Poetry and drama Reviews

George Elliot Clarke

Zong!
By M. NourbeSe Phillip
USA: Wesleyan UP, 2008
228 pp. $24.95

Nantes, France, situated in the Loire Valley, is famed for its Muscadet grapes, wine, and liqueur-filled chocolates. Strange, it is, then, that the city’s gateau Nantais, a kind of pound cake, comes drenched, not in Muscadet, but in imported rum. In fact, though, Nantes history is steeped in rum, for this city was the second in Europe, after Lisbon, Portugal, to get rich shipping Africans into slavery in the Americas in exchange for cod and sugar cane and its by-products.

My review of M. NourbeSe Philip’s brilliant and impossible poem of poems, Zong! (Mercury Press, $22.95), begins with this acknowledgement of the persistence of the influence of transatlantic slavery on Europe and the Americas, more than two centuries after the British suppressed the business, because it is the Tobagan-Canadian author’s purpose to record “the Song of the untold story of (African slavery); (what) cannot be told yet must be told, but only through its un-telling. “Record” is not the right verb; “transcribe” is better, for the text of Zong! has apparently been “told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng” – an African spirit – whose surname appears as co-author on this hardcover book’s dust jacket (though not on its actual spine).

Indeed, Philip feels that the text has been found, that its words and tales and voices have been dictated to her over seven years from a mass of documents related to a true and infamous slaughter: the deliberate drowning in 1781 of 130-150 African slaves, jettisoned from the slaver Zong, when its British captain determined that an insurance settlement for the perished cargo might yet earn his employers a profit on, what was otherwise, a loss-cursed expedition. So scandalous was this deed and the resultant court case (to determine whether or not murder had been committed and, thus, whether or not the Zong owners could be compensated), that even the great British artist, J.M.W. Turner found inspiration in it for his 1840 canvas, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying, Typhoon Coming On.

Philip names her text a “fugue” and coins two words to describe it: it is “hauntological” and its purpose is to “exaqua” – to recover the African dead from the Middle Passage waters in which they were lost. Hence, the poetry here, especially after the first sixty pages of this six-part, 200-page poem (which feels like an epic – if one to which an asterisk or two must be affixed), has emerged from a kind of séance, in which Philip, guided by Boateng, inks a text in which every word has been assembled and disassembled from the legal texts of the Zong case.

Although one can read the poem – with enough concentration and patience – from left to right and down, the pages look like gibberish, for words are split up, interrupted, spliced with sounds and phonemes from other languages, so that Philip attains the verbal equivalent of both Turner’s canvases, where light and water erase forms, and bebop, where sound and rhythm displace melody. Yet, her method also recovers the linguistic violence of slavery, so that “Words break into sound, return to their initial … phonic sound – grunts, plosives, labials…” and Philip transcribes “this language of grunt and groan, of moan and stutter – this language of pure sound fragmented and broken by history. This language of limp and wound.”

Moreover, narrative here vanishes into a whirlpool of voices. No two readers will ever agree on what they read here, for it is almost impossible to tell just who is saying what when. Yet, the careful reader will "hear" persistently the voice of a guilt-ridden mariner and husband, who has signed up for the voyage to make money and bring home a slavegirl for his wife "Ruth," but who engages – with other crewmen – in rape, torture, and murder of Africans. He (or another) also ponders blacks, Christianity, and early capitalism, and recalls bits of Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante, often ironically No quotation can do this daunting book justice. Here is a random fragment: “the s / he negro ent / ices me wit / h her scent traps / my lust my ho / pe for you / can a b / at how about a ra / t the scen / t of you ru / th wafts across / s oceans….” Zong! is an excellence that deserves and demands close reading – severally.

Alhambra Poetry Calendar
By Shafiq Naz (editor)
Belgium: Alhambra Publishing, 2008
436 pp. $29.95

Though December or January is the best time to discuss the Alhambra Poetry Calendar (anthology), an annual publication from a Belgium-based publisher (www.alhambrapublishing.com) that also appears in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, any day should provide a proper opportunity as well.

