What Stirs
by Margaret Christakos
Coach House Books, 2008

BRAIN MIXING BOARD (active)

I have no idea I mean you focused
I mean no idea I have you focused
to my gosh

In Toronto writer Margaret Christakos' sixth poetry collection and seventh book, What Stirs (Coach House Books, 2008), she works again in her recombinative ways, working her own twists and re-imaginings to make newer from what she has already made new. 

The poetry collection What Stirs exists in seven sections, again referencing the colour orange, as she has in just about every collection, again working out what is possible with the lyric through the push she makes at the limits of the lyric boundary, again turning the lines of expectation on its ear and inside out. 

In pieces such as the "BRAIN MIXING BOARD (active)," Christakos works her way into the smallest fragment of moments, turning what has also been the lately realm of some other Canadian poets such as Mark Truscott, writing so small that the moments are almost deceptive in their simplicity. You don’t have to look complex to be doing complex things, and they can exist in the simplest forms.

Something inside me was screaming Write
you fool! Tell the whole damned
world how you
feel! Something inside
says there's somewhere
better than this

Holy one I have something inside me
sometimes nameless I started thinking about
Yes

Sherry, writing characters and nursery rhymes and folk tales that hold echoes of her previous collection, Excessive Love Prostheses (Coach House Books, 2002), writing her theses on the excess and excesses, the phantom limbs and artificial joints where love can sometimes live. Christakos works what could be considered gymnastic leaps of language, including mixed words, puns, and otherwise unexpected turns to create something that almost can't be contained or described in simple words. 

In What Stirs, she continues a line of poetry that works the balance between what words mean when jumbled up against each other, breaking meaning into new and separate states, and written language, writing "ASAP" and "NY," for example, in the poem "HOPE YOU." Isn't this how language works now, typed through blackberry or sending an email?

WIRED

Whoever hears the wind and, is it
a read tire grinding out of slush? Mnn.
They've been asleep for hours. I listen or sniff the air
for you, like I said.
It's embarrassing.
Just how many ways can hind senses be smarter
than Internet spam?

What Stirs asks the question of what is real, and what is real emotionally in an increasingly virtual existence, asking the reader directly about what stirs in the heart, as in the title poem "WHAT STIRS?" (note the question mark added that isn’t in the book title) that begins with:

For example, surreptitious crows could mean something about birds or
an attitude toward humans, in that you hold just about every element in
distrust. Marmalade clouds or mackerel horizon. Certain grasses flop over
like the insolent wings in Swan Lake. Desolate. Solar pleasures.

How does the statement implied in the book title turn itself, here, into a question?

SUPPLEMENT

Hoity-Toity, nine pounds, two ounces
Born to Sherry Mary and Billy Bob
Such joyous they cannot file
Any known where

What Stirs: Ladder for the Tower of Babel 

The poetry in Margaret Christakos’s What Stirs is pre-apocalyptic. This is the poetry that is written just before Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Bradbury’s Farenheight 401, or Huxley’s Brave New World become reality. 

What Stirs starts slowly, with the touch points of timeless life - motherhood, sex, marriage, time spent with friends becoming entangled with the increasing bewilderment of modern existence. The radio and television intrude, the Internet intrudes, the therapist intrudes, cell phones intrude, grammar intrudes and finally language itself intrudes.  

In the poem "The Turret Door," the words hyphen and dash substitute for adjectives, nouns and verbs, altering the reader’s expected connect with the poem: 

Your safer-sex kit stays shut with a hyphen dash.
Try to be eligible, with a hyphen perfume.
Lower anchors and tethers for children.
A server crashed because of a long semaphore wait for the adaptive hash dash,
Some dinky hyphen dash a two-year-old kid could break with a flick of a finger.

The reader switches between imagining the actual punctuation of the dash, and hyphen, and substituting their own words in the age-old ritual of making linguistic sense where there are incomprehensible structures that challenge the traditional syntax. We have entered a fairy tale tower where the rules are arcane and based on rituals beyond our perception. Or are we in the Tower of Babel, where communication is impossible, a babble of words and images that eventually lead to a "server crash" of inability to communicate? 

Did you mean hyphen match? 

In this chaotic universe there are still moments of calm, of hope. In the section "Lovely One" a breathing space for the rest of the poetry is created, as if the reader is perhaps at the top of the tower before losing their footing, before being driven off, and can take time to look around. 

