By Keith Garebian
Everybody Knows a Ghost
by Elana Wolff
Guernica Editions (2026)
The title foregrounds universality, knowledge, and the spectral. “Everybody” encompasses Manu (name for the 14 rulers of earth in Hindu mythology, special painters, music (modern and classical), writers (particularly Old Testament and Kafka), filmmakers (Wes Anderson and Jacques Tati), the poet’s family members, and strangers (children and adults), which, of course, shows the poet’s mind concentrating while also ensuring that her presentations of experience and meaning oppose laziness of perception. Poet and critic Jane Hirshfield contends that “good poems hold more than one knowledge,” and this is certainly true of this collection where meaning takes the forms of intellectual component, imagery, and sound that widen our sense of what humanness and its wonders and puzzlements might be. Slipping with admirable facility through the mystical, the mythological, and the empirical, Wolff’s poems are revelatory and transfiguring, using knowledge to signal perception, familiarity, recognition, and experience, and linking this to shades, shadows, spirits, daemons, demons, and traces. Though portentous, they are never pompous, even when they use esoteric allusions—Wolff’s ruminations often being ambiguous even when completely entered by a reader. And one of their fascinating qualities is an eroticism in the sense of wooing a reader’s mind and heart the way a tender lover would, especially a lover of words and their sonic patterns. Interestingly, Wolff’s sixth collection, Swoon, had an overarching sense of a poet’s mind swooning with compulsive perceptions (spare, introspective, elliptical) climaxing in transcendental insights. Her next collection, Shape Taking, exuded the ecstasy of mind and body, its world stroked lovingly with vivid images.
Everybody Knows a Ghost has a looser arc than those collections because of its quirkier, more tropical patterns, and because its imaginativeness and suggestions of altered states are filtered or angled in slices that she, like Kafka (one of her favourite literary models), turns into precise but fragmented, concentrated yet concealing poems. It is easy to chart Wolff’s technical excellences—especially her masterful deployment of sibilance (“Or Else” has 30 superbly deployed “s’s”), fractured words and forced enjambments relating to philosophical increments (“Use of the Room”), modulated rhythm and revising trope (“Fishing with DB”), elliptical metaphoric form (“Tapioca”), or colour synaesthesia (“Manu’s sphere”)—just as it is easy to cite the phantoms or shades or traces that infiltrate and charge many of the poems in which daytime hauntings and nighttime dreams challenge the poet to keep her heart open to the ineffable. The book has many spectral concentrations: Manu; a husband whose shape fades away nightly; a night wolf; the terrifying ghost of a murdered victim; even perennials and a haunting vase; and the enchanting gliding spectres of Kakfa and his treasured Milena.
The real significance and value of the poems, however, is not a statistical compilation. Rather, it is the poet’s inward and outward looking. Wolff is not woman as passive or decorative being. That would be unforgivingly simple. She is not a diagram or a mere engine of action or a convenient frame for a proposition. Her poetic images and sounds are not ornaments: they express truths. Which is not to insist that they have all or even most of the answers to questions of reality. She is not a woman who dives into wrecks; nor is she aquiver with lingering scents or clinging sentimentality. She is game to work with hunches and inklings, believe in dreams, read relics, parse apparitions. She is an adept, one whose lines are “as slant /as ladders,” and who is intent on building meanings between selves and random things, as she confesses in two poems (“Entering the painter’s space” and “Use of the Room”). Everybody Knows a Ghost adopts different angles of reflective and elliptical meaning: the first and simplest being the outer world; the second, a kind of dialogue with what is perceived; and, most significant of all, the poet as a voice and eye, with language as controlling and shaping organ. The poem “After-cast” could well be the model for Wolff’s virtuosity, but there are others (for example, “Gloss,” “Adept,” “At the Heart of a Ghost,” “O-zone,” and “Catalytic”) where the quotidian is mysterious, where perdurable change and synergetic forces show that death is “not oblivion,” and where what we don’t see has a presence that is charged, sometimes unremitting.
Keith Garebian immigrated to Canada with his family in 1961, and after earning his doctorate in Commonwealth Literature from Queen’s University (1973), he became a freelance literary and theatre critic for such varied sources as Canadian Theatre Review, Scene Changes, Mosaic, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Canadian Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Performing Arts in Canada, Books in Canada, Canadian Forum, Literary Review of Canada, Theatrum and others. He also taught Canadian and Commonwealth Literature and Canadian drama part-time at McGill, Concordia, and Trent Universities.