The English poetry 2009 calendar, selected by Shafiq Naz, combines, as usual, “365 Classic and Cotemporary Poets”, chosen from work by 350 poets. As one might suspect, the selection is eclectic as well as resolutely international. New Year’s Day 2009 opened with another contemporary American poet, Jane Hirshfield, whose contribution is a prose poem: “This was once a love poem, before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short, before it found itself sitting, perplexed and a little embarrassed, on the fender of a parked car.” It ends with the poet – the poem, rather – touching “miniature cacti … one, then another – with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.”

December 31, 2009, enlists Canadian poet Robert W. Service – famed for his Yukon ballads (especially in the US) – and the fittingly-titled “The Passing of the Year”: “Old Year! Upon the Stage of Time / You stand to bow your last adieu; / A moment, and the prompter’s chime / Will ring the curtain down on you. / Your mien is sad, your step is slow; / You falter as a Sage in pain; / Yet, turn, Old Year, before you go, / And face your audience again.” Canada Day offers another U.S. poet, Kate Northrop, whose entry, "Delphinium," showcases her usual, disciplined free verse: "You later will hear inside / At night in your own voice // I am awake Do not touch me / I will be awake all night."

(For the record, July 4 summons Walt Whitman, Bard of the Republic, with his assertion, “I Hear America Singing”).

As most of the samplings attest, Yanks are well represented in this poetry calendar. But there are a number of Canadians. Perhaps I shouldn’t include in that list PEI native Mark Strand, for he is generally considered an American poet. His date is January 22.
Lorna Crozier shows up on February 6, with “My Last Erotic Poem”: “Who wants to hear about two old lovers / slapping together like water hitting mud…. // We have to wear our glasses to see down there.” (Nicely, Victorian British poet Christina Rossetti gets Valentine’s Day: “I loved you first: but afterwards your love, / Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song / as drowned the friendly cooings of my dove”).

April 12 goes to Natasha Trethewey, who is African-American like her late mother (but is also part-Canadian, thanks to her dad, Eric, a Hants County-born, Nova Scotian poet). In “Limen”, the 2007 Pulitzer Poetry Prize laureate writes of “almost” seeing “my mother’s face … // hanging wet sheets on the line—each one // a thin white screen between us.” Vancouver’s George Bowering covers June 2 with “Gorgeous”: “The gorgeous brown skin / within eyesight in downtown // Havana stays with you. It glows / as if not needing a sun….” Montreal’s Stephanie Bolster prefaces June 19.

The canonical – classic – poets are also here: Wild Bill Shakespeare (January 2), Blind Jack Milton ("On Shakespeare": January 3), Johnny "Tomcat" Donne (January 8), Lord “Roll Your Own” Byron (February 22), Mad Bill Blake (March 5), Gerard "Saintly" Hopkins (April 6), Emily "Dickering" Dickinson (April 25), Bobby Browning (April 28), Geoffrey "Bad Boy" Chaucer (September 27), Jumpin’ Jack Keats (November 11), Percy "Can’t Swim" Shelley (November 12), etc. The beauty of this anthology is the eclectic range of voices and styles, with something for everyone – likely everyday. And do check January 16: you’ll find a verse by the former Nahum (or Nattt) Shaka: “I want a young girl who does everything / All the devious things a diva should do.”

The Muskwa Assemblage
By Don MCkay
Nova Scotia: Gaspereau
48 pp. $49.95

Don McKay’s roughly fifty pages in length, is daunting only in its price. (The quote is not a misprint). The poetry itself is fairly accessible – despite some of the deliberately scientific terms wrested from geology, zoology, biology, ecology, etc.