Clouds are lovely in the valley 
I’ve known the moist movement
reach for its thin shelf of provision 
Consolation over chaos knows plenty
about poured chord 
And you’ve certainly heard about pleasure 
Less is surely the future 
Opals for the moment
are sleepful

These "opals," like many of Christakos’ word-images, appear throughout the collection reminding the reader in the case of "opal," of this pause, the bubble of milk at the corner of a sleeping infant’s mouth that signifies the existence of something beyond even the parents’ capacity for imagination. 

The collection continues bewildering and melancholy, there is humour but it is the dark chuckle at the situation we have gotten ourselves into: 

Air Quality

Sulphur’s the devil in your mouth
copper in your pocket
gold in your testicles
silver in the lining of your brain, crisping 
That’s what they’re saying sweetheart
Bonne chance

By the time the poetry begins to deal with a specific individual or "One Very Interesting Example" it is a pregnant woman named Sherry Mary who seems to be moving mechanically through her world, with no real insight into her motivations or actions and the observer, the one writing her story uses language as if they were a crazy person scribbling on bus transfers or shouting into the rush of the oncoming subway train. 

No Folic Folly, Okey Dokey? 

Sherry Mary does know all about the hoity-toity supplements
one should ingest when Jesus Murphy! Pregnant Sherry Mary can
dispense a lot of dilly-dally advice to anyone
who wants to get pregnant Sherry Mary’s been loosey-goosey
there a hee-haw half dozen times and would
go again to the altered brat-packing state of
pregnancy It’s just a scritch-scratch example Sherry Mary finds
interesting …" 
Her therapist, that accoutrement of modern self-definition, weighs in: 
"Real original accomplishment can
awake in extra spaciousness
close to, over pebbles
an idea very reddened.

I do love Sherry Mary and all her hoity-toity supplements. Jesus Murphy! I said pregnant again! My dilly-dally advice won’t be any good, for who wants loosey- 
goosey me to weigh in after kissing so repetitively all up and down Sherry
Mary’s surreptitious breasts and nearer buttocks …

Sherry Mary is lost in this babble; she ceases to be individual, but instead becomes a construct made of words, even losing her own ability to define herself as if everything that comes out of her mouth turns into the raving of a lunatic. Throughout the discourse the reader feels the personas trying to break through the language to tell their stories and the anger or complacency at their inability to do so. 

In the penultimate section of the book "Wind I am lonely" there is once again breathing space, "opals," but this time they are beginning to be encroached upon by that malaise known as the Internet, and finally in the last section "Something Inside Me" the individual is reduced to a MySpace profile, to using a blog to connect and try to tell their story or make an emotional confession, caught in the web of technology that gives the appearance of transparency, exposure, but is in reality the most secret of hiding places, where everything can be manipulated, where lies are commonplace and where the final image is that of a million madmen screaming to themselves in language with no common context, open to any interpretation. 

What Stirs is the first poetry book to capture perfectly this bewilderment brought about by the intersection of life and the impact of the Internet, the feeling that there is a language being spoken that is not communicating what we wish it to, is not making the emotional connections we desire and need as humans. Christakos offers us a ladder out of this tower of Babel by reminding us of human relations of the most intimate and tactile sort: the mother and the child. She proposes it is the future generations who will move easily through the constructs we find so bewildering now and bridge the gap between touch and the language of distance. What Stirs is beautiful and disturbing, poetry naming the world we are creating. 

Troubled
by RM Vaughan
Coach House Books, 2008

Thought to be transference, poet RM Vaughan opens himself to long for his psychiatrist. The doctor reciprocates. What unfolds in the situation, and Vaughan’s poetic account thereof, Troubled, is a heart-wrenching and career-hindering abuse of power. Troubled marries Vaughan’s rightful feelings of vengeance with those of a decade-laters forgiveness and will to move forward.

The 70-page volume moves between an opening section of poems, each titled Session, to lists literal and literary (Harlequin Romance Titles, Three Humiliations, With Outbursts), from textual excerpts from the authors video work, actual paperwork between the author and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario and the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Code of Ethics to reflections on the hearing where the doctor’s license is suspended, the difficulty of having loved this man and the eventual reinstatement of his license.

