Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Part Six
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.)
Jaeyun Yoo’s “Orchid” recounts a woman’s escape from a sexual killer by admiring his magenta orchids. In the dialogue between the two she asks him how he keeps them in bloom, to which he offers: “Two ice cubes in the pots per week, / west-facing windows, perlite soil.” She then asks how he ends up kidnapping a woman. An ordinary domestic situation clashes with an underlying criminality: “She brewed him a cup of chamomile tea / while he blabbered sob stories about his mother.” By the middle of the poem there is a release: “She patted his back, a princess kissing / a bulbous toad to lift an ancient curse.” After her escape she speculates on the nature of safety for women: “I want to hear about how nothing happens / when walking alone, earbuds playing ABBA, / through a park dim as a beer bottle.” The music points to the soundtrack of consonant b’s throughout the poem about bondage and buoyancy: bloom, brewed, blubbered, back, bulbous, bolted barefoot, barber, blood, and beer bottle. At the end of the poem, she returns home to her houseplants and sprays them three times for a good night.
Alexander Hollenberg’s “Origin Story, With Crow” was written on the occasion of Earth Day 2023. The poem’s couplets align with its themes, beginning with “The crow’s wing is a blade / slicing the ocean open:” Each couplet is a blade slicing and splicing origins and endings, external and internals in rhymes of wing and slicing, assonance of origin, story, crow, ocean, and open, which opens to the second stanza: “inside, the usual offal – birds’ nests / of old transatlantic cable, fists of seagrass.” The sibilance in this couplet snags the detritus into the next stanza where nets trap nests and sturdy alliteration: “that clasp and conceal the bleached bones / of tankers and trawl nets, dusky shards of fallen stars.” The enjambment continues into the next couplet where the sentence ends in a resounding sibilance that introduces a keyword “syzygy,” which represents opposing terms and is therefore fitting for the couplet structure and thematic juxtaposition of opposites: “set down on the seabed in a sunken syzygy / of celestial trash – a drowned stationary orbit.”
The crow’s syzygy: its wing blade, which also “squirrels it in her plumage / and soars – for a moment spruce and crow and sea and sky.” Each of these elements “concatenate, which is to say create, / a new cosmos in the ink of her wing.” Poet and crow ink and concatenate in the syzygy of stanzas. The final sentence of six stanzas returns and gathers in fishermen and their nets, “as if there were a net wide enough / to reel back in the world.”
Bertrand Bickersteth turns his attention to Black cowboys in “A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse”: “Boy’s horse stepped in a badger’s hole, lost her footing / and fell. Boy was flipped.” Accents in sing-song rhythm and alliterated b’s and f’s imitate the accident. These sounds carry over to the action in the third stanza where the physical incident expands to mythic proportions: “felt the inertia of his flight take over the topography, twist / westerly, still tilting to the east.” Fall and flight, east and west, tilt and twist in various directions from couplet to archetype. Insistent repetition girds the experience of inevitable accident: “He felt his fingers slipping through her withers, felt the fear / of the horse rushing to the ground.” The animal’s withers are part of this withering experience that questions the knowledge of whereabouts or whither. The identity of western stereotypes burrows into the final couplet: “a blind quest in the sorrow of the soil, forever fumbling, forever finicking / for the unknowable mother of darkness.” The lone Black cowboy quests for family and grounded connection in his unfortunate fall.
The empty spaces in Fareh Malik’s “Praise Us, for We Are Dead” are meant to imitate bullet holes of battle, as well as lost lives and “earthy wounds”: “This poem is about losing a home, and trying to find it, and failing, and surviving, and building, and having to house its haunting.” And the breathing between phrases contrasts with death’s suffocation.
In “Resting II” Armand Garnet Ruffo observes the graves of children who died in residential schools and eulogizes them:
See the hidden graves
between the trees,
the unmarked ones,
the ones that will be forever nameless,
the children are resting.
This straightforward silence is marked by the two indented lines, which in turn mark the graves. A question completes the rest of the first stanza:
Resting? As if each child
were tucked in
with a lullaby, a teddy bear,
a goodnight kiss.