Indeed, the design of this Gaspereau Press book emphasizes the natural: hand-made paper and hand-printed poems – and no page numbers. It suits a work whose subject is the artistic response to a rock “formation inside the Muskwa-Kechika wilderness which stretches from the Toad River area in the north to Tuchodi Lakes in the south,” near the Alaska Highway. In McKay’s poetic prose, these “geological phenomena … open precipitously into deep time….” (Before I go further, I confess that Gaspereau Press has published three of my books).

McKay’s work arises from an artistic expedition (or actual exploration): “In 2006, a group of artists assembled in the (wilds) of Northern British Columbia.” Like a new Group of Seven, they wanted to “direct aesthetic attention to a wild ecosystem.” McKay’s participation meant writing on the spot – and then later – his perceptions of "a place almost entirely undisturbed by human settlement or industry.”

His “assemblage” (and the word may refer trilaterally, one reads, to “a gathering,” or to art mixing miscellaneous elements, or to a distinctive, rock-based ecosystem) is, then, prose, verse, and illustrative typography that records scientific knowledge, naturalist insight, and artistic response to the memorable moments of the group visitation. Or maybe I should say "congregation": There’s a vaguely religious element in the meeting of artists and woods – to the point of fine, Canuck cliché. (Recall Emily Carr’s totems).

McKay writes, “Remember how you sat transfixed, Marlowed by it, the whole of 94K4 an EEG of tectonic force, a contorted brainscape laid out on the kitchen table. // And skewed to the diagonal. It was as though some formerly symmetrical design had been invaded by irresistible divinity, some Dionysus headed northwest, so that all its features stretched and dragged, gripped by the eros of the oblique.”

Like a religious experience, you have to have ‘been there’ to truly ‘get it,’ though the passage succeeds in communicating the thrill of viewing – intellectually annexing – this raw – virginal – map-land.

McKay is a multiple award-winning poet and is surely the leading practitioner of ‘eco-poetry.’ His lines are clear and clean: “a she-moose / feeding: / droplets – this, / this, this, this – / ellipses / drifting into the no-name lake.” You see the scene, up close – as if through binoculars. And there’s fun too: “And of moose, speak no more of the brawn / the blunder, the old oaf-of-the-woods / and the glum dumb glare and oversized rack / galumphing through the swamp. . . .”

Yet, despite its attractions, The Muskwa Assemblage reminds me of my one big misgiving regarding ‘eco-poetry’: too much conservatism within the conservationism. But green runs closer to blue than red.

Flutter
By Alice Burdick
Toronto, ON: Mansfield Press, 2008
97 pp. $16.95

Nova Scotian poet Alice Burdick’s Flutter is a second collection. Her lines are deceptively elementary, but it’s not simplicity they produce, but rather complex comprehension.

One instance is “Colonial fall”: “Mind your origins; / they’re obviously not mine. . . . // The lazy deer don’t remember guns. . . . // A search for blood; / it brought us over here, in boats. / We were used to theft, / to stealing and being stolen from. / Bigger smaller ideas. / So it was no long leap / to this new world. // But a heavy landing / for we already here.”
“Lunenburg light” is a heap of ultimately dark associations: “Remember insects? They remember me – / how to first touch, then devour”; “Lilacs send scent through dusty air, / near their end / and drying.”

Burdick’s tone is as bleak as the boulders of Peggy’s Cove: "You are told to be happy, / and so fail in the effort." Later, we read, "Here’s a reason for failing badly: / no cause is found, / evidence destroyed." It is Robert Frost as interpreted by Margaret Atwood. Or maybe it is “Farewell to Nova Scotia” – that weepy anthem – replicated as jaded, irony-rich verse. Don’t matter if it is: it is very good.

Daughters of Men
By Brenda Leifso
London, ON: Brick Books, 2008
119 pp. $18.00

Kahlo: The World Split Open
By Linda Frank
Ottawa, ON: Buschek Books, 2008
101 pp. $17.50

Brenda Leifso’s first book of poetry, Daughters of Men, follows poets like Anne Carson and Anne Simpson in looking to classicism (Greek) and a smidgen of feminism to write verse vernacular in voice, startling in imagery, and disciplined in form.