Vaughan walks into his later-lover’s office broken down, afraid of intimacy, exposed. The doctor (referred to in the text as S or Dr. M) meets him in this guard-up state, knowingly, takes in information from their sessions, researches Vaughan outside of the office, lets this be known, "mark[s] [him] a man" and from there, this real and fabricated closeness, proceeds to manipulate their love affair. Understated in this work is the intricacy with which Vaughan shows his own vulnerabilities, not so much as a victim, but as a lover and, man really. As he pens his daydreams and imaginings pushing way into reality, this is clear. As it is also clear when the doctor, this archetype of man in many ways (successful, fatherly), is learned to be not only ordinary but flawed.

His intellect and realism are uninhibited, starting with spelling out the warning signs and judgments he flags from the get-go (everything from "Easter colours in September," page 1, to the way the doctor engages with this teenage daughter) and throughout. It is not a given, but a brave and well-seen-through choice that Vaughan decided to testify in poetic form. In that, Troubled, is reminiscent of Lynn Crosbie’s 2006, book-length poem, Liar.

Vaughan is self-conscious, reflective and aware, his points of reference local and astute (Dufferin Grove, Air Canada, class divides), his voice obstinate and on, even when forced to play the part of the wronged,

I’m a spectre here, a film, gauze and netting….
Told to stay quiet,
Make no sighs, whistles, wolf calls or raspberries
During my day, my docket debut.

Careful of what is said or unsaid, and intentional of even of the construct of the poetry itself, Troubled is a rare case of an author taking on a lot— substance, form, emotionally— and having it not only pan out, but radiate.

White Porcupine
by Phil Hall
Book Thug, 2008

Reading Phil Hall’s poetry is much like being lost in a forest and finding the occasional open space where the variety of trees and the location can be clearly seen. His elusive style has strong appeal but the sense of dis-orientation is almost continual. The epigraph at the beginning is indicative of Hall’s style: ‘incomprehensitiblity is confession’ by Theodor Adorno. 

Perhaps Hall is confessing to not understanding himself, in which he would not be alone as none of us understand ourselves completely.

He writes of the landscapes frequently as in

The sun pardoned upon the earth seems to coax each hillock along
equally with its flaming arrows – never deviating or discriminating
physics – but more than physics
generosity – if not love
the earth harrowed retaliates with gravel – which is a good crop around here
this is where I got off when I was your age
I know you’re bored but I want you to see the same dilapidated light on snow & a creature’s tracks – the same ghost declarations – Crow’s Dairy – Denure Tours 

(p.20)

The poem begins with a sunset which touches each small hill, a physical phenomenum. This particular land is thin and stony, good only for gravel. And here apparently Hall first had sex. In winter the light is cut, ragged, but reveals animal tracks, reminding the poet of an old dairy and a tour company. So Hall ties his memories together into a kaleidoscopic poem that touches many things, none in depth, unless one happens to share his memories.

His poems of reality are graphic with sudden glimpses of vivid beauty, as

Where #7’s survey tanget
cuts across the old lumber draw-roads
through limestone highlands to the Ottawa
a starling picks at a blood-orange
thrown half-eaten to the gravel from a car ages away now

(p.23)

Here’s a complete picture of someone tossing an orange out of the car-window, the orange rolling one way, the car swift in its forward movement, long gone when the starling finds the orange.

On p.26 Hall says ‘if what I have to say seems unconnected – wider!//

there is further from lies than truth’ which appears to mean that the distance between lies and truth cannot be measured, and who is to know which is which? Is his language

my first language – nonsense – over-hugged my second language – sense
pre-morning fog in the field-hollows muffled the survey-quilt & the
deerstock’
….
until an actual poem came brandishing its turret key – but no language
so I had to find one

(p.15)

For Hall poetry unlocked the use of language, made imagery and communication possible, but not to everyone who reads White Porcupine, though his time-shifts and imagery are intriguing.

-Joanna M. Weston

A Thousand Profane Pieces
by Myna Wallin
Tightrope Books, 2008 

If you didn't know anything of Myna Wallin's prodigious life and purchased her first non-chapbook, for its erotic shocking-pink cover, you’d come to understand Wallin’s migration avows itself from within the temple of her poetry. Her bohemia doesn't belong to the preppy nouveau riche generation. She doesn't do pithy or pretend; she opens her heart and renders a landscape in her own blood.

A razor-sharp play of words marks Wallin not just a scrupulous observer, but mystic of human malady: "After the 6th or 7th bottle, / We expose our neurosis, each by each." 

