Emptying the Ocean
by Kim Fahner
Frontenac House (2022)

Because the title, itself, of Kim Fahner’s latest book suggests the impossible, I am instantly intrigued, and Emptying the Ocean does not disappoint. I find myself floating somewhere between that ethereal quality of myth, and stung by the very real sense of longing, loneliness, fear and grief. There is a journey here, one that takes the reader through Water, Earth, Air and Fire, which divide the book into sections, but Fahner adds The Spiritual and a return Homewards. 

In the opening section, Water, icebergs form particularly poignant images:

Edges of ice aren’t sharp

except from a distance (12)

…

She walks down to the sea, hears ice whisper:

The sea speaks Selkie,

the whole song echoes

Then—

sings her own song.

 

Edges of ice aren’t sharp,

so sculpted by sea—traces,

curves, caresses what is

both seen and unseen,

along this body, her coastline. (14)

Throughout the book, Fahner reminds us to look more closely, that not all is what it seems, that what we see/hear from a distance is only one perspective, that there are Selkies and other mythological figures, other shape-shifting artists, and the elements that change/shapeshift. Deliver. The readers’ own journeys can’t help but be brought into the equation.

Also captivating is the poet’s use of language. Listen to this: 

She watches—impatient—

for quick spark of flint, for slight sliver of ice,

for rough calving, and then lightning birth.

She waits for crashing of form fashioned into another—

mirrored mosaic on cobalt water. (14)

The alliteration, the assonance, shiver on your tongue. 

The poet’s use of metaphor also compels. There is a constant tension in the elements, including tension of perspective. For example, light is a guide but also leads through fire:

Light a match, a candle, a torch that will guide…

….

She puts her palm up, open, and presses it to the glass so that

fingerprints find homes in molecules that refuse to dance…

….

…the motion of a lake that feels like an ocean when mid-life

swims out ahead and doesn’t wait for the other swimmer

…her compass isn’t clear (17)

At times I felt lost, or swimming in the liminal space that Fahner creates, or unsure of who I was with, but that seems the point, and the imagery carries me along. The poet takes readers to Ireland, to Northern Ontario (she even finds beauty/interest in the tailings ponds), to the Maritimes; we are treated to fiddleheads, oysters, birds on stilts, lakes, oceans and icebergs. There are “seal women” in the background “hiding behind / black rocks, hair woven / with seaweed, skins / in their cold hands, pale /fragile.” (20) The selkies are the constant in the “unsettled spaces.” (16) Even these double entendres of the unsettled work poetically to guide readers through a mythical but very real journey when mid-life swims out ahead. Again and again, the vibrant imagery creates tension, a tension of love and longing and readers are there, watching, “a life mapped by strange frame, / cars stopping in the road outside” (69), and we are left swirling in the wind of it all. And searching for home. But home seems more a journey than a place, an unsettling.  

Then there are Fahner’s images of rebirth, very much a constant in this book, and because we already know that everything is not as it seems, that perspectives shift, “reborn” (21) doesn’t necessarily mean a positive ending. Nor is it negative. There are tempests, and the narrator guides the reader through swells of waves and the rejuvenating storms, fire and water, and air. In “Reminders” (51), the narrator asks for vulnerability:

I wish to be a planet, turn slowly and see

night become day over and over again

to feel that throb of rhythm,

heartbeat where the skin is thinnest,

at my wrist. Kiss me there (51)

The poet reminds the reader that the journey is all about the journey, not the end, but vulnerability, the swells, the anticipation, not the destination, but the “fireflies and dragonflies / luna moths and honeybees / pebbles in pockets to fashion paths.” (84) While we might already know this, we see it and feel it anew from the poet’s eyes.

I am magic—making myself over and over again

until the planet stops turning, the branch

stops reaching, the fish stops swimming. (51)

As readers, we are with her, mesmerized, searching, anticipating, Emptying the Ocean, “carefully, one bucket and then another—a pint of ocean at a time.” (25)

Beth Everest enjoys the freedom to write, to create jewelry, and to dig carrots in her own garden. She is fortunate to publish in journals across the country, and occasionally come out with a book.