Linda Frank’s second verse collection, following Cobalt Moon Embrace (2002), is Kahlo: The World Split Open. Presenting a fictional poetic biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54), Frank’s style is rambunctious, perhaps to imitate the vagaries of her subject’s life and the vividness of her canvases. An Alberta native now living in Calgary, Leifso is not only a postmodern neo-classicist in the manner of the aforementioned avant-garde Anglo-Canadian women poets, but also an heir to a Prairie tradition of say-what-you-mean talk and show-me imagery. As much as she rewrites the classical Greek dramatist Euripedes in one section of her book, other poems bespeak the populism of Lorna Crozier and Robert Kroetsch (or, from our Maritime ‘neck of the woods,’ Alden Nowlan).

In this regard, see the plain-spoken and personable “Letter to Kirk: Vancouver”: “The people here own so much / I covet. Every time I step on the rackety bus, / I want to be the chestnut-haired girl wearing those perfect soft-brown shoes. / I guess I could blame my mother for not teaching me how to dress. . . . / You know, I’m getting tired of blaming my mother. / It seems I can’t write a poem without lying.” Supple – not subtle – feminism animates “Prayer for Rain.” Here the poet reminds us, “After (his son) Seth was born (when he was aged 130), Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters.” As we toast Adam’s un-Viagra-assisted virility, we should also ponder Eve’s unmentioned, un-artificially-assisted, elder fertility. . . .

Leifso’s poems about girlhood, adolescence, and the-life-lived-to-date are emotive and moral – without being bluntly ideological. Hence, pre-teen girls ostracize another: “The others chew their feathers, chrrrr in agreement, / fall like dockyard seagulls on the abandoned lunch.” Still, the biggest part of this book is “The Theban Women: a play in verse,” wherein Leifso recasts Euripedes so that, when Agave murders her own son, she is conscious of it, not merely manipulated by the god Dionysus. Leifso also adds a character – Silenae – a hillside-abandoned girl child who survives and grows into “a wild creature.” The strength of these lyrics is their clarity: “When night beats the bright drum of stars”; “How tall he sat on his froth-mouthed horse”; “I would swear . . . by a woman’s body, by its blindness to nothing / but time’s brutal sight.” Ezra Pound’s strengths are realized here.

The one weakness I see in Leifso is a lack of playfulness: all is dour. The singular advantage of Frank is her almost reckless abandon in trying to capture the frenzy of Frida Kahlo’s life and art. She gives us no brooding drama, but charismatic figures (including Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera), first-person murder and present-tense sex, and zesty argument and impassioned painting. There’s clearly drama in a book whose first word is “Corsets,” and soon Frank’s Frida is telling us, “I want to adorn my corsets / Make them obscene // They hung me by my head from a beam / for hours to dry my cast. / They put me / into traction, pulled my spine with weights // Painting is my own true medicine. . . .”

She is a compelling speaker, this persona, and so she should have an ego and show some spunk: “I painted what I saw / Nothing more / I painted myself / I was the subject / I knew best. . . . // look at my hair, my dress / my jewelry, the parrots / and monkeys and the dogs. See / how they push the pain / off the canvas.” Frank’s Frida further explains, “anything that escapes / the canvas escapes the body / but paint remembers, pushes through / pentimento // because I want to split the world / wide open.”

Such sentiments – the Trudeauvian seeking after power and glory – is also an echo of Irving Layton, his own bravura self-making. Frank lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and she exudes not only steel-town’s gutsiness, but also Montreal’s gusto. Her weakness? Not knowing her own lean strength, Frank piles on the words.

Native Song
by David Woods
Nimbus Editons, 2008
141 pp. $16.95

Born in Trinidad in 1959, David Woods has been an African-Nova Scotian (or, to use my word, Africadian) since 1972. For nearly thirty years, too, he has been a one-man cultural renaissance, as painter, poet, and playwright, but also as an organizer, entrepreneur, and impresario.

