Poetry Review

Vox Humana

by E. Alex Pierce
London, ON: Brick Books, 2011
95 pp. $19.00

The strength of poetry is its ability to slice through the mundane and the obvious, to first lacerate and then open, and then lastly illuminate the surface layer of observation so that the reader feels a glimpse of the enlightenment that exists beneath the routine order of our existence. And if this illumination is abandoned by the poet, they must at least offer the prospect of a world unseen and let the reader play the explorer from that point forward.

Vox Humana, the debut collection from Nova Scotia writer E. Alex Pierce, appears to understand that the purpose of poetry is to dig into the usual to unearth the rare and special. There are moments in this collection that do lift, however briefly, from the self-aware poetics that taint much Canadian poetry. But too often Pierce provides only the scaffolding of what poetry can construct instead of the actual architecture. So many of the poems perform their own poetry that the reader may find themselves asking, “So what?” and “Where else?” Like a film with beautiful cinematography but clichéd dialogue, Vox Humana is certainly poetry, but the kind we have grown accustomed to for decades.

The title of the collection is the starting point for the reader’s expectations. The human voice is a difficult subject matter to which to bring a poetic freshness. We are prepared for meditations on language, words, sound and speaking. Pierce gives us exactly what we would expect, delivered in lines that verge on the predictable:

“The thing which has no voice / refuses to speak.” (“Vox Humana”)

“…I could still hear you, / in that other language, speaking to them, to the lambs.” (“Shelter”)

“…Your letter / lies in my lap. What can be said?” and “I will give away all that is left, / remnant and scrap – say nothing. / Nothing will speak.” (“No Address”)

Poems about language and speaking that rest on the conceptual surface of language and speaking risk being discarded as unoriginal or at least tired. That the narrative edifice of the first half of the collection is childhood memories of sisters running wild through “mossy woods,” mothers singing hymns on Palm Sunday and musty Aunts laying old in musty bedrooms ages this collection both thematically and stylistically. It is poetry how poetry imagines itself it should be, and has previously been.

Many of these deficiencies could have been mitigated by a more discerning eye than the editor provided. Instead, as in “Archduke Trio” we are given stanzas of easy images illustrated by easy verbs:

“Music / will not render into words. Beethoven speaks to her – not to her directly, speaks / through the strings – heart, what else but throbbing. Pulse beats in a temple, little blue vein. Great carotid artery, washes of blood, sobbing held back. He stops.”

That a heart throbs or a pulse beats is no original insight. The more brutal use of a red pen could have excised these clichés and led the poem into something more profound and less exhausted. These commonplaces, which become trivialities in their overuse, are exacerbated by the trope of the feminine pastoral where pear halves are held to lips, plum blossoms to cheeks and children reach for petals. When mixed with dusty lines from church hymnals and Shakespearean sonnets, the effect is rather like that of having to visit a great-aunt and listen to her play through her repertoire of oldies on a clavichord.

The ekphrasis poems in the latter half attempt a more universal scope that do well to bring the collection out of the personal. “Penthesilea’s Horse” and “Cio-Cio San Arrives at Your Door” both open into fresh insight: “Change. Change everything. Give up / your quiet places, polished surfaces, / protected hours.” These poems provide some necessary relief from the stale and flat, as do poems like “The Snakes Transform in the Woodpile” where the juxtaposition between a moulting snake and a dying aunt is actually quiet profound. This poem serves to demonstrate that the subject – however intimately the reader does or does not connect to it – matters less than the way it is handled by the poet. The graceful closing lines: “Like sticks, the snakes must have lain there afterwards. / Like lovers, startled, still too new to move – / and then their eyes would open.” Here, the reader is allowed to create the connection; it is not handed to or forced upon us.

For a debut, Pierce has given us a deeply personal collection that demonstrates both the potential and pit-falls of poetry. Her work will certainly find an adoring audience with those looking for poems as they have come to expect them. For those who seek more innovative texture, they would do well to try elsewhere, perhaps in Pierce’s follow-up collection.