gillian harding-russell
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Morning After You
By Carmelo Militano
Ekstasis Editions (2014)
ISBN 978-177-10343

Carmelo Militano writes from the perspective of an immigrant to Canada from Calabria, Italy whose landscape shares some similarities to the prairies in summer but provides more of a contrast in winter. As well as the freshness inherent in being a foreigner, Militano’s eye for detail and his imagist approach work together with a fondness for unexpected angles and surrealistic effects. Frequent allusions to English literature combined with homely images from his native Calabria weave irony and a layer of suggestion, and lend sophistication and a European homeliness to classical effect. Whereas in“ The Atlas” Militano uses a metaphysical conceit in the manner of Donne’s iconic image in “The Compass,” in “Bus stop, Main and Logan,” the poet builds the poem on an allusion to Ezra Pound’s “In a station of the metro.” Meanwhile, in “Winnipeg Noir,” a piling and patchwork of literary allusions is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Altogether there is a natural grace and energy to Militano’s writing while his experience builds on the tensions between his homeland with its weight of cultural history and the modern Winnipeg setting with its anonymous grey streets, between literary /classical traditions and a contemporary popular culture of poet societies in which the poet-speaker complains about “this ceaseless habit / of writing on shadows in the middle of the afternoon” (82). Humour and elegance and archness in the poet’s style and tone draw the reader in even as one detects a certain self-irony.

Reminding me of the scene with the rescue of the nun on the bridge in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Carmelo, in the opening poem, “Finding 17^th Century Poetry on the Window Sill at the end of August in Italy” juxtaposes the sacred and profane and the historic and the contemporary. From the cool breeze that “swells the curtain of nine months,” with that image’s association with the gestation of pregnancy, the following lines liken the house to a “convent”:

white washed walls, with narrow black cross above the headboard
plain wooden chair turned away from the table
open closet door on an angle like the lid of a coffin (11)

Here raw juxtapositions and paradox are smoothed into long lines that flow with an unexpected mellifluousness, and the poem ends on the turn of yet another surprise association. While the female figure in the poem identified as “you” is pictured reading Marvel’s “To a Coy Mistress,” she turns away from the sun’s “winged chariot” to reveal her “full breasts / away from the modest Calabrian sun.” There is a naughtiness and a playfulness amid the erudition that entices the reader with intricacies of conflicting impression that have a net-effect of strengthening each others’ ironies.

While reading the erotic “The Atlas” with its central metaphor of maps, I was reminded of Donne’s “The Compass” in which the poem hinges on a single point of similarity between the compass and the always returning ‘faithful’ lover. Accordingly, in the Atlas, the map metaphor is extended and developed in ingenious ways:

just before the bells on a camel caravan ring
to cross the flat desert of your belly
pause to smell salt
near your original connection to the sea
register a promise
to your solitary prisoner on the embankment
who now waves and stiffens
above your dew filled valley (22)

Militano has a talent for erotic poetry, and this dramatization of the lovemaking is poignant through the freshness of his images. In droll romantic denouement, the speaker urges “the moon, stars, sun to return / send light back into the universe” while in “in a single, fitful blast simulating orgasm all the maps born under (the lover’s) skin” must be redrawn (Ibid.).
That the poet-speaker finds himself caught in a northern hemisphere where the skies are wintery and grey becomes most poignant in “November.” Here images drawn from Italy and the old world have the effect of accentuating the differences between Winnipeg in November and Calabria during its extended period of seasonal mildness. In these lines an implied old woman image captures the natural setting and humanizes it in an old-world way:

Low mud green rivers under the city bridges
move slow as swollen legs
ice thin and clean as a silk scarf
sits on the edge of the riverbanks (64)

I imagine Ceres become an old crone as transported to winter and another hemisphere while biding her time until her daughter, Proserpina, may return to her for a visit in the spring.
In the closing lines, the poet is impelled to “undress the evening “with the invasion of a thousand sighs” and he feels a detached association with the moon pictured with “a fat crooked smile” that reminds this reader of Hades in his craven and slightly disturbing marriage to Proserpina after taking advantage of her having eaten three seeds of a pomegranate (Ibid.).
Unlike “November” in which the poet makes contrasts between the current and remembered setting, in the summer poem “Light and Sky in Winnipeg” the poet discovers surprising similarities between Winnipeg and his memory of Calabria which might even convince the reader that he has come to welcome his new home, at least during the summer.