Primarily a speaker and a doer, he has been less inclined to write-and-publish. His plays are staged, but rest in manuscript; his poetry is performed, but only printed now-and-then, here-and-there (such as in the lyrics for Joe Sealy’s Juno-winning jazz album, Africville Suite). Native Song, published in 1990, was the great exception to Woods’ general practice. Here, in his original book, he set forth a good selection of his poetry on the page, backed with eight estimable paintings.

Reviewing Native Song in 1991, I noted Woods’ absorption of signal African-American poets, especially those of the Harlem Renaissance era, such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. And I opined that his persona echoes T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock mask: “the frustrated Romantic, yearning for Beauty and Humanity in a world of machines and money and. . . . generalized oppression. . . .” Now Native Song is reborn in a second, enlarged edition, a length closer to Woods’ original conception (as he tells us in his “Author’s Note”), but again with eight paintings (though four are ‘new’ replacements for those previously featured).

The new material includes sections on “The Derby Tavern,” “Birth of Knowledge,” and “Africville.” Some of these poems showcase Woods’ strengths, particularly as a recorder of popular wisdom and sentiment. The “Derby” lyrics are witty epigrams involving love, liquor, and ‘ligion, and often make use of rhyme. Here’s “To the Babysitter”: “If the weather turns cold – / See you at 5, / If the DJ ain’t right – / Be back at 9, / If the American ships are in – / See you tomorrow night!” A similar group of poems is “Voices”: Again Woods offers humour based on observed foibles and follies and overheard gossip. See “Signs”: “She blamed it on stomach flu. / Nine months later – Everybody knew!” “Tookie and His Four Women” counts “One to go to church with, / One to party, / One to get money from, / One to marry.”

In the “Africville” suite, Woods again operates as an astute eavesdropper of sorts: “Uncle Duckie turns the pages of the Herald / Searching for the article we spoke of, / ‘What does the word expropriation mean?’ he asks, / His voice hardening with anger.” There is power and beauty in Woods’ writing, but also moments where abstractions vitiate emotion, or where clichés pop up, destroying originality, or where preachy statements ruin music. Examples abound. The bulldozing of Africville is “A death … putrid and anonymous”: “Putrid”? Okay. “Anonymous”? No. Cliché calls Africville’s demise “The cruel death” and “The gaping wound.” “Warning” lectures, “When (leaders) no longer have patience / with the people they serve, / And can no longer dance / It’s a sure sign— / The leopard has changed spots.” In 1991, I thought that Woods could do with editing. I still think so. Yet, Native Song still offers many striking poems and only fine paintings…

On second thoughts, in my first take on the expanded, second edition of David Woods’ Native Song: Poetry & Paintings (Nimbus, $16.95), I admired the artwork, but was critical—yes, rightly—of the poetry, deeming it fine in its ‘oral’ registers, but needing editing in its more elaborate guises. I neglected to pinpoint, however, one poem that seems unadulterated in power. It is “Kurtz and the Boys (The Heart of Whiteness).”

In this lyric, Woods’ Dalhousie University student persona executes a witty and devastating critique of the ridiculous aspects of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Heart of Darkness, and its antihero, Kurtz. “Think of Kurtz as one of the boys, / his problems are very profound / he conquers a continent to solve them. . . . / And the tribe around him is really dumb – / They elect him chief / Even though he can’t speak the language / And has been in the jungle less than a year. . . . // Think of Kurtz as one of the boys – / Swinging triumphantly in the jungles / and vines of white literature."

