Beauties on Mad River
by Jan Conn
Véhicule Press, 2000
Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston
Conn has arranged the poems in this collection to portray the evolution
of certain recurring themes in her work. They are not in chronological
order as is more usual but in five sections, each one deepening and
widening the reader’s perception of the theme. ‘Namesake’, whose
underlying subject is the suicide of Conn’s mother, uses desert images,
with light resonating throughout the section in various forms, such as
moonlight, a white silk blouse, light waves and the yellow of daffodils.
Poems from earlier collections form the backbone of this book though
almost half are new and these exemplify the forward movement of Conn’s
thought. She is never static, never content to remain in one place
emotionally or physically. Her travels all over the world and habitation
in Caracas, Gainesville, Montreal and Vancouver, enrich her poetry with
snapshot-images: ‘My lover has run away with a beauty from Mojú./ Such
enchanting breasts, such crow-coloured hair!/ I climb Mt. Mansfield, I
bring the season’s hurricanes/ all the way up the northeast coast. …’
She uses whatever she has seen, experienced or studied to explore and
delineate. Her work as a biologist adds precise detail to her work
‘the tarantula, the/ sidewinder, the long-legged kangaroo rat.’
The section titled ‘Lament’ lays out the journey from new and
exhilarating love to separation, loss and grief. She explores her view
of masculinity through poetry that moves back and forth, from the first
perception of her father as male in ‘Electra’, ‘midnight, at the icebox,
rumpled/ and smelling faintly of rum, faintly/ of something else’; to
thinking of her lover as a teenage boy ‘naked as a shoestring’ in
‘Exposure’; to ‘Belém without you/ is like being vertical’.
The male body, boys’ bodies predominate in this section, seen through
the lens of broken and breaking relationships. Underlying these,
surrounding and imbuing them with a miasma of pain, is hard imagery: an
iron gate, an icebox, car-lights, chromium, icebergs, asphalt, dump
trucks, chain link fences. There is nothing easy or friendly about this
section of Conn’s poetry. The colours are muted, slate gray,
candlelight, snowstorm, fog, glaucous air, pre-dawn light, turgid water,
and desert.
Thin threads of colour are woven in: apricots, tiger lilies, and red
blood cells. But the overall mood is one of distance and removal,
culminating in the last poem of the section titled, appropriately,
‘Loss’. In this, a poem in which Conn again uses the spirit of the
ghazal though not the actual form, quiet words are made suddenly bleak
and hard by the use of terms such as ‘gritty’ and images like ‘careening
jeeps’, ‘turbulent hills of waves’ ending with ‘a thin red line’ which
evokes Sir William Howard Russell’s “The Russians dashed on toward that
thin red line streak tipped with a line of steel,” picked up by
Kipling’s “But it’s ‘thin red line of ‘eroes’ when the drums begin to
roll.” The lover’s journey ends with war - and Conn wearing a black
linen dress.
Conn’s poetry tends to take a hard objective viewpoint; perhaps her
work as a biologist makes her see life clinically and portray it without
easy emotional engagement. Her scholarship, however, is remarkable and
gives a richness to her work that makes her poetry map ‘not so much the
world as the soul’ as George Elliot Clarke has said.
Joanna M. Weston is the author of The Willow-Tree Girl - for ages 8-12. |
