Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Part Two
Poetry Review by Michael Greenstein
(Editor’s Note: Part One of Michael’s review can be found here.)
Susan Gillis’s “Come In, Come In” is both an invitation and an entrance, each couplet entreating the reader to participate in the experience of autumn. “The breeze is cool, the air warm, or is it the reverse? / Leaves fly up funnelled by wind.” Autumnal reversals of fall and fly up entrance the speaker whose enthusiasm is shot through her perceiving eye: “The tree that shimmered a week ago is bare, / Look! How golden, I said.” Although the sky is heavy, the nights are still too warm for the duvet, and “a little giddy” to rhyme with heavy. After the exclamation of “Look!” a question appears – “How do I do it?” – which may refer to the act of composing this experience.
The answer seems to follow in the next stanza: “Something gathers and wants utterance, wants / out of the throat. Not comfort.” Throat signals voice, which commingles with vision of look to the past: “Behold: thirty years ago a summer afternoon / on a rooftop deck above Fan Tan Alley.” Fan Tan Alley is the narrowest street in Victoria’s Chinatown, which pinpoints the gathering “Something” to “Someone is desperate for a cigarette. / Another is saying are you sure, the kindest thing.”
Breeze and wind pick up these smoke signals to a lurching transition: “Watching certain shows is like eating a bucket of KFC / and needing to wash afterwards.” The speaker looks back to halcyon days of the twentieth century, “but only the good parts / swarms of birds in evening light, swellings that aren’t blights.” Internal rhymes align with those golden days of “clean tides spilling into granite, forming pools, / Schoenbergian nights,” when once again the breeze is cool. Real walls “bring the idea of doors // back to us from metaphor where they wait like birthday presents.” Metaphor invites entry and entrance, the simile of birthdays. The final question: “Can you hear the far wind stirring // the swimming pools, rattling the blue tarps of surface tension?” The answer: “Come in, come in, they say. Come on in.” And the reader enters Gillis’s couplets of memory, impressions, and associations.
Gillis’s “Something gathers and wants utterance” makes its way into George Amabile’s “Coming of Age on My 84th Birthday,” which is structured around “Something I should have learned” and “Something I already know.” Amabile’s quatrains explore personal and poetic belatedness, “announcing / another surprise in the laddered shades of aging.” Alternating long and short vowels, tetrameters and pentameters ladder the aging process. The calendar of cedar groves gives way to music that “tends to extend the distance / between now, and now again.”
At the centre of the poem a line from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass appears: “grass … a beautiful uncut hair // of graves.” The leavings of graves force the speaker “to wake up the Buddhist emptiness.” After these inter-leavings the poet concludes with an ordinary sound that becomes extraordinary: “and maybe much too late I’m / in love with everything that remains / unsaid, unsayable but suddenly heard / in the sound of rain on a slate roof.” Aside from Whitmanesque inclusiveness, this final image seems to come out of William Carlos Williams, but within the poem, it is a sound progression from the earlier ladder. Amabile’s belated rite of passage yields an epiphany after “deft conjectures.” His down-to-earth god climbs time’s ladder to the moment before the last light.
Owen Torrey’s “CV” begins in medias res: “Now I’m remembering another / thing” – a memory he shares with so many of the other poets in this collection. The poet is fishing on a frozen lake where a pair of trout appear through a hole in the ice. At the centre of the poem, “Get in / Line” refers both to fishing and writing since CV may be curriculum vita or contemporary verse. The speaker ruminates on presence and absence, the shaping of lines and life.
Lorna Crozier’s sonnet, “December’s End,” reflects on the death of her husband, Patrick Lane. Like Torrey, Crozier relies on monosyllables to go directly and indirectly to the heart of experience. Mood and atmosphere are framed by the cold moon at the beginning and end of the poem, which itself focusses on beginnings and endings: “The first night of the Cold Moon.” By the end of the poem those capital letters are lowered to “cold-moon shine,” as the poet goes through the process of grieving for her loss. The period at the end of the first line recurs in the second, while the remainder of the sonnet is entirely enjambed. Moonrise rests on the poet, a caesura splitting moon and poet yet joining through internal assonance: “Rising in the east, it lays its eyes on me.” Another split in the third line: “I am barely here, part of me.” Barely gets picked up towards the end of the poem where the poet is stripped of herself.
The second half of the sonnet places her in her garden where “the chilled air feathers me / with frost, head to toe, it rimes / my tongue” – a tongue that also rhymes in verse to come to terms with grief. She is “wintered / with woe,” and concludes: “I am flensed, my bones / moving to the surface / their startled, cold-moon shine.”
The epigraph to Michael Trussler’s “Decoy” echoes Crozier’s grave sentiment – “Poetry is an artifact of the world that has ended.” The poem probes apocalypse not only in its erased title, but also in shape-shifting lines that include arrows pointing in two directions between words: “renovating ←→ conjuring ←→ summoning ←→ evacuating.” These double-edged signifiers between participles highlight the poem’s themes and point to the caged nature of coy and decoy. The opening sentence, “Hard to disagree,” establishes a matter-of-fact stance, but also introduces a hardness that runs through other parts of the poem. “An extinct word-voice” is a self-consuming phrase that develops the title’s caged cancellation before advancing to the next longer sentence: “An improvised glass / sutra sodden as Mylar’s hybridity but inert.” This voracious statement works through metaphoric comparisons hybridizing east and west, improvising the artful.
“Decoy" enacts its own shape-shifting of thought and style: “As shape-shifting // as unintended original sin.” After these comparisons, a logical negation – “Therefore nothing, really.” Word and logic stretch further: “Therefore / now becoming : a hobby-store-rocket word that stalls mid-air // incandescent // in the simple science of lighting the birthday candle world.” Word and world coalesce in this candle. “This excavating the birthday candle // world” leads to those connected participles conjuring, where resonance in the rub of words resists meaning even as it unveils it – “nothing, really.” The poem ends with a line drop, “a // lure” in Trussler’s “grindhouse.”
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis (Nov. 12 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 184 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966327
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966320