The post Review of Kim Fahner’s “Emptying the Ocean” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

by Beth Everest

Common Brown House Moths
by Laura Zacharin
Frontenac House (2019)
ISBN: 9781927823989

Common Brown House Moths by Laura Zacharin is anything but common. Already the first line, of the first poem, tantalizes my senses. The poet’s word choice and use of image are stellar. “Amygdala” is compared to “golf ball innards;” and then, the evocative “loop after loop of rubber strand stretched” (7) becomes the interconnected imagery of loss and memory and grief and sorrow that link one poem to the next and the next. Take the final image of the first poem, for example: “newspapers flapping in a tree” is not only a strong visual in its own right, but it serves as metaphor for small glimpses in different lives, and links to the second poem with “glancing up from his paper, spread out / when she tried to explain how nerve fibres/branch” (8). We find echoes of the newspaper, plus other kinds of papers, such as in “Shadow Twin” (35), we have the character complement to Rosie; and in “A Beginner’s Guide To”:

It isn’t really mine, it’s just
a noise that skitters through me,
the weather, buzz of traffic,
an occasional loon on a lucky summer night
but mostly, other people’s conversations,
wrappers, empty bags and jars
and scraps they’re done with (67)

The it (and the variety of paper in the poems) not only creates the image but reminds us of the poem that is a shared happening before and after it is in a written form. This is what I so like about Zacharin’s collection, the seamless gathering of leaves / edges / branches of images lighting other images, in poem after poem, or paper, or like a moth after another moth.

And there it is, the title image: common brown house moths. The title doesn’t simply refer to a single bothersome housemoth or two buzzing lazily, but a scourge in the kitchen and all over the house:

Exhumed moths and moth parts. Under the rug.
In the coats. Inside shoes, ball caps. Desiccated shreds.
…tangles of webwingbodylegs. (8)

Notice the poet’s evocative word use with exhumed and desiccated and the squash of webwingbodylegs. The scourge becomes a problem, at first for the mother referred to in the poem, then later for the speaker of some of the other poems, but clearly the moths become metaphoric for so much more as we move through the collection. It’s cleverly done.

Even so, the words introduce a death, of sorts, or at least a developing change in the amygdala, that “pair of shriveled almonds between a rock and a hard / place” to which we were introduced in the first lines of the poems. They work as a satisfying set of images.

The interlapping, as we might call it, of imagery continues, and the primary images of paper and moths develop throughout the poems as we witness the mother’s progressing illness. Watch how this works:

Now, she starts losing weight, “could hardly breathe,” forgets, loses words:

The aaahs, and uhhhs, a kitestring in the Boxwood, newspages strangled
the Summersweet. She smacks her lips. And besides
they say poetry of witness is dead. They the new poetry
is poetry of absence. Just forget it. Just I said anythi (11).

Not only do we see this absence/illness in the absence of letters on the page, but many of the poem titles are suggestive of the change in the mother: “Same Same and Different” (12), “That Summer Between Everything” (16), “Watches the Mouth for the Shape of the T”(18), “When the Weather Turned.” These pieces resonate gripping truth, “like in that dream loop when you can’t get to the other side” (16), or moths that won’t go away, or lice “the whole scalp dizzy // with bugs. Leggy and frenetic, bellies taught with blood” (41),

But the messages keep coming,
Like sideways rain or darkness or drunkenness or

Like someone’s trying to tell me something
I should know by now. (13)

For the persona, the messages become the moth scourge. And the mother loses so much weight, she becomes moth-like, and more like paper, as we see in the “tissue paper flaps, barely tethered at her back” (36). It is implicit that we could even refer to the mother as the moth(er), “Light/ like a shadow. Like she was by then” (37).

Where does all the flesh go
when she slowly disappears
like that. (65)

Where does all the flesh go? It is a good question; and in this question the poet asks not only of the corporeal self, but of the mother who returns in flashes of the old self, in flashes of the before:

She squints back to a time
when she was kind
long ago, before she was or
before she became or before she
before she felt the, before
… (48)

Notice the change in poetic form as the mother moves from the before to the later stages of the Alzheimer’s:

She grew fangs  a curve
in her spine, her nails curled
to claws. In a burgundy housecoat (53).

