Poetry
Reviews
Part of TDR’s Behemoth
Gargantuan Canadian Poetry in Review
Found
Souvankam Thammavongsa
Pedlar, 2007
At first glance, Found, Souvankam Thammavongsa’s second volume of poems published by Pedlar Press, looks very much like her first collection,
Small Arguments. Here again is the small, square book with its title embossed in filigree silver. Again the small type, the roomy white space. The first poems of both collections function as explanation, prologue, a “way in.” Again the pace of reading is meditative, slowed by short metrical lines, elegant lyric, clean as bone.
But while Thammavongsa uses Bertrand Russell to frame Small Arguments as an invitation to contemplate the strangeness and wonder beneath the surface of the quotidian, she places a heavier expectation on her readers, and arguably herself, by prefacing
Found with a quotation from Wittgenstein, describing the work of the philosopher as “assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”
Found assembles the author’s responses to the scrapbook that her father kept while living in a Laotian refugee camp in Thailand in 1978, a scrapbook she retrieved after he threw it out.
Found is a complicated act of witness.
And where Small Arguments’ meditations are cast across the white space of its pages, Thammavongsa now takes what she found in her father’s notebooks, and, after three initial poems that breathe more easily, winds her responses tightly in tense columns that stay bound to the centre of the page. Such a strict observance even requires the awkward severing of a word:
Na
is a deter-
miner
if you
lift up
the last
sound
just
as you leave
the first
This lineation performs more obviously the violence that many readers missed in Small
Arguments, and speaks perhaps of an uneasiness on the part of the author, making her work less intrusive to mask her intrusion into the journal.
And while we are invited inside Found, the poet never makes it very far inside the text she explores herself. This is an account of the constant hitting of a wall- the repeated encounter with an impenetrable or blank space, what it means to set out to read what cannot be read:
Each letter
wound
around itself
drawing
a small dark
hole
an inner
ear
tiny
and landlocked
The emotional impact of many of these poems is felt less directly. I’m still haunted by the absent face of the worm in
Small Arguments, and every grasshopper I see is heaven’s reject. Found’s subject matter is the stuff of human tragedy, yet the poems are so restrained that it is in fact this restraint that inspires pathos. The power of the work accretes, and must be taken as a whole.
The final, brutal “warning” is placed at the end of the book, a gesture I want to read as dark humour, because it is too late, after all, for warnings. The journal was opened. This book has been written. It has been read.
-Katherine Parrish
feria: a poempark
by Oana Avasilichioaei
I’ve been reeling from all the physical descriptions of Vancouver lately, after recently going through other titles by Vancouver authors, including Sachiko Murakami’s first poetry collection,
The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, 2008), George Stanley’s Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) and Meredith Quartermain’s
Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008).
What is it about Vancouver these days, or is it something I hadn’t been paying attention to previously, happening all along? The newest example of this is from Montreal poet, translator and events organizer Oana Avasilichioaei, with her second poetry collection
feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), on the heels of her debut collection,
Abandon (Wolsak & Wynn, 2005), soon also to appear in Mexico in Spanish translation.
Prologue
In the poempark the seasons spill
as one.
Each line: a tree planted
grows roots; the roots tunnel beneath the page.
Limbs stem.
Occasionally, a small shudder
is a thought misremembered.
Working from various sources including archival material, Avasilichioaei works her engagement with parks in general, and Vancouver’s Hastings Park specifically, as a series of extended dialogue, working a geography of unmade, taking apart through language and then reconstructed; less a geography of collage than one of breaking down before rebuilding. Writing six fragments as “some streams” after the initial prologue, feria: a poempark is far and away a stronger and more compelling collection than Avasilichioaei’s first, and I am amazed by it. How can I ever see parks the same?
Is risking an act of
spring, the sunrise between sleep
a lily
breaking?
The book is thick.
If filled with words
will it be thicker?
If a question mark didn’t
the possibility of a question
its existence
its wolfishness
In this book there are no keys.
-rob mclennan
The Invisibility Exhibit
by Sachiko Murakami
Talon Books
Governor General Award finalist and Vancouver writer Sachiko Murakami writes about the representations of missing and murdered women in her home city and the city's most infamous neighbourhood, the Downtown East Side. How does one write about missing women and those representations without turning such into twisted parody or exploitation?
Explorations of uncomfortable subjects in Canadian literature doesn’t happen nearly enough, whether Anne Stone's recent novel about a missing girl,
Delible (Insomniac Press, 2007), Toronto writer Barbara Gowdy writing a kidnapped girl in her last novel,
Helpless (2007), or even back to Lynn Crosbie's brilliant and thought-provoking novel
Paul's Case (Insomniac Press, 1998).
Murakami works her own collection of the last few tragic years of some of Vancouver's darker histories through a number of voices that overlap, and even contradict, sometimes shading and even blurring, with some poems titled "PORTRAIT OF HOCKEY PLAYER AS MISSING WOMAN" or "PORTRAIT OF MOTHER AS MISSING WOMAN."