Back in 1991, reviewing the brand new Native Song, I saw Woods’ character as reprising T.S. Eliot’s Prufock. A York University professor argued I was mistaken. Yet, “The Green House on Birmingham Street” echoes Eliot’s poem: “I toss on clothes and enter the streets, / Discarding long-held disguises— / Seeking the common places of relief. . . / Lingering among the prostitutes and hustlers / Who line the taverns along Hollis Street…. / I overhear lonely voices that fall: / . . . ‘I feel a little low of late – / Please come over for cup of tea?’ ”

Still, Woods’ best work is epigrammatic: “Who got the best deal for their (Africville) land: / Pa Carvery at $14,000? / Pooh Izzard at $2,000? / Papa Noah or Speedy Flint at $500? / The answer: / No one!” Too, Woods’ Halifax-Dartmouth-Metro is recognizably what it is – that fine fusion of London, Edinburgh, Harlem, and New Orleans.

The Serenity of Stone
by Michael Fraser
Toronto, ON: Bookland Press, 2008
96 pp. $14.95

Open Slowly
by David Furlong
Toronto, ON: Tightrope Books, 2008
77 pp. $14.95

When Barbados native Austin Clarke published his first novel in 1964 – forty five years ago – his generation of immigrant African-Canadian authors tended to view Canada as a cold, unwelcoming (if rich and democratic) land of exile, while the homeland seemed warmer and kinder (if poorer and more authoritarian).

But a revolution, spearheaded – somewhat – by Clarke, and furthered by David Woods, et al., has occurred: Canada is now an objective subject in offshore-born African-Canadian writers. A new example of this turn is Michael Fraser’s debut verse collection, The Serenity of Stone, which Austin Clarke introduces. Born in Grenada, raised in Edmonton, and a Torontonian since 1983, Fraser sculpts good free verse that simply takes each place and experience for itself. He renders Toronto sharply: “store windows flow sideways like flipcharts / as raspy streetcar voices / grind along the road’s iron washlines.” There is romance: “hanging gardens of sunlight / bounce off the shaded faces / of deep downtown scrapers…”; but there’s also realism: “(with the world’s longest / free-standing structure it is still / jealous of foreign cities half its size)”; and there’s also the Gothic: “a cannibal that eats its children to the bone….”

Fraser has been widely published, but he’s still capable of a tyro’s errors: “longest” – in the passage just cited – should be “tallest.” Elsewhere, he describes “slabs of wind / rolling through . . . hair,” which is a neat trick, for a ‘slab’ of anything is more likely to slide than roll. But I shouldn’t carp about such minor and infrequent infelicities. Fraser is a good poet, though one who needs – like many of us – to tame the storms of imagery he can so easily unleash. When he is simpler, he is still arresting: “words are leaves / falling from a forest of faces … // behind the door / our tongues run / for the freedom of each other.”

“Dog Days” shows the poet showing off 1970s Hogtown: “my young hip to jive father / controlled a long white thunderbird / through toronto’s melting white streets / how he parted his bad-ass sideburns / and boogied out our dawn door in bursting colour / a sharp all-spice scent trailing behind him.” There’s much to like in The Serenity of Stone: Fraser is a smart and cosmopolitan poet, who should remind one of the young Derek Walcott and the established Yusef Komunyakaa.

Open Slowly (Tightrope Books) is Dayle Furlong’s first collection of verse. Educated in English and Fine Arts at York University, she has lived throughout Canada and Central America, Asia, and the US.

Her imagery recalls 1970s-feminist Atwood, but with both harsher realism and stronger romanticism. See “Hooks”: “little fish on hooks / gulp and cry / worms will die / but you keep me dancing / on a line / not hanging exactly / but hoping for (friends) return. // And with them carelessness, youth: / a hook from which / I couldn’t wait to escape – / yet struggled against / ripped my skin needlessly.” There is realism – the imagined pain of hooked fish, the death of worms, and the ‘ripping’ pain of maturation. And there is romanticism – the Top Forty notion of being kept ‘dangling’ as well as the Golden Oldies notion of yearning for positive recollection.

For Furlong, then, web-caught flies appear “their wings raw, taut, stretched as if smiling / dancing on display.” But those that escape spiders may still fall prey to an “old toad’s tongue.”