It is the scourge of the disease.

There isn’t only one mood in Common Brown House Moths. Changes are shown in content, image and rhythm, but also by layout of text on the page. The poet slides adeptly between the more conventional freeform poem, to the looser broken line that begs to be read aloud, to block-text such as in the evocative “In the Light Of “(22), to a sense of urgency created by the use “Watches the Mouth for the Shape of the T” (18)

The variety in form works both visually and for sound/breath pauses. The interrelated images hold the book tight in this beautiful collection. I enjoyed the double meaning created in the line breaks, and the lighting in and out of the serious subject matter. The moths and their referents are gorgeous.

Perhaps the poem that moved me even moreso than many of the others was “Before I Leave, I Wrap You in Red” and especially the final stanza:

I hear it. The ice breaking, at the lake, the low pitch wail beneath.
It’s like someone crying at the bottom. But no one’s crying
And this time, I’m not too late. I hear
The broken floes and deep below, their sorrow song. (44)

Beth Everest recently retired from 30 years of teaching, and hopes against hope for more time to write and make jewelry. Her most recent book, silent sister: the mastectomy poems was shortlisted for numerous awards and went on to win the BPAA Robert Kroetsch award.

The post Review of Laura Zacharin’s “Common Brown House Moths” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

The post Come join us for our 26.1 Issue Launch appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Frontenac House Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-897181-55-3
$15.95

What intrigues me most about Lisa Pasold’s poetic narrative is the perspective. The book contains six sections, alternating focus between Marco Polo’s journeys and those of a contemporary dancer. But this is what happens: after we are introduced to Marco Polo and his stories, the contemporary narrator wonders “what if my neighbor believes he is Marco Polo” (33). Once suggested, their stories overlap. As Polo’s stories are recorded by Rusticello and given to the world in many versions, so the dancer’s stories are told by her neighbor in the second person perspective and thereby involve not only the dancer but the reader as imaginary participants. Of course, all of this is filtered through Pasold’s imagination and scribed by her.

Any Bright Horse is also a narrative about narrative, and while this trope has been done many times before, Pasold’s strength is in her words. Her narrator asks, “what if I tell him every story I know…/ what will he tell me in return?/ A red bird released from his hands, flying distantly” (33). Red becomes an important symbol of release and desire, as does the horse, “more noble, more ready to rise up” (52), “a mare with a shaking mane and a route across the snow (55). Poetic elements such as these capture the wonder, the fantasy, the fantastic. All this mixed with the reality.

The reader doesn’t get bogged down by questions of belief and truth, however, but is taken up by the energy of the narrative and the clever anachronistic details. For example, Marco Polo stands at the border before the customs guard:

I ripped open the seams of my clothes
with the bronze nib of a pen designed to fill in
dishonest declaration forms. I tore those seams and
they spilled into my fingers so I might give her
strings of pearls white as the eyes of snakes,
handfuls of uncut rubies that sparkled with
congealed blood (15)

Here one can see Pasold’s wry smile as she combines the historical with the contemporary, with political commentary, and multiple narrators speaking through one voice. Or as Pasold says, “Is he speaking only for himself, or for us all?” (22). We don’t even need to ask whose stories are these anyway, because it doesn’t seem to matter, “That whatever it was, was red and moving, leaping/partly from joy, that’s what it seemed” (34).

Any Bright Horse is a journey narrative, but the journey itself is not Pasold’s focus so much as is the impact of the return and the telling of the journey. Or at least the story of the journey as it has been told by the layers of narration, ultimately Pasold’s narration, but filtered through Rusticello or the touring dancer with a wounded ear and specks in her eyes, and the dancer’s neighbor. Of course, they are not making the journey for the sake of the journey, but are on a quest to bring back “the rock, the gem, the object….and if you are lucky and brave and if you find your way, you’ll come back with the story, with the word” (101). The problem is, of course, that on your return, “you enclose all that ocean within/ your mind. No wonder you can’t rest. You have returned/ speaking a language your neighbors refuse/ to understand” (11). I question, however, if it is not a refusal but an inability to understand; as Pasold reminds us, those on the journey are changed by the journey, and those who have not gone cannot know what they cannot know. As the Venetian commander says, “I did not know how greatly a cold thing could be missed, like ice,/ melting” (81).