MISSING
Waited in the rain with a sputtered candle,
set the percolator on the stove. Didn’t drink.
Shriveled in the tepid bath. Turned
the stone over, crushed shells.
Avoided parties and small-talk. Avoided sidewalks.
Stopped washing and drying. Drove from ocean
to desert, didn’t snap photos.
Tried jogging. Bought a stopwatch.
Threw stones at tree stumps.
Talked to the doctor,
lived in small-talk, opened gifts,
looked everywhere. Wasted time.
Sent a message in a bottle. Threw out
the dead fern, remodeled. Ate a peach.
Skipped stones alone. Picked up the paper.
Couldn’t call. Thought of you living
in this midst that passes
so routinely for living.
What impresses about this collection is that Murakami does manage to accomplish the difficult act of writing out such events without cheapening or offending her subjects, those of the missing women themselves, even as she deliberately writes past and beyond them, sometimes using the portraits themselves as jumping off points into something more.
PORTRAIT OF IT AS MISSING WOMAN
And now what you've been looking for,
it leaning against the back door of the Victory café.
Stroking its cheek with a dirtier hand.
Head to-toe red and redder where scabs haven’t healed,
or would be if the photo weren’t so black & white.
Its body emptied of the expected contents,
purse spilling on the road before it.
It did this for money to feed itself.
Look at it. Like it's about to cry
or crack. Don’t concern yourself.
It can't look up to find your gaze.
There has been in Vancouver for some time the link between writing and social/political action, from the writing of some of the members of the loose collective around the Kootenay School of Writing, and other projects, including Vancouver writer and editor Aaron Vidaver's guest-edited issue of
West Coast Line on Vancouver's infamous "Woodsquat" (issue 41, fall/winter 2003/2004) that took over a building for three months, beginning in September, 2002.
In an issue that included poetry, drawings, essays, memoir and photography, contributor Noah Quastel, in his piece, described the action itself: "In September of 2002 a number of persons began occupying the site of the former Woodwards department store in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, both as a way of finding temporary housing, and also to protest the severe problem of homelessness in Vancouver, coupled with an inadequate government response."
A couple of years later, Vancouver writer and editor Anne Stone put together her own issue of
West Coast Line, on the subject of Vancouver's East Side missing and murdered women over the past dozen years, an issue that included Sachiko Murakami as a contributor. All of this history, recent or otherwise, places Murakami within an interesting history, but where does she take her own project, and what does she bring to the material?
POWELL STREET
Now we are the audience to our own claims
of heritage in a park we only come to
on BC Day weekend to stand in line
for takoyaki make the bored children
watch the tea ceremony tap out code
with chopsticks on Styrofoam
beyond the chain link fence
a man sinks to the pavement
while middle-aged women bang drums
in the Buddhist church Shiatsu massage
is by donation on the lawn the picnickers are safe
from discarded needles everyone has bought
a raffle ticket for two tickets to Japan
Japantown doesn’t exist except on this day
despite the outdated maps
everything we do everywhere go
is Canadian our volunteers ready
to attend to the first victims
of sunstroke
Murakami's The Invisibility Exhibit is an interesting collection that doesn’t seem to really go deep enough in some places, but works as an extremely compelling first collection, and on a subject matter that few would be brave enough to confront. Considering that she is at work on a new collection, Vancouver/Special, "in which she wonders about real estate, habitus, and 'ugly' homes in her 'beautiful' city," it makes her Vancouver explorations in
The Invisibility Exhibit read as the beginnings of what can only open into something further, larger and fuller.
Murakami's collection and potential continued work even provides an interesting counterpoint to Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain's recent explorations through the same geographies, writing Vancouver as an archival city in her
Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005) and Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008), not to mention poet George Stanley's recent collection
Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008).
Just what is it about Vancouver these days? Is this part of a larger trend building in the City of Vancouver, or are we in the rest of the country just beginning to notice what has always been there, back to the days of George Bowering writing
George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower, 1970) and Kerrisdale Elegies
(Coach House Press, 1986), Daphne Marlatt writing her Vancouver Poems (1972) or Michael Turner writing
Kingsway (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995)?
EXHIBIT E (HEART)
It is best kept out of rational debates.
We’ve determined its place, since no one writes much verse
around tonsils or other uncertain tissue. We coo over
the sweeter meat that melts
into Hephaestic fire. Bless the pump that feeds the river.
It’s not quite satisfactory but stuck. Can’t fly on a whim to Hawaii.
In its suit, the king grimaces, justly
suicidal. The real world is not its place.
We say it lies at all centres, ubiquitous. The heart of it.
It’s still only a shell. For all its efforts it can’t contain the life
that flows through it, though it’s fist-shaped. Keeps
trying. Beats out each Mississippi, is perfectly It.
-rob mclennan
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