Copper Thunderbird
By Marie Clements
Vancouver, BC: Talon Books, 2009
64 pp. $15.95

10 Days on Earth
by Ronnie Burkett
Staged - CanStage, Toronto

Marie Clements’s Copper Thunderbird (Talonbooks, $15.95) is a dramatization of life of iconic First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau, C.M. (1932–2007). Ronnie Burkett’s 10 Days on Earth (Playwrights Canada Press) utilizes puppets—all strings attached—to tell of love, mainly familial and platonic, but also with a nod to the sexual (i.e. procreation).

An Aboriginal Canadian playwright, Marie Clements is an award-winning performer, playwright, producer, and founding artistic director of urban ink productions and fathom labs highway. Her ten plays have been presented widely, while Copper Thunderbird premiered as a co-production with The National Arts Centre in Ottawa and The Magnetic North Festival, in May 2007.

In Copper Thunderbird, Clements stages a conversation among the elder and dying Morrisseau (“Old Man”), his childhood self (“Boy”), and his young adult self ("Young Man"), as "Copper Thunderbird"—Morrisseau’s Ojibway identity—muses on his development as an artist and his dilemma as an Aboriginal person making art in defiance of a white European-defined aesthetic and within a white American-dominated market. A product of residential schools and psychological colonialism (a character named “Auntie” teaches the Boy to love Christ but to hate Ojibway culture) Clements’s Morrisseau faces off against assimilation (be “a useful Indian,” not “Useless” and “Bullheaded”), commercialization (“Your work could take you far … even Paris), and nationalism (avoid “talking like a white man”).

But, despite his success in establishing the beauty of – and market for – Native Canadian art, Morrisseau succumbs to alcoholism, an addiction and a disease that is also a response to the pressures he has endured as an Aboriginal artist. His end is pathetic – “Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau is selling sketches in Vancouver to buy liquor, Vancouver, 1987” – but not tragic, for Clements presents Morrisseau as being a Shaman, even a kind of messiah, who perishes in telling his people’s stories, but also dies so as to show them their own beauty. Pointedly, this message is rendered by Norval Kateri, a saintly figure, who tells The Old Man / The Boy / The Young Man, “You have to remember you have given acres and acres of being Indian . . . Even with our scars . . . do we not deserve love? Can we not be beautiful?”

There may be an echo here of Toni Morrison’s famous scene in Beloved, where an elder character commands her young black audience to love themselves – each and every part of their bodies – despite the racism they face. Clements’ wondrous stage directions call for painterly interplay between human beings and the natural world and Aboriginal cosmology. In one scene, “a white bone ladder comes down into the blue”; in another, “a giant blue wave approaches and submerges [the various Norvals] in the depth of his blues.” Lovers look like frogs; one hears the “thunder” of “a giant white buffalo.”

Such scenery recalls the similarly dynamic nature in Djanet Sears’s play, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, but actual scenes bring to mind, unavoidably, George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967). Despite these potential debts to others, Clements crafts an original and striking portrait of Morrisseau, whose work, aesthetic, and sacrifices, she makes clear, created our truly Canadian art. Copper Thunderbird should be frequently staged.

Ronnie Burkett’s 10 Days on Earth is, in fact, frequently staged – and has been, from England, New Zealand, and Australia to Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver – and deservedly so.

The playwright is also the puppeteer of this strange, beautiful play that uses a host of marionettes, some more real than others, to tell the story of Darrel, a middle-aged simpleton – or innocent, who awakes one morning to a world suddenly bereft of his beloved mother, who has died in her sleep. But, he forges on, partly because he does not—at first—understand death and partly because he lives in a dream world.

The play is one-part Being There (the 1980 Peter Sellers comedy) and one-part Monty Python. Here God is homeless and angry, a duck wears a tutu, a Salvation Army lady struts in heels, and a boy-man learns about mortality: odd and moving.

