Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Part Four
Poetry Review by Michael Greenstein
(Note: all current parts of Michael’s review of Best Canadian Poetry 2025 can be found under the tab of the same name in the navigation bar)
Anne Simpson’s “The Golden Boat” is ekphrastic in that it is based upon Cy Twombly’s cycle of paintings, Coronation of Sesostris, which itself portrays the small golden boat, part of the Broighter Hoard in the National Museum of Ireland. Line lengths and spacing give a sense of the voyage: “Halfway between where you came from, where / you’re headed, in a boat a bed a boat // not meant for this.” What is the voyage? It is a journey into words, Twombly’s painting, the mystery of Sesostris’s Egyptian history, and the poet’s pain. The drift between boat and bed, Sesostris’s conquests and the poet’s hospital bed, is a liminal space between origins and endings – a hypnotic place within a circle: “The question / answered with a circle. Sun, call it, / unseen through the cloud, bits of white velvet.” This voyage of verse travels between the two sections of the poem, so that part 2 repeats “halfway between where you were // and where you are,” as well as “white // velvet, something for the pain, circling.” And the poem comes full circle at the end with “Another round of pills.”
Simpson’s circle encompasses much where white velvet may refer to clouds or pills. Midway between day and night finds the poet “Sleeping : : : : :”
in colons of semi-consciousness. Dreams drift among Twombly’s colours and shapes, waking “to snow in the elbows of trees,” the capture of assonance and “dawn / dissolving on the tongue.” Myth enters the landscape with the sun – “cells sending / the wrong signals. The red blink.” The blink “might be a hidden chariot, a sun, / a cell tower, or crim / son flowerings.” Simpson loops the hidden chariot through bodily and communications cells, through sun and a separate crim son, and the sound of a blink. Words split, colours spill down canvas, a splitting head ache pains and paints the small boat, and pills in a plastic cup slant to “a tilting cup filled with people.” Simpson sails her golden boat, brushing past Sesostris and her hospital stay, halfway between past and present.
From Simpson’s hospital to Carolyn Smart’s sickbed in “Grip”: “After the operation, we slept in separate rooms.” She grips the experience of caring for her partner, including all of the medical details before going to her own bed across the hall where she seeks solace in books. She grips her Golden Encyclopedia, which she loved so much when she was young, but now finds it filled with colonialism and misogyny. She grips nothingness which slides between the lines: “Nothing that I had imagined has come true. Nothing / I could hold onto has stayed. Nothing is the same / including what I find inside these books.”
Y.S. Lee’s “He/Him” follows her friend’s gender transition from when he was seventeen and almost crashed his car to the present moment when he tells her about his identity: “it’s like that moment when the optometrist / flicks one final lever and the soggy letters / suddenly surface.” The epiphany occurs “bold and sleek / against a field of light.” From the earlier accident’s headlights to the optometrist’s field of light, sudden revelations end in “Oh, / there you are” – fluid pronouns naming lurch, laugh, and silence.
Molly Cross-Blanchard’s title, “Here’s the thing,” hints at the casual exuberance found in her poem about finding happiness in ordinary daily occurrences. From the mundane opening, “Tonight I went to the grocery store for a steak,” she moves to the roof of her eighteen-storey building with its vista of Burnaby – a metropolitan panorama. From that panorama to her kitchen pan cooking the steak, she googles for the meanings of death and capitalism. Watching porn stars, she masturbates and concludes “tonight is as close to freedom as it gets.” Her free and liberated verse ends with the sentence: “Earlier today a student wrote in an email / you’re my favourite prof so maybe that’s enough.” The sufficiency of “Here’s the thing.”
Molly Peacock’s “Honey Crisp” is a still life of an apple that represents events surrounding the death of her husband. She addresses the apple in her refrigerator, a memento of her late husband’s taste. “Hello wizenface, hello apple, / understudy in the fridge / since March (it’s September).” A keepsake, the apple ages all those months, its personification a substitute for the afterlife of the departed. “Hello wrinkly red cheeks, / I’ll bet you’re almost a year old.” Her hello is a kind of farewell, a bittersweet reminder of passing days beyond ripening. “Hello my honey crisp (well, / my honey, no longer crisp …), / are you asking why you / haven’t been eaten by now?”