What is certain, however, is that the narrator can spellbind. And s/he does:
The Genoese children chant, Messer Marco, tell us another lie….Oh amuse us, we grow impatient! (85).

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 3.

The post Book Review of “Any Bright Horse” by Lisa Pasold appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

“Yes”

Beth Everest
A Review of
Yes.
by Rosemary Griebel
Frontenac House
ISBN 9781897181492
$16.00

I have been looking forward to reading this collection because of Rosemary Griebel’s recent successes, not least of which have been three winning contest pieces in FreeFall in two years. I anticipated being encouraged, if not motivated by a book titled Yes. I was not disappointed, but the book was hardly what I expected.

Yes opens with “My Father Comes Back,” and I was ready for the father to be a central focus. Not so. Instead, it’s the final line of this poem that sets up the ghosts that are to appear in the following pages: his large white eyes /turned on a darkening world, cavernous nostrils/releasing ghosts into winter air.” The world appears mostly dark, and the people in it struggle with its language in many forms. The ghosts appear as such characters as the father, mother, various others from dream and reality, and most curiously Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan.

In these Helen Keller poems, that seem to be echoes in most of the other pieces, there is a sad yearning. Take this stanza, for instance, in “Helen Keller to Anne Sullivan Macy”:

The reporters will ask about the wedding. Say I cried with joy,
my arms open to the day. If they ask about the future, tell them it
is like the lake that rocks the boat safe to a shadowless shore.(70)

These poems are very much about love, and language in its many forms. It is clear that Helen is in love with Annie, but Annie makes the safe choice; it is a shadowless one, as if the sun is too bright, too relentless for someone like Helen who is blind. Annie marries John Macy, and Helen is left to find her way alone. This is not to say that Helen cannot see, and we get the familiar theme of seeing without using one’s eyes:

….The water lapped beneath us: here gone, here gone
The sheer happiness of being together. You spelled the light into
my hand, and I held you with everything that has ever been true:
words, water, the night. This love.(70)

What’s different is the connection of language to the vision. The light is “spelled” in a myriad of ways, including the alphabetical spelling, the magic of touch, and the illumination. Moments like these draw me in to Griebel’s poetry. Here gone, here gone is a lovely echo of the yearning that follows like a ghost for the entirety of the book. It is the yearning of loss and the yearning of love. This is not to say that the yearning is all melancholic, because for Griebel, it isn’t. The happy/sad creates poetic tension. Take the centre section of “Words, Burning”:

I don’t want to remember farewells,
there’s too much cold in the world.
I want to sit and think about my grandmother
humming as she kneaded bread, her snowy arms
moving like dancers, or lovers in a warm bed….
….The way we lose loved ones, by something said—
or not said. The smell of rising bread and that light opening….(31)

The light opens. The light is energizing. The light illuminates, whether we see too much or too little. Or not at all. It is also connected to story and the emotion that story/memory brings. It is the “spool of narrative/ that reveals other ways/of seeing.”

The characters in this book connect to the land and the language through using all of the senses, and like Helen rely on heavily on the sense of touch, whether it is the “weight of the stone in my hand,” “the silence of swallowing,” or the placing of “my finger/upon the pale and leaven moon.” There is an abundance of mouth imagery, with the silence of things not said, or the “way your silence holds a story” or how it is “your mouth finding its way in the dark.” The ghost of Helen Keller moves throughout the book, pointing anew in other ways of seeing.

In a book called Yes I never get the sense I am listening to a motivational speaker. Rather, whether I am following Helen, the father, the grandmother, or any one of the montage of ghosts that appear and reappear, Rosemary Griebel’s voice urges me gently: she says, “Look at this world. Just look at it.” And so I do. But I use more than my eyes. And I am uplifted, and open to the light that no longer feels so shadowless. She ends her book with these lines:

There I quaffed the sharp chiseled air, the slow, sad light
of merciless winter and said, yes, this world is for my mouth forever…
And I am in love with it.
Yes. (82)

---

 

This Review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXI Number 2 Fall 2011

The post Book Review of “Yes” by Rosemary Griebel appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.