By Kathryn MacDonald
Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead
by Erina Harris
Wolsak & Wynn (2024)
Academic and poet, Erina Harris, has several interests and concerns, many find their way into the subjects and themes of her second poetry collection, Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.
According to Harris’ profile on the University of Alberta website, where she teaches, her research interests include fairy tales, rhyme and nonsense verse, gender and women’s writing, subjectivity and relationality, experimentalism and more. Given this array, Harris meets the organizational challenge of creating a cohesive collection by structuring the poems into an abecedarium. But the complex weaving of varied subjects and themes into a whole is not the only thing that readers will notice. As in her first book, The Stag Head Spoke, the poetry here is highly original and experimental.
Readers are treated to rhyme and nonsense verse, word-play and music, a taste of Dadaism and Surrealism among other isms. The poems are subversive. They inform, create context for her research interests, while shifting perspective in unusual ways. They play with form, structure, ideas – and in the case of “Letter B: Bestiary Rondo” with sound.
… in the breath, in the breeze, that the breathing beasts
breathe in, the breaths of the bees breathing trees’ breaths, the
breeze breathes the bee-breaths with trees breathing beast-
breaths, breath breezes in beast-breathing bees breathe the
bee-breath-ing trees in the breath-tree will be in the breeze of
the bee in the tree-bees will breathe with breeze-breaths will
beasts bleed … [Da Capo] (3)
Harris is a skillful weaver of words.
In Trading Beauty Secrets, Harris references literary and other notables that may not be recognized by non-academic readers. To address this concern, she introduces each poem with epigraphs that inform what follows. Additionally, Harris includes extensive end notes in the form of “Poems: Biographies” and “Dedications and Acknowledgements.”
Harris is clearly enamoured with ideas and with tracing them through the literature. For example, in the “Letter N – The Cameo Essay: Towards a Poetics of Nonsense / An Ekphrastic” (35) she begins with the idea of a talking cameo, then quickly moves to the Red Queen. Delightful. An inviting allusion. One opportunity Harris takes in the poem is to discuss violence against women.
I love to learn something new when I read, and Trading Beauty Secrets doesn’t disappoint. My favourite poem, “Letter T,” the longest (53-120) and titular poem introduced me to Lotte Pritzel and her creation, the Dolly Varden doll, named for a Charles Dickens’ character. (Other writers appear, including Gertrude Stein and Rainer Maria Rilke, Hans Christian Andersen, and Baudelaire . . .) That dolls were shown “behind glass cloches and cases” (58), a practice “reminiscent of Victorian / taxidermy practices” (59), allows Harris to explore women’s place across time.
“Letter T” also deepened my understanding of Stevie Smith, her life, art, and poetry. We learn:
Stevie Smith’s illustrations for her poems bear influence from
avant-garde European art, which posed a challenge to conventional
mores by disrupting our ways of seeing.Stevie’s drawings mime traditionalism, then disrupt it through
flourishes of derangement, disproportion, fragmentation –
what nonsense (102).
The poem provides a revealing look at nonsense, disruption, and its power.
Skipping ahead to Letter X, we come to a poem that may be more personal and less academic than the others in the collection. Part II begins with an epigraph:
“My mother is a fish.” Vardaman Bundren, WILLIAM FAULKNER As I Lay Dying”
II The Xebec Boats
i.
Unwitting Emperor of my Childhood, he always knew when the boats were
coming. With his back to the harbour-facing windows, from the brown plaid
armchair, smoking, the moat of cigarette burns in beige carpet around his veined,
bluing ankles, somehow, my father could still see the waters behind him.His gaze would alight on objects buoying across its surface then take them into
itself, exceeding them.The Xebec boats were coming! The earliest sign: first the sails, three per vessel,
oncoming upon the undulating surface within which sea and sky become
indistinguishable, closer, uncountable faces peering over the ledge at the stare
staring at them: “There they are!”
The poem continues in six parts, passing through thoughts such as “Beyond metaphor the waters, sublime, paternal, became a looking glass” (135). Another reference to Alice, or perhaps mirror, mirror on the wall? “The last words he spoke fatherly were part fish. And he became a merman” (136). The poem ends with: “These days I wish I could cross over” (137). You can, perhaps, glimpse the leaps, yet also the coherence with which Erina Harris writes.
Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead may not be for the casual reader of poetry. In a review of The Stags Head, Harris’ first collection, Joel Deshaye writes: “As an academic, I know how specialization narrows a field, and Harris (a doctoral student in poetics) seems to be writing primarily here for other specialists….” This practice seems to have carried into her second collection, but I imagine that those who share Harris’ many and varied interests will find the collection brilliant.
Kathryn MacDonald is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon and A Breeze You Whisper. Learn more about her work at kathrynmacdonald.com