Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Part Seven
A Poetry Review by Michael Greenstein
(Note: this is Part Seven of a multi-part review of Best Canadian Poetry 2025 from Biblioasis Books. The previous parts can be found here.)
Eve Joseph presents a magical, phenomenological paragraph in “superpowers,” which are not political but poetical gifts of the imagination. By mid-paragraph she summons three French phenomenologists – Francis Ponge, Jean Follain, and Max Jacob – to add ballast to her flight. Which begins with: “When I wasn’t looking the broken bowl repaired itself. The genie let himself out of the bottle. The tide receded so far back I could see yesterday.” These magical reversals expand and contract from small containers to the surprising time of yesterday. Blindness and insight unfold with each sentence. “In the interval when I looked away the dog with three legs grew a fourth and did backflips on the trampoline.” The power of looking is the poem itself with all of its revelations. “I tested my powers by blindfolding myself. Sure enough, overnight Ponge, Follain, and Jacob showed up like elves in the shoemaker’s shop and in the morning the table was piled high with poems written on blue sheets of paper.” The postmodern muse as elf, followed by an exclamation “Wow!” The poem is all about its own process of being and becoming. “I wondered how far I could take this. What would happen if I looked? This is the point where it can all go wrong. Where the gift of the poem gets weighted down by craft.” Take away the weight, and the poem will soar: “Take away the wind and the clouds will have to row themselves across the sky.”
Sue Goyette writes an elegy for her mother in “surprise: an armoire (in a sunny spot, I’m hoping).” The title captures emotion and place with subtitle and parenthesis. “Mother of pearl glare. Tongue spiced by glove pulled off / by teeth. Birthing.” The sensory experience of glaring or birthing includes all of the f and l consonants trapped by teeth in the birth of language. The second stanza develops this mother-daughter sensory experience: “She was the first elevator I got into. Sonically unnerving, my / mother’s nervous system.” Stretched lines running on enhance the delivery. Enjambment between stanzas further advances the maternal links: “mother’s nervous system // was a hospital corridor. We must’ve frolicked before I was born // in the old-fashioned way – all ice cubes and décor.” Goyette keeps score in the corridor-décor rhyme, with a reminder of décor as honour to her mother: “This is when I truly knew her.”
Joy and grief intermingle: “The most unexpected thing about grief is how she turned up as / an armoire.” Birth and death are parts of the transference between mother and daughter – caring carried in an armoire. Daughter grieves and breathes with mother, “Taking in the weather like a / respirator.” The initial tongue “spiced by glove,” resumes with “I spice her with way more attitude than she ever had.” As unexpected as the armoire, the emotional toll upends the daughter: “I didn’t expect the breach and rip, the inverse of birthing.” Yet this emotion is mixed: “I didn’t expect the comfort I sometimes feel // when a molecule of her good self melts on me like a snowflake.” That melting molecule returns to the earlier ice cubes and the weight of thunder “like a wet boa over her shoulder.”
The daughter’s last gasps for her mother form the final three stanzas:
O little tumbleweed. O little ash. These deep breaths in are my
paltry attempts
to keep the new version of you close. And this getting on my
knees may look like drama
but the feeling is the realest I’ve been.
This genuflection is a tumbling from the last brave stand of being a daughter.
David Martin’s “Tinnitus” is a formal sonnet with traditional rhyme and rhythm. “My ear is humming a song that lasts all night / and day.” The musical thrum links inner ear to symphonic performance: “The song has one note, and it never / varies in rhythm or tempo: fermata forever / waiting for its conductor to end the plight.” Martin pitches his score wittily: “You might be thinking this pitch is like a bite, / and that I spend my hours wishing to sever / the roar.” He concludes his sonic performance on a high note in a minor and major key: “The words I speak are pedal-pointed, pinned / to this song that will be with me till I’m dead, / a single tone that stretched for me, my tonic.”
Gerald Hill gets in touch with nature literally and figuratively in “To Celebrate Waves Right to Left in a Shirt-Rippling Wind, Tavira, Portugal.” The waves’ direction runs counter to writing from left to right. “Lying on the sand you’d burn eventually, get thirsty. / You’d peel and eat your apple.” Each sentence is a wave across the page bearing internal rhyme of eventually-thirsty and the double peel of fruit and skin burn. “You’d try / for a moment to name what the waves think / they’re doing, you’d ask the same of yourself.” The same name links waves and poet, a conjunction summarized in the second stanza: “So the world begins and ends in sky, sea, sand / not forgetting sun breathing fragments of cloud / or yourself giving birth to this.” The sibilance of this sentence from “So” to “this” accentuates the wind that gives rise to waves and the weave of poem to nature.