Her way of jumbling moments together to convey a deeper meaning with exquisitely non-linear tongue and a savvy use of memory transposed into the future to show the inadequacy and lure of love and modern-life enables Wallin to mock and pay homage at the same time, with beautiful daydreams, episodes of insight dotted with rich imagery and wildness that streak ravishing images across the page.

Wallin is as any poet should be, the observer of things too painful and exquisite to paint in prose, her raw voice screams: "take me, with all my / unmet expectations, overblown desires, / & make me scream. Overwhelm my / intellectualized craving to be loved." Her gift is rendering a sensual tour-de-force of our plunder into anxiety: "I want to be one of these women-in-control, / But I was born too early-- / never mastered 'walk the dog' on my yo-yo."

Blissful Times
by Sandra Alland
Book Thug, 2008

Blissful Times is the Groundhog Day of poetry volumes. It is in fact the same poem 63 times, translated into different forms. The initial poem is taken from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and reworked into video, dialogue, and reverse acrostic, among many others. 

One of the poems, ‘Anglo Saxon Guidebook’ is a found piece from the newly, sort of defunct, Oxford Canadian Dictionary. You get the sense through the original, that Blissful Times is about two people who can no longer be as they were, this is made all the more tragic after countless pages of reiteration. 

Allard’s innovation probably comes from her background as a multimedia artist, poet, and publisher. Not one to be tied down to one title, it is no surprise that her work cannot be tied down to just one form.

-Elysia Bryan

The Real Made Up
by Stephen Brockwell
ECW Press, 2007

Stephen Brockwell's The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007) wants to deceive you. Written by the adept hand behind Cometology (ECW Press, 2001) and Fruitfly Geographic (ECW Press, 2004), Brockwell has crafted poetry that will not tolerate your reliance on its honesty.

Coarse and untrusting, the poetry interwoven is not all that it seems. "The Real Made Up is itself made up of real and imaginary interviews with people off the street, of poems by others and poems from others," extolls the back cover copy. You may be dumbfounded to uncover this cruel abandon of coddling promises, especially after you engage characters found in "Karikura Digs" (p. 60), "Joanne's Vibrator" (p. 101) and "Mark Bradley's Truck" (p. 66), characters who have an uncommon depth of candor.

Brockwell has managed to construct fiction so detailed and goodly, you may catch yourself taking shelter in his world, be it sanctuary or trickery. Take, for example, "Bill McGillivray's Trophy Deer" (p. 23) - a cunning interview depicting the loss of a father, and the gaining of a disembodied elk.

The texts are playful and experimental, jarringly erratic in form, yet still masterfully stringent. "Four Electronic Handwriting Recognitions" lead this reviewer to believe that Brockwell had entered original poems into optical character recognition software, and allowed machine-made errors to linger in the final production. My own quizzical delight arose when I realized that I had built up my own illusion; Brockwell played my readerly instincts with a deep understanding of human nature.

The Real Made Up has no respect for comfort zones. A wonderful work of harsh unrealities.

-Holden F. Levack

It's Hard to be Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems
by Jeanette Lynes
Freehand Books, 2008

With her fourth collection of poetry, a compassionate and poetic character study of Dusty Springfield, Jeanette Lynes has piqued my interest in the human person behind the fascinating sixties pop icon. 

It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems (Freehand, 2008) explores, fleshes out, and demystifies Dusty Springfield's icon status, her mythologized pop-icon history, and her out-of-this-world characterization by the press. The poems indeed mention Springfield's hair, clothing, and style (how could they not?); but more interestingly, the poems trace her rocky childhood, loneliness, anticlimactic career, and the promise of a vocal talent that seems to have been, according to this collection, in some way wasted. 

None of the poems include a lyrical "I" in Springfield's point of view; and all idealize her as a tortured artist who did not get the respect or life circumstances that she, by virtue of her vocal chords, deserved. Even the poem "Toronto, Canada: (from an imaginary journal, 1980-81)" is written in the third person, so readers come to this as outsiders, through outsider-voices, as in reading a biography.

This collection asserts that Dusty Springfield, née Mary O'Brien was talented, smoked a lot, had bouts of depression, attempted suicide, had girlfriends and boyfriends (but no one steady), had stalkers from the press, and cared about upholding her image yet also felt, at times, the hollowness of that image. She is completely sympathetic as a character. 

