culture, science (particularly in the Space Age) and literature. Our fears take metaphoric shape as age-old monsters such as the bogeyman and the malicious hag of folklore, but also as real-life menaces such as the atom bomb. The tone is not all doom-laden, though, for Vermeersch suggests that the way forward is through our capacity for imagination. As he writes in one poem, “Only stories want us to live … Come with me if you want to get out of here alive.”
river woman By Katherena Vermette Anansi, 112 pages, $19.95
For the Métis poet Katherena Vermette, home is a wellspring of inspiration. Like her debut collection North End Love Songs, which won the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, river woman is rooted in a strong sense of place, as the ground for metaphorically exploring love and confronting the wounds of colonization. “River dances/out to lake/lake rushes back/to river/waters wash/ around each other/and change, “she writes in one poem, where the interaction of lake and river expresses intimacy’s transformative effect. Throughout, there’s an ebb and flow between a sense of brokenness and resilience. Indeed, the Winnipeg writer finds hope in language itself.
In “Breathe, “Anishinaabemowin words become a kind of oxygen, and a bond between lovers. These spare, imagistic poems live up to the words of the Vietnamese spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh, quoted in an epigraph: “If our hearts are big, we can be like the river.”
What Your Hands Have Done By Chris Bailey Nightwood Editions, 96 pages, $18.95
As its title suggests, this appealing debut collection draws on personal experience. Chris Bailey grew up in North Lake, P.E.I., in a family that has been fishing for generations.
He currently divides his time between North Lake and Hamilton and still works on the boat when home.
He often relies on a lean vernacular to portray that gruelling way of life and the people he shares it with: a man with hands “like lead weights/on the end of mackerel lines” and, especially, his father, who tells him, “The work is hard/and the smell follows you but the money don’t/stink, does it?”
Elsewhere, Bailey writes with restrained lyricism of a long-distance love affair and of life away from P.E.I.; as he puts it wryly in one poem, “Insignificance is found/downtown at the foot of the CN Tower.” It’s the “salt-encrusted coils” still holding him, though, that anchor this collection.