Tolu Oloruntoba pens a cento based entirely on a host of questions from Anne Szumigalski’s poetry, which focusses on identity: “who are we? / who am i? who was i? i am? After all the questions, the poem concludes, “understand me, love me, / answer me.”
Carmelita McGrath describes poverty during the pandemic in “Visit, July 25, 2020.” Her descriptive powers and empathy are evident throughout the prose poem. “The boy arrives at 2:25 am; / like most things here the visit is random.” She structures her randomness through sentences of forgetting and imagining: “Let me imagine so, if only / for a little while tonight.” From her down-and-out shelter, “Imagine that, this day last week, / I didn’t have my sixtieth birthday here.”
Kate Genevieve writes about school shootings in the United States in couplets of remembrance. “Remember when we pulled their bodies from / under piles of skin and cotton.” A circular pattern appears in “Wheels on the Bus” in the rest of the first sentence when their bodies are brought home “to wash their faces clean, rusty // blood circling around and around – or is it again / and again – down the drain.” In the final sentence of remembering the school children we see “yellow busses // with bodies, and kept sending them back again and again.” Repetition in the circular wheels of history.
The three stanzas in Ronna Bloom’s “Where I’ve Been” examine her emotional reactions to her waiting for surgery.
I’ve been to where the sky picked me up like Dorothy
and took me to a diner. It was kinder than a hurricane
but blew black. I’ve been to panic and back
several times a day on the no-go bus. I’ve been freaked.
I’ve been to the doctor, the doctor, to medical imaging twice.
I’ve been to the phone when it rings and when it sits there.
Stresses in rhythm, internal rhyme, alliterated blue-black sky, frenzied and frozen repetition of “I’ve been,” and a plethora of hard k sounds capture the anxiety and emotional toll of waiting and uncertainty. Medical imagery runs in parallel to the poem’s imagery. She has been “too crazy for words,” yet they provide catharsis. The hurricane at the beginning shifts to an uplifting like a kite surfer: “I am flying, and surfing, and crossing. How it just / goes and goes. When the kite surfer fell, I fell / I was what was left: the wake, the waking, the water.” Bloom’s being surfs and suffers from Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Alice in Wonderland. Sober and scared, she splits the line to gauge her feelings: “how ordinary it is / I am to have all these feelings.”
In “You Grew an Orange” Sara Truuvert honours her grandfather who got kicked out of church for teaching his Sunday school students about freedom of faith. After listing her grandfather’s losses, she describes him driving her to the zoo, and concludes with his other “gentle rebellion”: “you grew an orange / in your apartment, in frozen Toronto. Surprised, / it softened & thrived bold enough to eat / on your astonished table.” This tropical fruit flourishing in a frozen city is bold and astounding.
Robert Bringhurst eulogizes Stan Dragland in “Life Poem” – a philosophic oscillation between life and language, ontology and linguistics, oracular metaphysics and the vernacular:
Life is language, I wanted to say. Only problem:
it isn’t. Not language exactly, not language
as such. Not a particular language either, though
it has a lot to say – in fact, no end of things
to say – and it can listen through the cracks, as every
language needs to.
Negative notes are dominant in this dialectic that resists synthesis and repeats “not” in a rhythm that stamps the life of language. Indeed, not becomes its homonym with its silent consonant, as the poem knots language, tying up the flow and end of things. Additionally naught dispels its own emphasis by capturing sounds that slip through the cracks of being and nothingness. The poet knots language in each stanza before multiplying it towards “a swarm.”
During the evolution of language, image, and nimble thought, these swarms become acrobats that “grow, shrink, dodge, feint, / scatter and reform.” Lexicons, grammars, phonemes, morphemes, “phrases, clauses, sentences congeal and then repeat, / repeat.” By the end of the poem the acrobat tiptoes the line and ties up the existential knot of thought: “So softly and so plainly and so clearly you / might almost try at first to say it could not, / could not possibly, be you that they are / talking and not talking to.”
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis (Nov. 12 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 184 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966327
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966320