Fiction and Poetry Reviews

Angela Hickman

Outskirts

by Sue Goyette

London, ON: Brick Books, 2011

There is a lot to love about outskirts, Sue Goyette’s latest collection of poetry, but let us start with the setting. Although not knowing Halifax does not take away from any of the place poems, knowing the city and its neighbouring towns certainly helps situate the collection in a way that adds just the right edge to some of the poems.

Perhaps the best examples are the numerous fog poems that come in the second half of the collection. It is easy to think of fog as a generic, rolling, poetic convention, but on the south shore of Nova Scotia, for all its density, there is a softness to the colour and weight of the fog, making it all the more sinister. As Goyette says in her first “fog” poem (there are four): “Fog I nomadic. A low prowl of Atlantic rooting / through the city like a bear. In the town of Prospect, / fog once swallowed a school bus. The children, / taught to hold hands in an emergency, emerged older / and craving gills.”

Besides being a lovely and subtly vivid passage, it is also a good example of how Goyette works names of places and specific stories into her poetry without being obvious. Cape Breton’s famous Tim Horton’s Jesus also gets a mention, as do some of Nova Scotia’s other myths and stories, and picking them out adds another layer of pleasure to reading her verse.

Thematically, outskirts takes it’s title and then changes what we think it means. Many of the collection’s early poems are told from the perspective of a parent watching as the bond between herself and her child lengthens, and she shifts from being central to her child’s life to a peripheral influence. This idea of distance is evoked in many ways, including visual and linguistic distance, but where “outskirts” typically refers to a geographic location, Goyette is more temporal than that. Often, the speaker is watching the action from some space apart – behind a window, across a crowded bar, through memory – and is thus unable to take part. That experience, of course, is mirrored by the reader, giving the edges a kind of gradient – there’s a reason the title is plural, after all.

The first and second sections of the book are quite different, and at first I found the shift jarring. Partly into the second half – titled “the last animal” – the book felt too long,  as if the longer, more ranging ones of the end took away from the quality of the compact poems of the beginning.

But, once I got over that, I realized that outskirts works precisely because the tone shifts: it’s a collection that requires you to think about what you’re reading, and the early poems take on a new light in relation to the ones that follow. In the later poems, often the subject matter is broader and somehow both less human and more personal, with Canada becoming its own shifting character and fog creeping in and out.

outskirts takes on the domestic, the ethereal, and the worldly and gives them all the same shifting weight. Although Goyette keeps the reader peering in over the rim, she moves us around, changing our perspective while maintaining a distance that’s still close enough to the action for it to matter. It’s a strange and addictive feeling, and one that ensures I will return to outskirts again and again.

Grace

by Vanessa Smith

Toronto, ON: Quattro Books, 2011

Some books have a weird way of taking you back to another time and place, and reading Grace threw me right back to high school. Partly, that’s because Grace, the titular character, is pretty young; partly because in a lot of ways Vanessa Smith’s novella is the kind of thing high school teachers would love – it’s full of teaching moments.

The story starts out with Grace at a flea market, poking around and mostly avoiding any kind of conversation with the woman whose booth she’s investigating. It’s clear early on that Grace is far more comfortable with a kind of internal dialogue than with any actual interaction, and she bristles with the woman’s attempts at friendly small talk. Eventually she buys a box of old photographs. She collects them, you see, and files them into albums organized by emotion. It’s like feeling by proxy, since she was, it’s suggested, emotionally scarred as a child when her parents divorced.

I suppose this is meant to set up Grace’s strange and stilted interactions with the other characters introduced in the story, but I’m not sure it does. Really, Grace is kind of a petulant brat, and it’s very hard to feel much sympathy for her. It’s strange actually, because the story is told in the first-person, and typically that point of view makes it easier to relate to the main character. With Grace, though, her moods are so mired in angst and frustration that every two pages made me want to shake her and say You’re 22. Get your shit together.

Of course, I couldn’t do that, so instead I watched her engage in a flirtation with Jack, a much older man, and then go on a date with him. I say “watch” here, because Grace seems to be watching herself do things, which makes it very difficult to be in the scene with her. Anyhow, the date goes well (he takes her to an amusement park) and they plan to go out again. Inevitably, though, he invites her over for a drink before date number 2, and instead of going anywhere he shows her his home and then they have sex (even though Grace has previously told us that she doesn’t like sex).

Smith is at her best during the chapters when Grace is at Jack’s house. Her dialogue is natural, and her description of Grace trying to strike an alluring pose, despite being physically uncomfortable, feels just right, as does the later description of Jack’s butterfly collection. The moments are small, but more scenes like these would slowed things down and allowed the story to come together on its own time.

Instead, the pace ticks right along, and before you know it Grace is infatuated, Jack is gone on an indefinite business trip to France, and Grace has herpes.

Now, I don’t want to trivialize an incurable STI, but herpes can be managed and an incredible number of people are living with much worse diseases. Contracting herpes at 22 is understandably life-altering, but I just didn’t quite buy Grace’s post-diagnoses transformation, which begins when her mother picks her up from the clinic and, over a diner dinner, they have a frank discussion.

Once she gets home, Grace lights a fire and burns all her emotional photo albums. Having herpes, it seems, means she can now experience these emotions herself. The story ends with Grace realizing that she doesn’t really know her mother as a person, that she should have asked her mom how to keep going when things got bad. Then Grace starts to cry.

As a story, this is a sort of ideal action-consequence set up for discussion in a high school health class. As a novella, though, the story feels forced and Grace is too one-dimensional to hang a  story on. Although there are some great details that feel like foreshadowing (the gay bar Grace goes to at the beginning of the story, Jack telling her how butterflies are killed, etc), they never go anywhere, which is disappointing. I can see what Smith was trying to do with Grace, but too much of the novella is trying and not enough just is. Perhaps it would have worked better as a short story, since the shorter form would have reigned in Smith’s ideas and streamlined things, but as it is, Grace feels more like a work in progress than a finished book.