Hooked
by Carolyn Smart
London, On: Brick Books, 2009
120 pp. $19.00

Looking Through Stone: Poems About the Earth
by Susan Ioannou
Sudbury, ON: Scrivern Press,
Scrivener Press
$17.00

Carolyn Smart’s fifth book of poetry, Hooked (Brick, $19), is a must-read and, also, eminently readable. In this collection of seven narrative poems, Smart examines the psyches of seven famous—or infamous—women, whose adulations of a man, just as famous—or infamous, imped them to self-destructive behaviour.

Smart considers these women’s experience of ‘love’ as an addiction – a perilous ‘tonic’ for some lack or absence in their lives. Worse, they ‘hook’ themselves on men who are incapable of love or who are psychologically damaged or psychotic. Although one might expect these seven portraits to be monotone or monotonous, given the similarities of the subject women, the poems are actually absorbing and exciting, for Smart lets each one tell her story in words that are partly drawn directly from each woman’s own life. Hence, the ‘self-portraits,’ so to speak, differ because the diction of each persona-character differs.

Myra Hindley (1942-2002), helpmate – i.e. accomplice – of early-1960s serial child-murderer Ian Brady, recalls that their fateful first date involved watching footage of a Nazi rally: “that first night he took me to the pictures: / all those people at Nuremburg, cheering, / better than a football match.” Smart has Hindley recall her death this way: "heart attack / and the first crematorium wouldn’t take me // in Cambridge Crematorium I lay / like radioactive waste with an afterlife // and they burned me / and they put me in the ground // became a better person after all.”

Unity Valyrie Mitford (1914-48), a British socialite, fawned over Adolf Hitler, becoming a cheerleader for him and spewing her own anti-Semitism. Being Hitler’s #1 English gal made her “an angel in Bavaria" and gave her the power to make "Party members disappear.”

When Britain declared war on Germany, Mitford put a bullet in her brain, crippling herself, but surviving the wound nearly a decade: “that old bullet started rumbling in 1948 / when I looked up and said ‘I’m coming’. . . . // that night I died at last.” Smart’s sole Canadian subject is her surname sake, Elizabeth Smart (1913-86), who, bored by her childhood among Ottawa’s civil-service aristocracy, decided to spice up her life by pursuing a married but constantly philandering British poet, George Barker.

Their affair brought her several children, poverty, and one gem of a book, her own By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945). In the end, she is alone, writing: “whole notebooks fill… late at night / with writing near impossible to read / but it is there, you find it if you can / make from it all whatever books you wish.” Liz Smart’s last two lines reveal C. Smart’s strategy: Research the bio, quote the poetic line or two, then ‘echo’ the subject’s voice in pared-down free verse (reminiscent of the ballad). This book works.

Susan Ioannou’s Looking Through Stone: Poems About the Earth (Scrivener Press, $17) is her eleventh collection of poetry. Herein she uses geology as the basis for reflections on self, soul, and society. “Illusion” may sum up Ioannou’s sensibility: “Whenever fingers fold around a rock,” / mind may whisper ‘jagged’ or ‘light,’ / but gut cries ‘solid’! / Faith is built on rock; / riches also, even the dream / that hurtles a seeker into madness.”
But the solidity of stone and rock is illusory: “Look closer at the granite / chunk scratching your skin / – a fistful of electromagnetism.” Its interior allows this insight: “What an atomic frenzy – h Please! / Is this what ‘solid’ means?” Clearly, each mineral and metal is a ‘philosopher’s stone,’ a touchstone, permitting and supporting the poet’s speculation.

Hence, “The Oldest Metal, Lead (Pb),” is both “the lovely alloy in pewter” and that which can “whiten the blood, / eating away at cells as cancer / or mutating a fetus / into a monster.” Ioannou concludes, “What better reason for alchemists’ / centuries of futile spells / to fire (lead) into gold?” These lyrics are likeable, but they are also weighted down by verbiage. Though Ioannou is able to give life to her subject, her writing too often feels as clunky as a geology textbook: "Enough on mystics. / What is healing’s truth? / Mere placebo, or gems’ quantum physics?” Then again, hard it is, to get blood from a stone.