The poems often explicate poetically an emblematic moment in Springfield's life with titles that mark the event such as "Festival of Light, England, 1971," "Laurel Canyon, 1975," and simply "1979." "1979" is one of the most striking and revealing poems for its unsentimental compassion for Springfield's childhood:

They found her father when milk
bottles overflowed the front porch.
When it was too late. If Hollywood
wasn't so distant, she'd have flown
to him, smashed each
bottle in his name, for hadn't he
taught her how sound
worked, glass
striking a surface? Hadn't he
said listen good, girl, you'll only
hear it once, the shatter's tonal
range. Hadn't he tapped rhythms
on the back of her hand, a kind
of musicological Braille, smacked
her fingers if she got the song wrong?
He had. Soon she never got it wrong.

The poem elicits concern for both Dusty and her father and suggests Springfield's unflinching adoration for a man's misguided tough-love. Lynes skillfully combines the hard words "smack," "shatter," "smash," and "strike" with the softer images of wasted milk and a dead body. The wasted milk bottles overflowing on the porch testify her lack of mothering nurturer; and the shattering glass attests to the brokenness of Dusty--her relationship with her father is part of the reason we find her unsatisfied with her life throughout this collection, ending up in a road side diner unable to convince folks that she once sang with Jimi Hendrix.

This compelling collection conveys Dusty Springfield's power and vitality through crisp, dexterous poetic language: it's readable and addictive. Particularly evocative for me is Lynes's use of Dusty's name to evoke the metaphor of death as dust. The lines

She can take with her
only two things:
voice, dust.

and "Look at her now, she's Dust" have precisely the memento mori effect they aim for. The recurrence of suddenly-appearing gardens are miraculous moments which, next to the dusty ephemera of her life, testify that there was just as much beauty as ash.

-Susie DeCoste

Songs for the Dancing Chicken
by Emily Schultz
ECW Press, 2008

As a Herzog enthusiast, the referential title of Emily Schultz's debut collection of poetry – Songs for the Dancing Chicken – piqued my interest. Moreover, the usage of the penultimate, Ouroboros-esque scene from Stroszek (1976) that reflects upon the absurdity of the American Dream as a book cover did more than just grab my attention, it gave me the impression that Schultz would delve into a creative exploration of the subtle nuances of Herzog's oeuvre. 

Unfortunately, however, Schultz's Herzog-inspired poems are not unlike the recapitulation of the facsimile image that appears on the front of Songs for the Dancing Chicken insofar as they are merely rudimentary, synchronic snapshots of salient scenes in Herzog's films with little interrogation or creative investigation. 

For instance, "The Conquistador of the Useless", drawing upon Fitzcarraldo (1982), arrogantly attempts to re-present scenes from a filmic language into the comparably narrow scope of the written word without elaborating or engaging them in a way that justifies the pseudo-adaptation:

Many children wait to watch
Fitz fall asleep
to music —
or is it the music itself
they wait to observe?
and
The black umbrella of the dead
floats on water. A hand-cranked
phonograph preserves.

As well, the provocative banality of Herzog's final scene in Stoszek is bastardized by Schultz's over-simplification and obvious acknowledgement of the implicit ambiguity that Herzog so idiosyncratically constructed by means of her rhetorically playful questions in section 9 of "Double-Double and Hell on Earth":

Are Herzog's animals friends? Does the mallard who beats the drum
keep time with the others? The rabbit rides a fire truck in his cage
and the piano-playing chicken pecks at keys.

Aside from the lackluster Herzog-based poems of Songs for the Dancing Chicken, poems such as "The Man Out of Time", "A Climax of Dirt", and "The Boy from the Theatre, the Excrement of Dogs" are where Schultz really hits her stride: she beautifully parades a fastidious, lyrical darkness that both subsumes and distances the reader, placing him or her into a linguistic space – often instigated by fascinating formalistic experimentations ("A Group of Empty Trees, Regularly Spaced") – that contains truly unique, enthralling cadences. 

"The Boy from the Theatre, the Excrement of Dogs" ends with the quintessential Schultz voice, which operates by luring the reader in and subsequently arresting the momentum of the poem in order to re-inscribe the mundane with an enigmatic ecstasy:

I lay dreaming
that we were a thousand years old.
When I woke you were sunlight
and my heart was the cold colour of snow.
In the apartment below me
a spoon scraped the bottom of an empty bowl.

Overall, Schultz is a more than worthwhile up and coming poet that has the ability to shock and stun in a very discreet manner so long as she does not try too hard to fit within the confines and parameters of a German auteur.