Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Part Five
A Poetry Review by Michael Greenstein
(Note: this is Part Five of a multi-part review of Best Canadian Poetry 2025 from Biblioasis Books. The previous parts can be found here.
Kim June Johnson’s “I Don’t Know What to Do About the World” uses spacing and ampersands to join and separate climate crisis, the deaths of children in residential schools, and a close-up of a robin pulling a worm. In a broken ecosystem where it is hard to breathe, “the earth spins & spins” and a “tiny robin / tells me a story.” Despite all the devastation, the poet concludes with a question of love for the world “like an old favourite coat / with a torn seam & missing button?” The button is the ampersand, the missing button the empty space between phrases.
Instead of blank spaces, Amanda Proctor punctuates “I found a place where time stands still” with back slashes, diagonals that link the poet to her grandmother’s displacement from Belarus during the war. With the exception of diagonals, she avoids any punctuation in order to fuse past and present: “as a child i roll curlers into grandma’s wet hair / pastel and plastic they resist as i click the pieces together.” (This opening recalls Hollie Adams’s “snap-clips in our hair” and the man with “the clicky knee.”) The act of wrapping curlers into her grandmother’s hair is part of a larger project of curling the past into the present: “the only way out of the gravitational pull / is to move toward the present / of this moment toward her / soft hair stretched between my fingers.”
Another grandmother appears in Domenica Martinello’s “Infinity Mirror,” whose couplets remain unpunctuated to give a dizzying effect to the profusion and distortion of back-to-back mirrors. The French label this technique “mise en abyme,” which results in visual vertigo. The grandmotherly muse sings of the womb, echoing towards infinity: “my grandma gongs the gong and is cancer-free / but says she still gets all the perks.” Grandma’s gong echoes through the chamber of generations, the free verse commenting on the diagnosis with the rhyme of cancer-free and coffee in the second stanza: “a plastic jewel unsews itself from her knock-off / ed hardy cap as the crowd claps and hands her a coffee.” Perked coffee and the hyphenated knock-off revert to cancer-free, while the gongs meet the clapping crowd. The unsewing of the jewel may hint at cancerous cells coming undone and proliferating in the infinity gongs.
There is a randomness to the abrupt changes in perception, the arbitrary path of cancer, the genetics of a mother’s cells inherited from her mother, and handed down to her daughter: “someone comes up once a night to wash her back / she throws a bag of cheese curds at the walmart cashier.” Are these cheese curds a reminder of the cells’ proliferation? Similarly, the sudden appearance of “she chainsmokes romance novels” is another instance of proliferation and a link of smoking to cancer. The granddaughter then introduces the randomness of reading: “I opened one to a random page / found a single grey pubic hair.” She then explores the biology of “all the eggs and follicles” – a multiplicity that contrasts with the single trigger hair: “this random magical business / dressed down and destroyed.” The surreal running randomness of poetry is captured in “Infinity Mirror,” which dresses up and down the family tree to become “unsewn from reality / not a gong.” The final stanzas funnel down to single words from the opening pentameters, as if imitating the trajectory of birth: “trash // cheap trash / when you’re hungry // it’s a feast.” The coffee and cheese curds turn to trash and a cheap feast.
Multiple mirrors turn singular in Alison Braid-Fernandez’s paragraph, “Light Upon the Body,” which examines the poet’s pain through various lenses. “Next to the mirror in the ferry bathroom was a painting of two girls on a hotel bed.” In the interplay between mirror and painting, the poet turns inward from the inside of her eyelids to the green colour that says “Interior” and is warmly internal. The poet’s body shifts from dialogue and desire to “cosmic and grand.” Like the gongs in “Infinity Mirror,” the poet concludes: “Held in the bathroom mirror, I chimed and chimed and chimed.”