The second stanza fills in the background of her husband’s relationship to apples: “Because that man hewed to his routines: / an apple for lunch every day, / the same red punctuation.” The verb hewed clings to sound of routine, but also functions to cleave to experience as well as separate from the tree of life in this interchange between apple and person. Similarly, punctuation points to Peacock’s careful mood and rhythm, as well as the punctual habit of her husband.
The punctuation at the end of the first sentence in this stanza prepares for the ampersand of affection and connectivity in the next, as well as enjambment and caesuras that culminate in a question: “You were earmarked for the date / he slipped from my arms & we both slid to the floor, red angel, are you / listening?” Red angel and red punctuation fall with husband and wife when a new routine takes over. “911, hospital, hospice, / and ten days later (you were / about six months old then), / he died and was carried / to a cold shelf.” In the dialectic between fruit and human, the cold shelf situates body and fridge.
After the fall in the second stanza, the final stanza awakens brightly: “Hello smiley-stem, hello days / moving you from spot to spot.” The red punctuation moves from fruit storage half-underground in the first stanza to different spots in the fridge. The poet’s new life is more exuberant: “Greetings new groceries!” She picks up the lasting apple and refuses to eat it: “Not yet, not yet, my pomme.” The French prepares for the final pun – “Hello soft wrinkled / face in my palms.” The apple remains crisp in the capable and caring hands of the poet; its shelf life serves as a form of transference from grief to posthumous healing.
Pauline Peters’s “Housebreaking” covers much ground rhythmically from turtle imagery to a female divine, beginning in medias res: “And then I want to rise up through the roof / and make my brownskin way / through wood, tile, and concrete.” This initial elevation through domestic material turns downward toward the turtle world: “only careful, careful / like a turtle toothing its way / out of its soft, eggshell home.” The soft carapace is oxymoronic, while the alliteration of careful concrete and toothing turtle adds to the rhythm of repetition in careful, careful, suggesting a slower pace. Careful, careful is matched by “rise, rise” and a concluding “welcoming, welcoming” to Turtle Island.
Animal imagery appears in Elizabeth Blair’s “A Hunt’s Surviving Duck.” The counter lyric in this poem’s dialectic is presented in parentheses as part of the poet’s quarrel with herself. Her “tufted parallel self” continues at the right margin with “(she grew a garden.)” The trauma of the woman’s younger self appears in the final stanza: “who might in other words / crush her neck / roast her breast.” This animal imagery recalls Emily Cann’s “The Fox,” where she dissects a fetal pig: “I pressed the supine limbs open further / cracking fragile bones and popping joints.”
D.A. Lockhart’s quatrains in “Hussain Recites Ginsberg While Driving Down Kedzie” braid character, setting, mood, and themes in a cab ride across Chicago.
Let the sour dampness of this autumn
night fall into the shell of this rideshare
That the dampness of entangled worlds
collect in unaccelerated air. Open it
Lockhart entangles sounds in gathered sibilance, repetition of dampness, rhyme of rideshare and air, and closing t’s from let to it.
The second stanza opens the conversation between passengers and driver – “between nations, calling clans, / pathways to names.” Sibilance gains traction in the third stanza to combine car and city, stranger and Chicago:
of storefront signs, traffic between
neighbourhoods, the seamlessness
of a city stitched together through
knowing this to be the static centre.
Driver Hussain stitches together all the in-between sections of Chicago, for he is the driving force in this poem, incorporating William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg into the conversation of “Time between.”
The final stanza verses the city with internal rhymes of streets, rhapsody, the weave of “we’ve,” releases, and free:
The streets before us, his sedan, all beef hot dogs,
his voice, an intertribal rhapsody, drawing
together where we’ve been, what we’ve been
called, releases them, free, into the city’s night air.
Lockhart and Hussain air their inheritance of Indigenous and immigrant experience at urban intersections.
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis (Nov. 12 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 184 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966327
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966320