my tomatoes are plump and green
pagan sunflowers worship every day
and beans scale the mesh fence
like ancient Roman soldiers (52)

In these lines, Militano brings alive the current setting by allowing his Italian experience to influence and add resonance to our seeing what may otherwise be too familiar and taken for granted. As do the romantic and classical poets, Militano uses personification (usually considered too formal contemporary poetry) that comes naturally to him and does not feel imposed in reference to this western Canadian city as seen through Mediterranean eyes.                            In “Winnipeg Noir,” carrying the subtitle “suite of poems at the intersection of who we were and who we are,” Militano similarly brings together classical and contemporary allusions.
The Latin phrase “pulchritudinous night” may to our modern ears sound closer to ‘putrid” than beautiful,’ and what follows suggests how this speaker’s disenchanted romantic view may have been converted to one who now discovers pleasure in the city’s salacious or ordinary fare. The following anaphora beginning with ‘the city’ combines a choral effect (characteristic of Greek drama) with something like modern rap (as Militano would read the poem aloud in a coffee shop):

City where the streets are shiny with pools of wet light
City where a cat slips under the fence at midnight
City of broken streets, big box stores and broken houses
beside the red-wheel barrow Williams insisted we see for the first time
City where you find yourself and lose yourself over and over again (76)

“What remains” for this disillusioned but somehow invigorated speaker is the “Holy Trinity of   coffee, fries and burgers, hissing like/lovers” (Ibid).
Here is a poetry collection that juxtaposes classical and modern traditions as returning to the poet-speaker’s homeland of Calabria, Italy as well as offering a unique immigrant slant on the city of Winnipeg itself.

The post Book review of “Morning After You” by Carmelo Militano appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

gillian harding-russell

In Verge, Monahan writes slender verses that carry a MacEwenesque self-discovery and wisdom. Just as MacEwen associated with ‘magic animals’ and talismans as an extension of her Jungian-conceived consciousness, so Monahan identifies with the fox figure in a series of “verges” or prayers that run through the collection. The term “verge” indicates some brink of discovery through pain—as on the verge of tears—or experience, which Monahan often conceives as a physical landscape. Interspersed with these verges, Monahan writes about family members in terse verses where small details evoke whole lives.
Although these intermittent prayers dubbed “verges” supply the title for the poetry collection as a whole, the word “verge” appears in “verge 8,” which I will call the ‘title verge’ for this reason. Here the poetic phrasing once again recalls MacEwen’s finely chiselled, sparse verses:

I am on the verge
of some understanding
some thing I am meant to know

(102)

“Dark Pines under Water” with its Jungian depths of consciousness comes to mind. Rather than using the landscape as analogue and psychological metaphor, Monahan reflects her delight in the nimble and alert creature of the fox itself: “I dream of the small hello / of your ears / pricked and listening” (102).
In spite of a mystical tendency in which the speaker identifies with the fox figure throughout these ‘verges,’ Monahan can be down to earth. In the poem “my mother’s name was Nancy,” the speaker describes her mother as a young woman who “pinched her cheeks / to give them colour” and “met a young French man / who broke her heart” (16).

Later she married dad in a long satin gown
fifty tiny buttons down her back.

(16)

Monahan’s interest (tinged with amusement?) in the number of buttons at the back of her mother’s dress adds a no-nonsense human quality to the poem that contrasts with the more elusive voice in the verges. In that parallel thematic series, the poet is seen to follow her poetic-of-the-artist-as-vessel for inspiration, as expressed in the poem “not I”:

it’s the fire woman
who turns and turns
in the shiver of silver flames
words sparking from her mouth.

(62)

Here the “fire woman’ who “turns and turns” at once evokes MacEwen’s dance and echoes Yeats’ similar application of the image.
Not only does Monahan have a minute and particular musical sense that is heard inside and at the edges of her verses, but also a humanity that is warm without sentimentality. The ending in the poem about the speaker’s mother “my mother’s name was Nancy” ends with the portrait of a woman of strong character who does not give up, causing her husband displeasure while she repairs the eaves when dying of cancer:

She stayed home as long as she could
showing me how to make seven layer dinner
when to add the fabric softener
two weeks before Christmas
in the middle of the night

(18)

The poem’s ending, with the doctor’s reported words, is moving: “Nancy it’s time we took you to the hospital now…” To which her mother “after hesitation” replies “yes.”
Similarly, the poem dedicated to the speaker’s father, “dad’s angel” shares this hard-headed quality. Monahan begins the poem matter-of-factly: “No Billy Graham angel / all glory and grace,” her father is not without flaws. In fact, he keeps playboy magazines under the bed, drinks beer with his buddies, and “loved the heft of a good gun.” Monahan builds up to the poem’s ending with a storyteller’s grace and gentle irony, stating that her father’s angel didn’t hold her father in his arms or smile a “beatific smile”:

Dad’s angel just showed up
said c’mon Bill, let’s go.