Couplets in Evelyn Lau’s “Mindful” find the light in a dark Canadian winter: “I was coming out of the long darkness / when a streetlight shone on the rain-slick hedge.” Lau’s mindful combines earful and eyeful – the sudden illumination in a soundscape of long shone and precise rain-slick hedge. The green from “Light Upon the Body” colours this poem as well: “Green gleam in the corner of my eye, / barbed holly, Chinese jade.” The poet’s peripheral vision captures edges as well as panoramas, as she contemplates “a dun sesame seed.” She celebrates a tea ceremony with a circle: “The scarlet stones / that circle your wrist press cool.” Against the backdrop of bronze glow in the west and fog slouching south, “We’ll sip priceless tea.” From Chinese jade to snow leopard aroma, she concludes: “I was drowning in darkness when all along, // here, this cloud of flowers.” Lau’s aromas are auditory, visual, and laudatory.
A Whitmanesque note of reciprocity is struck in Henry Heavyshield’s “My Brother, Om’ahkokata (Gopher)”: “My song is the gopher and I am my song.” Myth, story, and song coalesce in the poet’s identification with the gopher: “We gather where grass meets / long-flat-rock.” Heavyshield’s voice joins the Canadian chorus along the flat aching heart. He plays the Crossing game, scurrying across long-flat-rock, avoiding the catch of Bright Eyes, to complete the ritual passage and be rewarded with a “post-Crossing snack.” The best crosses understand timing, and by the end of the poem, “I sing my clan’s name and run.” The gopher’s spirit enters the poet who learns “to speak / the ground’s common language.”
Rob Winger’s “Near Dark Park” offers another car ride, this time in Larkspur, California. The mundane opening, “I was steering the rental car through hillside Larkspur side streets,” turns to wonders: “the shining flood streaming over tidy pavement, a wartime postage-stamp lot filled with manicured bamboo and lemon trees, the shaded plastic playground … all of it set in the dark hold of a second-growth redwood grove.” Since the origins of tidy involve tide and time, we are reminded of the shining flood caught in the dark hold near dark park. And if we follow the flow to the penultimate paragraph, we find “gorgeous tides” installed in “our dry suburban cabin.” A wet-dry dialectic, part of a mobile-stationary pattern, runs through Winger’s prose poem.
In the second paragraph the passengers find the tree one avenue later, “angled into a cutwater diamond,” a fifty-foot tree, saved. It might have been an oak or acacia, “Or it might have been, like us, a legal alien.” Tree and passengers are legal aliens “inside the middle of things.” A sublime question about singularity follows: “what does it mean to save a single cathedral from a whole city of cathedrals?” The religious reference carries through to the automobile carrying the observers: “engine parts working in communion.” And one step further in the last paragraph: “our wipers calmly obliterate each raindrop blessing the sloped windshield.” Angle and cathedral turn to slope and blessing. The final sentence recapitulates the wet drive, sounded in sibilants and assonance: “I turn the dry wheel into breeze and fog and scented blooms, every steadfast steering column, only clumsy luck.” This turning into is transformative. Like the singular tree, the steering column remains steadfast in serendipity.
Evelyna Ekoko-Kay explores autism in “On My Shoulders” through couplets of repetition. She begins with “my autism is a disruption / to the ordinary body-“, the hyphen carrying on to the next stanzas connecting body and mind: “mind relationship. / I know what I should do I know how I should.” The “know” becomes part of an insistent refrain while “should” gets trapped in shoulder. This leads to a circular pattern: “I know there is a circle / made of people talking softly.” She tries to be a person within the circle, but “I stand in the circumference // and the circle tightens, / leaving me behind.” She tries “to get a shoulder in,” but can’t, just as she can’t find the light. “I don’t know / why, it was just a spotlight.” The poem shines a spotlight on her shoulder for her to become part of a social group, yet apart from it: “just a glowing circle on the floor. / I can’t feel the light. // I can always feel the light. / I know how light should feel.” The “should” embedded in “shoulder” highlights the mind-body relationship within the autistic self and beyond to society. Poetry’s peripheral vision circles and slants the truth.
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis (Nov. 12 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 184 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966327
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966320