Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Part Three
A Poetry Review by Michael Greenstein
(Parts One and Two of Michael’s Best Canadian Poetry 2025 review are here and here. More parts are coming!)
Catherine Owen’s sonnet, “Fall,” opens with the weather personified: “The weather says red sun / as a typical apparition.” The next sentence voices that colour: “Waking to a bathe of crimson, / sanguinary, carmine or just another / summer’s day.” Those long a’s lead to bathe, the alliteration and rhyme of crimson and carmine, while the sibilance of sanguinary and summer’s pick up the opening says and sun. This voice falls according to season and fate towards an apocalypse: “the sun a mouth announcing the latest / fires: garbage, recklessness, oil.” With its source and mouth, Owen’s weather is also a river subjected to the same pollution in an overloaded ecosystem “no / source reported but that it’s regular.” A series of “or” sounds announce the ordinary apocalyptic source: “nothing special about the apocalypse / anymore nor has there ever been with Thor / or Kali or the Cold War or that fabled button.” The weather utters more of less in fewer species and dwindled forests. The final couplet catches the fall in abrupt stops and sounds, where “we” respond to the weather in a dialogue of degradation. “Cut, we say, chop, burn. / And the weather says, catch.”
If Owen voices the weather, Shannon Quinn’s “Feral” also features original sounds through sibilance and synaesthesia: “Light starved whispers slid / into our beds we called them gods.” Whispered epiphanies appear without punctuation, but with breathing spaces within and between lines. The interplay between wild and domestic worlds in “Feral” hinges at the bedroom door: “They stayed through the night / while a shadow watched / from our bedroom door as we slept.” The second stanza proceeds from nature to religion of “resurrection” and “unredeemed” to arrive at “a flagrant grace turned wild with wonder” – long a’s turning to alliteration. A series of ampersands in the final stanza unite whispers and shadows in a circular pattern: “They circled us, singing that the shades / of loneliness and grief had married the shadows / from our childhood & forgotten us.” The flagrant grace ignites in the final line, “by the small fires in our chests.”
Hollie Adams’s “Five Days a Week” fashions itself on the experience of figure skating, most of its lines running without any punctuation; the only pauses featured in mid-line questions such as “how fast?”, “how healthy?”, and “how old?” In addition to an absence of punctuation, there is also an absence of capital letters, which creates a skating effect across ice and page: “the bajillion metal snap-clips in our hair / create a solar flair.” This opening exaggeration reflects the almost infinite ice marks, as well as a plethora of possibilities in poetic patterns that are simultaneously expansive and constrictive like snap-clips. The onomatopoeia of snap-clips is matched by the rhyme of hair and flare. Anatomical and poetic feet skate across rink and page:
“going one
two three
one two three”
These numbers eventually add up to a bajillion, and resolve to a spaced line: “we are fast how fast? fast as the dreams.” Also patterned on the page is “theatrically” in italics, as part of the performance that ends with the skater saying “I can do algebra” – her approach to bajillion and “Five Days a Week.”
This number reappears in Catherine St. Denis’s “Five Years After Joe Overdosed on Fentanyl.”
Karen Solie’s “Flashlight” begins like Shannon Quinn’s “Feral”: “In bed near the open window / like someone wandered away from a campfire.” The window opens to a simile (one of a series) that draws attention to a distance. The next couplet focusses on the act of seeing and reading: “When the eyes adjust / features of the landscape can be discerned.” The next stanza readjusts the focus toward an internal landscape: “as might the outlines of belief, / no helpful detail within.” The flashlight of insight flickers to include other beings: “When I asked if she’d seen my friend, she said / We don’t all know each other in this place.” Solie’s flashlight searches people and place: “death is not Saskatchewan.” If the province surprises, so too does the following line: “It’s obvious where this is going.” As the eyes adjust to Saskatchewan, it is not so obvious where the stanzas are going.
Casual prose mixes with metaphor and abstraction: “Enough, already, about the soul.” Philosophical speculation around Solie’s soul flashes to “as mathematics needs the null set.” After this mathematical abstraction the flashlight comes into focus once again: “as the flashlight lies beside the bed / though you’ve lived here long enough.” Personal pronouns slide along the flashlight’s path from you to me to he and she. The question at the centre of the poem concerns the soul, which is invented out of necessity. Illumination itself is questionable: “The prospect that he loved, I see it // and don’t see it.” Contradictions abound in the night house of poetry; the flashlight “lies” beside the bed in more than one sense: “It can be true if you recognize the lie in it, she said.” The soul’s journey comes to an end: “Far ahead the stubborn soul of my friend / switches off the flashlight.” We are left in the dark as “It drinks that last of the water / it no longer needs to carry.”
In contrast to Solie’s obscurity, Erin Bedford’s “For my dad who never read my poems but died with a well-thumbed copy of Watership Down” blocks out half of the page with black ink. (These experimental techniques also appear in poems by Michael Trussler and Erin Moure.) Bedford’s words are interspersed throughout that black blot. Starting with “The Journey” she asks “Where are you,” and responds with “Far away” – the distance indicated by the black smudge between words. The original text is the Silverweed’s poem from Richard Adams’s Watership Down and ends with “The shining circle” to join with other circles in this anthology.
In “The Fox” Emily Cann layers her lines with a confluence of the pandemic, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, and a dead fox under her deck. The first sentence sets the scene: “Pulling the rotted boards up from the deck, / they uncover the carcass of a fox, on its side like a dog / in summer.” Like the boards, the animal’s body is rotted, and by extension the broader environment is polluted. The sly monosyllable “up” ranges through the poem, so that the first stanza ends with “The dead fox’s eye sockets / aimed up my skirt.” She remembers when a boy in her class investigated her body – “arms out, palms up, as if / awaiting divine repatriation.” Synecdoche of parts of anatomy dominate the poem. “The theatre of decay / closed up for the season.”
The initial “opposite of treasure – auburn fur” returns near the end: “The opposite of treasure – / something I never thought of before as empty.” After various anatomy lessons Cann turns to the drift of etymology: “Necropsy is Greek / for sight of death.” The final stanza continues in this vein: “Nonviable from the French for no life. Ectopic Greek / for out of place.” After placing death, “Fox” concludes on a note of hope and renewal: “New boards, / a white searchlight on the deck, / the only evidence of change.” Cann’s searchlight joins Solie’s flashlight to illuminate different darknesses.
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis (Nov. 12 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 184 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966327
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966320