(32)

Contrasting with the more cultured elements in the verges with their nature imagery and the fox image, there is this no-nonsense human quality to the family poems that have a folksy quality.
Monahan, who is writer-in-residence for the wards Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert and facilitates the Writing For Your Life group with the Canadian Mental Health Association is a strong advocate for individuals with psychological afflictions. That her experience may be firsthand is suggested in the poem “there was a time.” The speaker recounts, “I was a thin walking stick of pain,” and likens her experience to that of an “insect” “wearing my exoskeleton / living on lettuce leaves.” That she skips two or three days eating and “the lighter I became / the less weighted I felt” tells us the speaker is afflicted with a form of anorexia:

food pulled me down
into the overfull lap
of my father and grandmother
fat with disapproval

(34)

The appeal of this new state of being as a “will-o-the-wisp-woman” or “a magic wand” becomes clear as the speaker expresses the desire to “tap three times” and make herself disappear. There is a mystical suggestion in this poem that, while about family, seems to have more in common with the more introspective verges.
Perhaps the most moving poem about family comes in the long poem about the speaker’s sister who suffers a stroke (“the word for every thing”). In an amusing dramatic tableau, the speaker teaches her sister words that she has lost, and in her sister’s fumbling calls her “the poet.”

the coyote in the field is papaya
slippery ice is itchy
            my slip on shoes are coupons

(95)

The mistaken words do indeed have the freshness of malapropism that make the speaker see the world anew, but her sister’s response is that she is still the poet: “no she says and hugs me you” (95).
In the final poem “verge 10,” the fox reappears as a figure of redemption that in identification with the woman “waits in the forest’s calm palm”: “I want to be / like you   unhurried and graceful / accepting of what comes next” (118).
Here is an elegant collection held together lyrically with the fox running through the forest, and the speaker divided between her introverted and extroverted selves as she celebrates life in its beauty amid family losses while also striving to come to terms with herself.

The post Book review of “Verge” by Lynda Monahan appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

In A Private Mythology, Stephen Morrissey writes poems that are obliquely confessional while delightfully clothed in the subterfuge of metaphor.  The first part includes a series of poems that share the metaphor of a “coat” for guises of the self, and in the second part astrological signs are applied to eons of civilization as they reflect stages in the speaker’s life. In the third part, the poems return more discursively to family and remarriage with his new wife as lover. Here each poem is a at once miscellaneous and a gem while it maintains the feel of the rest of the collection, echoing subjects and motifs from earlier parts in the collection.  Interestingly, the cover design “Chysalis var 2 “created by Ottlie Douglas-Fodor was inspired when that artist attended a launch of one of Morrissey’s chapbooks, and indeed the design is at once apt and playful in its own right.  The figure with a blanket on his back – suggestive of a  mythological icon – works well for this collection, which improvises its own metaphors and accumulating mythologies. Here is a poet who writes simple words using novel figures but in cadences loaded with quiet aural effects that carry their own peculiar power.

In first part, the coat metaphor provides the basis for a series and a powerful start to the collection. From “The poet’s coat” that “gives warmth/ and provides a shadow” (14)  to the speaker’s mother’s mink fur coat that was confined to closets but intended for fun (and that evokes a period of “madness” in the speaker’s life (18), the poet moves to other kinds of “coats,” including my favourite, “The Coat of My Inner Self.” “You are not as tired of this coat / as I am, and yet I wear it/ obsessively,” the speaker begins:

I am well-covered
in the rags of my complexes,
a wraith of the streets and shadows
in a coat that I have worn since birth. (21)

From the Freudian suggestion of “complexes” in these lines, Morrissey mixes seriousness with an iota of the mundane while he goes on to remark how it is“stained hamburgers /and French Fries” and about how “threadbare” the coat and how it “cannot keep out the cold (Ibid.).” There is a self-irony and humour to this poem with its smooth eliding lines that draws the reader right in.

