Concrete and Wild Carrot
by Margaret Avison
Brick Books, 2002
Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston
As Gerard Manley Hopkins stretched the sonnet to breaking point so
Margaret Avison stretches free verse, making line-breaks at points that
double the reader's attention. She teases word-order out of grammar into
perception and creates arrhythmic patterns that halt and haunt the
reader:
xxxxxxxxx... We
find our own level
as prairie, auburn or
snow-streaming, sounds forever
the almost limitless.
(Rising Dust)
While patterns, 'colour or texture and/ singles out a rhythm/ almost its
own, again,/ anticipating design', undergird this particular volume of
poetry, trees are the linking image of the pattern. 'These listening
leaves' (Responses) 'are quieted here, warmed and fed/ by the good old
trees and/ the shining little ones' (Ramsden). They mark the passing
year as 'Trees that were only sticks/ in the overcast' become 'soft and
full of catkins' and Avison can be seen momentarily as one of 'the newly
shampooed children being/ readied for the party' (Pacing the Turn of the
Year). For Avison, no matter her age, sees the world lightly and with
delight, noting the underlying wildness that like the Wild carrot, or
Queen Anne's Lace, is universally known and grows in unexpected and
often dark places--she treats that darkness playfully.
Yet, she probes the uncertainties of language for the immutabilities
that lie just outside vision. The Bible is as familiar to her as the
concrete byways of Toronto and she probes passages for deeper meaning as
in 'Four Words' where she explores "what good shall I do you unless what
I say contains something by way of revelation, or elightenment, or
prophecy, or instruction?" 1.Cor.14:6 REB. And indeed Avison reveals,
enlightens, probes the future and instructs.
She reveals the city of Toronto in poems such as 'Lament for Byways':
The harrowed city
swirls with grit;
it's thundery
with chutes emitting
shards
or in 'Pacing the Turn of the Year' when, in the midst of a soliloquy on
trees she notices
for everybody, on bikes
or park benches or
wandering along
the way
the city buses, dazed,
wended their way anywhere
on the odd quiet morning
Her poetry enlightens by imparting her spiritual understanding of the
Bible - as in 'On a Maundy Thursday Walk' in which she reflects on the
fifth day of creation and connects it with the Maundy Thursday of Holy
Week.
Avison instructs in 'The Whole Story' where she writes of Jesus in the
tomb:
behind that stone I must be sure
of deadness, to allay
self-doubt, i.e. so nearly to ignore
the love and sacrifice for our
release
And probes the future: 'There is a node. There, one day,/ all ways
will/ swiftly converge. .. ' (Prospecting)
She looks at death and beyond to a place unimaginable where she will
confront God:
xxxxxxxhe had to
steer his fair steady days and nights
deliberately
to some as yet (I'm guessing)
point of light beyond that
abysmal (other people's) living
end
and in other poems, 'There's no finality out here' (Dead Ends), 'I
anchor there as to a lifeline,' (Uncircular). Always there are
intimations that Avison sees death not as darkness but as light, and an
ongoing light. Perhaps her predilection for death lies in her age,
experience and the knowledge that she has not too far to go before
exploring this last great adventure.
While Gerard Manley Hopkins brought a profound emotional quality to his
writing, there is objectivity about Avison's poetry that grants the
reader distance and perspective on the wider complexities of life,
death, the cycles of time, and the limitations of language, without
losing track of the details that delineate each day.
JOANNA M. WESTON M.A., married, 3 sons, two cats. A chocaholic writer.
Has had poetry published in anthologies and journals, and a
middle-reader THE WILLOW-TREE GIRL online and in print,
2003. |
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