WARM BODIES / FOREIGN PARTS,
By Gillie Griffin, Published by Loxwood Stoneleigh, 125 North Road, Bristol,
England BS6 5AH. pp. 63, price $14.00. (Also, available from the author,
Gillie Griffin: ggriffin@bart.ccac.ca)
Gillie Griffin’s work is a powerful blend of terror and sensuality. She speaks of people and things that are familiar, and so they creep into one’s sleep. While there, they spill their sensuality into one’s own memories, until they, too, become the erotic possibilities Griffin hints at in her own experiences. Water—her children, herself in water—is a theme she is at home with, perhaps because both terror and sensuality are common to any body of water. She often uses the art and process of painting in her poems which are filled with painterly images, both subtle and visceral. After reading the book, one feels visually flooded, as, after a morning spent in a gallery.
Emily Dickinson said: “If …it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that it is poetry.” It would appear that Gillie Griffin is a poet. She takes us to the edge—no safety barriers—and then tries to convince us to jump.
The book has four movements, and the reader should carry the mood from one to the other, with great caution.
**In the first movement, FACING THE FAMILIAR, Griffin faces her father. While their outward roles may be simple enough, the poet makes clear that what underlies the relationship is a violence of emotion, if not action. From Locking the Door we read:
No one bothers me here. But now and then
the door must be locked and then he comes
and clamps my hand around the key
forcing it to turn so hard
that the stamped-out heart at the top
stays in my palm for hours.
Griffin tells us in The Last Time I Saw My Father:
though i raced through the crowds
though i tore it to pieces with my bare hands,
I couldn’t find him.
One gets the feeling that Griffin’s own truth about her father is as imperfect and unfinished as ours.
**WARM BODIES, the next movement, is about Griffin’s children. She has a girl who dives into the pool, wills herself to the bottom, “removed from the thrash and twitch / of muscle, nerve”. Finally she rises:
pierces the surface with her laughter.
Then flings the droplets of her life around my head.
Griffin has a son and no sticky sentiment to cloud her or our appreciation of him:
How you hated being held inside me,
how you kicked and punched your way to freedom /…/
How then I held your eyes
and talked you out of water into air.
**In FOREIGN PARTS, the third movement, we find Griffin’s work to be just as strong when it moves away from her home and family. The closest she comes to showing us her lover is in Storm Damage:
Look…/ how the ropes, though they chafe and
rub / carve out the silkiest grooves
and how even you, / raw as torn timber, / could be soothed by a reckless
sea.
**SPEAKING IN TONGUES, the last movement, is an extended poem where Griffin invites us into the love affair that keeps her heart in Canada:
My paddle dips and pulls
barely stroking her skin
following her curves and inlets
the shallow places where I bump and shudder.
She uses images to remind us of texture, shape, of the dark colors and white that are human, all of us searching for a place, eggshell thinning in the slick of moonlight./…/fistfuls of mud from the floor of the lake.
allison comeau
Have you seen the writing on the wall
Managing
Editor: b stephen
harding, Editor: Robert Craig, Consulting Editor: Seymour
Mayne, Art Consultant: Kane Faucher
Guest Editor: Robin Hannah
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