The second stanza denies and clarifies the first: “It isn’t true. Where do these lies / come from? They are not resting.” And the third stanza continues to pay attention: “Listen, they are below our feet. / Can you hear them?” Instead of resting, they are turning, “reaching / twisting / pushing up through the earth.” “Resting II” is a monument to their lost lives.
Kayla Czaga post-modernizes Emily Dickinson in “Safe Despair,” dialoguing with her precursor through persona and personification. “Because she could not stop for Death, Death drove alongside, shouting -- / Emily, get in the car.” After this first stanza that combines em dash, dialogue, and Death, the second stanza carries on the conversation: “Death said Emily seemed older, closer to his age.” With added punctuation the exchange would differ: “Death, said Emily, seemed older, closer to her age.”
Czaga continues to slant Dickinson when she lists Death’s direct messages to Emily: “a) threats / b) eggplant emojis / c) obscure Slovenian poetry / d) links to new articles / e) grim reaper tattoos.” This random postmodern list adds up to a mood of safe despair in the dialogue between Death and Emily, overseen by Czaga. In their quasi-absurd conversations, “Death, / Death, Death, Death, Emily, Death,” Emily is outnumbered five to one. For their one-month anniversary Death buys Emily a birch-white box, “five and a half feet long with pewter knobs,” measured according to the line’s meter. The same metrics apply to Emily’s journal entries: “Death -- / Death – Death – Death – Death – Homework – Death.”
Death tutors Emily in physics, for she is the only girl who can understand him:
Only Emily and her meters of lace,
museum of ceramic feelings, her breath
flogging the pane and long trembling
fingers could understand him.
In addition to her metered lace, this quatrain mixes her emotions: ordinarily her breath would fog the pane, but by flogging it, it plays on pain. In this macabre atmosphere Death reads a poem to Emily “over the phone that made her bones glow.”
The final stanza culminates in her surreal, safe despair and the reader’s suspension in rhyme and alliteration that seals her casket: “She folded her notebook pages into coffins / and cranes until she felt a formal / purple purging in her veins.” Amherst’s coffin is filled with hospital spoons, forks in the road, and the slice of knife.
Cassidy McFadzean describes her experience of visiting Storm King, the large sculpture garden on the Hudson River, north of New York City. Where Czaga builds on Emily Dickinson, McFadzean reads from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” yet her opening also calls to mind Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” “The citizens of this land build massive sculptures / to honour the king.” McFadzean’s pentameters create this kingdom of oversized sculptures. Who is this king of storm and sibilance? “And when he is pleased he shows mercy / And if he is displeased he rouses a hurricane.” The poem gradually progresses from this grandiose scene to smaller details: “We approached Wavefield but didn’t walk on the wave.” This wave of w’s carries through to the next line with the introduction of Robert Frost and the need to mend: “We lay by a wall of stone where I read to you ‘Mending Wall’ / And after weeks of discomfort, finally cracked my back.” How does the poet mend her cracked back? “At home I bathed in green copper water.” Copper prepares for miniature “ions” a few lines later.
“I asked what you were building and you said context.” In the pact between poet and reader contextual building accrues with each broken and mending line. To build context one needs the quotidian routine: “We should think of each day as having twelve rounds” about the clock. The poet returns to her broken body: “I’m tired of feeling things in my body Like ions” – microscopic details that build the body. Domestic details verge on the surreal: “All the apartment’s doorknobs have been removed / The last tenant afraid of being locked inside / In a house with no exits.”
Further confinement carries through personal details hemmed within parentheses bracketing the body. Details frustrate the speaker: “That my mother described her symptoms to a pharmacist / concerned they were a side effect of medication / (she was having the heart attack that killed her).” The dialectic between cause and effect is repeated in the next bracketed sentence: “I stare into the middle distance as defence mechanism / (so I don’t get attacked on the subway again).” The poet traverses distances from Storm King to doorknob to a concluding question: “Fear manifests as compulsion – Where is the feeling / I used to have (that life was taking place).” This final feeling reiterates her earlier feeling things in her body where life takes place in the monumental as well as in microscopic ions.
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis (Nov. 12 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 184 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966327
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966320