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Born and raised in rural Nova Scotia, but now resident in Toronto, Skibsrud projects a tone of ironic whimsy that almost shades into surrealism. Her book’s opening lyric is a good example.
“I’d be a Hopper Painting” presents a speaker who, in cataloguing several of the American artist’s canvasses, projects herself into the frozen narratives they present: “Cape Cod Morning, 1950…: “I wouldn’t be the woman / leaning from the well-lit room. Instead, I’d be the pane of glass / and look (but not like her, out to the yard and waiting— / for what, for whom), // inside and out at once, without desire. // I wouldn’t even be a shadow if it touches her. / I wouldn’t risk it. / I would stay away from women.”
The poem concludes on a wry feminist note: “I’d be a Hopper painting if I could. / Even his women he paints solid. / But I wouldn’t be a woman. / I’d be Freight Cars, Gloucester, 1928. / I’d be the light on the slanted grass.”
Skibsrud is not dogmatic about brevity: she allows herself whatever number of words desired to relate a narrative, so some lyrics range across pages. But she modulates them to stress prize moments—separate, musical—within.
See, for instance, this memory of a friend’s pregnancy, a poem addressed to the now-born child: “You, uncurling, at first cautious, / up— / toward your mother’s hand, // which rests now, above you, like a / hand against a pane of glass. // Isn’t it funny. That you, / still officially unnamed, are now // just you, / nothing more, or less. // Unfurling— / up— / and up— / toward // your mother’s hand….”
The transcription here does not do justice to the actual ballet of the words upon the page: the very posture of each line is calibrated.
Though Skibsrud precisely sculpts her lyrics, there is often a wistful sentiment at the conclusion. An elegy for her father, one that describes a boat he left half-built at his death, concludes with surprising force, “that boat / made me proud as a child, but in a / sick and half-hearted way. // … oh how my father / failed that boat.”
Also notable is how Skibsrud sticks to fairly conventional diction: few big words, few “foreign” words, and few “showstopper” words. The ideal is conversational simplicity, like that of a proverb: “I could go no further (in crossing rapids) and // turning, followed my own / footprints back, as if the // company I kept was my / arrival.”
In one lyric, Skibsrud quotes the late Kingston, Ontario, poet Bronwen Wallace—a sort of domestic feminist, and one can feel that presence here, along with, perhaps, the incisive lineation of Dame Atwood. But Skibsrud is subtler than Wallace and less arch than Atwood. There may be an American influence here too—that of Wallace Stevens (a touch) or Williams Carlos Williams (a tad) or Elizabeth Bishop, though with less Bishop “flash.”
The bottom line is, though, this collection marks an excellent beginning.
Houle is an exciting poet, but also difficult; or, to say it another way, her difficulty—her intransigent demand that we pay total concentration to every word—is exciting. That’s because her sentences are paradoxical: they start out saying one thing, but end saying something else entirely, or they double back upon themselves, thanks to a pun.
“First, During,” the first poem, gives us, “The sound of light left just as we had found it” and “We went in a circle while going in a line.”
Houle creates another level of difficulty by surging into (or surfing upon) philosophy: “Reason used to have no reason // to run on ahead, / to look back // at ‘itself’ // as if emerging from a leafy background.”
The poet’s mixing of abstract and concrete nouns also engenders occasional puzzlement (as well as pleasure): “Someone, or the thought of someone, plops itself down— / in my corolla region; in the rising sun’s brief, seasonal / struggle I can hear / the sip sound, / the long deliberate pulls / off the thick atmosphere / of an idea— // the taking it into the mouth from the head.”
There’s much to bend one mind’s around: it is heady stuff, and, while invigorating, it also recycles traditional, English-Canadian intellectualism—the dominant tendency in our poetry.
In this four-part collection, with each section bearing titles punning on notions of duration and endurance, the portions—lyric moments—I find most enjoyable are those where Houle seems most personable, or most fleshy, natural, palpable….
See the nature details of “Jack pines penetrated / by sturdy bugs”; “Skirt caves of spruce”; “I watch the forest edge, / the stupid slope / of deliberate grass…. // I see a deer. // Between the meshwork and the trees, / grey and solid and still.”
Also laudable are Houle’s unexpected images. The sound of a train’s horn “pummels the ribs’ / rickety timber bridge— // pours off toward tomorrow / like thundered buffalo gulched / in bone-bed muteness.” The sound of the horn dissipates into silence like the thunder of buffalo stampeded over a cliff unto death and silence.
Eager to use terms taken from biology, geology, forestry, and philosophy, Houle’s descriptions are sometimes difficult-to-digest congeries (or word-heaps). Hence, a moving train is, for her, “steam-fed, gathering gait, / non-discriminating bosomy front-end / pre-vibrational undodgeable siding // of compression.” One is either convinced, or not, but one objection could be the unnecessary parading of surfeit knowledge….
Houle’s poetry blends the philosophical eco-poetry of Jan Zwicky, the encyclopeding reference-mixing of Roo Borson, and the LANGUAGE play of Erin Moure. There are nods to T.S. Eliot too. However, the poet Houle seems closest to, for me, is Lisa Robertson.
That last title may seem incongruous: Aren’t poet-shepherds a throwback to, well, the Psalms of David or, more recently, the first Elizabethans?
Actually, that pastoral interest serves Lerch well, for her poetry often unites the green universe of the garden with the red-and-black world of politics and war.
Trained as a teacher and journalist, Lerch is observant of diurnal reality and of the ‘news’ that impinges on it.
So, she speaks of how “A poem may… // couple sunflower seeds encoded / to be wide yellow eyes / with bunker busters / descended from a brandished club.” The fact of flowers—about the house—does not negate ‘the flowers of evil’ that can spring up like razor wire anywhere.
But Lerch trusts that a poem “must / enter the muddle and emerge transformed, / using whatever means // to witness for beauty and resist despair.”
Art always flirts with reality, and, at times, its insights come keenly close to wisdom. An anti-war poem reveals, “Ground was broken for a facility that became the Pentagon on September 11, 1941.”
“Under the Cliffs at Economy, Nova Scotia,” Lerch thinks of “New Orleans Obliquely,” and her imagery references Hurricane Katrina’s destructiveness—without ever mentioning it: “But the (trees) that jut and thrust / at odd angles from the cliffs, / or hang downward, / having clutched some tenuous root hold, / … bearing always the brunt, / these / break my heart.”
Politics is, in the end, heart-felt, and, if heartbreaking (as above), the pain is not always due to quarrels with others but, as Yeats would say, with oneself.
In “Child of Mine,” Lerch takes this truth to heart, providing a psychological autobiography that locates the temptation to favour liquor over love, or solitude over self-sharing, in unresolved childhood pain.
The poem is brave; better still, it is well-wrought: “Lovers erased, forced out / in a squeeze play, / over and over, // You and I, / Castor and Pollux, / exhausted combatants / and paradoxical allies / in love’s annihilation.”
Lerch lives in Sackville, NB, and heads the Writers Federation of New Brunswick. Her poetry holds nothing back; it is all about revelation: that which hurts—and that which heals.
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