Similarly, I am drawn by the mythopoeic “Visits from Psyche,” with its dramatisation of a dream in psychological terms. Having the trappings of a real girl, Psyche drives a volkswagen through puddles, and when the dreaming speaker complains that the car might stall with the water spray, she throws the keys in his face, and they hit his glasses, blinding him.  Even as the rest of the poem unravels the speaker’s interpretation of the dream for the reader (in perhaps less satisfying terms), we are offered verses with the suggestion of a quip:

and the key to open a lock,
a mystery to which I was blind,
even wearing glasses. (26)

Significantly, the second part of the poem offers images of pain and guilt, of being oppressed and of suffering. From the injured kangaroo in the dream (that must be returned to a backyard containing a bear) to the wounded horse with the reproachful eye that watches the speaker (in the manner of the injured horse in Robert Browning’s “Childe Harolde to a Darke Tower Came”), we are allowed a glimpse into the speaker’s anguish in the complexity of his emotions.

In the second part, Morrissey applies astrological signs to the various eons of civilization as they provide a macro-metaphor for something like the stages of a man’s life. From the beginning “Age of Virgo ( 13,000 to 10,800 B. C.), which is seen as “the time /of silence, of/  the soul’s gestation,” to the “Age of Leo” (1,0800 – 8,640 B. C.), in which the lion “is born in the heart” and “walks at night/ enters dreams (38),” we perhaps see a movement from an uneventful childhood to a period of becoming and passion at adulthood; but while the “Age of Cancer” talks about caves that are both places of gestation and death, the “Age of Gemini” echoes a middle-agedness in the manner of Rip Van Winkle that is hard to mistake and brilliantly concise:

I fell asleep
and woke at middle age,
so many years spent
in deepening sleep
until released (42).

From the pleasing ring of these lines, we move to the “Age of Taurus” in which the Minotaur-like figure acquires power while his hanging genitals appear as “the shadow/of one in the moonlight/ of one/ whose body was a man’s “(43). The poet remarks on our commonality as humans in these terms:“we each/ have one song/ one chorus/repeating/our need for love (Ibid.).” The dramatization of the remaining ages with their intricate iconography moves into the broader arena while the present implies a history on which it is built.

The third section shares the confessional nature of the first section but is written more discursively. Here the speaker has found love in a new marriage, and both the poems “For My Love” and “Anniversary” are lyrical and touching. In the former, the speaker sees a picture of his wife as a young women when he did not know her, and feels that it is infidelity to love a twenty year old (even if it is his own wife when she was younger) since he has fallen in love with her when she was much older. “Anniversary” is a song that bursts forth most spontaneously with the lines breaking into new images, each with metaphysical tenuousness joined by one point of similarity, with every turn of line:

A flock
of birds flying south
move as one mind
or a single wing turning in the air,
caught on the wind, swooping,
then turning over like
a page in a book (69).

Later in the poem, the imagery shifts to include a comparison of their love to “honey/ in the hive,” with the beat of wings now around an implied queen bee like a “bird wing (Ibid.).”

Employing a similar metaphysical-type image of a “thread” for “memory” in “Hanging by a thread” (the last poem in the collection), Morrissey uses the metaphor to suggest the precariousness of family as it is held together by the single thread of memory from a shared past.

And then the thread
breaks making the sound
of grief & disappointment,
oh brother, son, father,
& mother, former families
we said we loved,
and into the darkness
we fall, as though our past
never existed (87).

Most powerfully, the poem closes with clanging, abstract tableau of “oh broken strings,/ twanging instrument,/ banging drums & a bird somewhere/ out there among the damned (Ibid.).

gillian harding-russell is a poet and writer from Saskatchewan. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan, and wrote her dissertation on postmodern Canadian Poetry. For may years she was poetry editor for Event, and was a regular reviewer for Prairie Fire Online Review of Books. She has three poetry books and several chapbooks published.  Poems have recently come out in the anthologies I Found It At The Movies, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson (Guernica, 2014) and Between the Lines, eds. Dwayne Brenna and Lacey Thiessen (University of Saskatchewan Press, 2014). More work is forthcoming in Descant, The Antigonish Review, Fieldstone and Freefall. The long poem “Missions: Then and Now” was a finalist for the Thomas Morton Award, and will be published in The Puritan, Issue 27 (Fall 2014) .

The post gillian harding-russell’s Book Review of “A Private Mythology” by Stephen Morrissey appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Redshift
By Patrick White
Ekstasis, 2013.
ISBN: 978 1771710275
$24.00

In Redshift, Patrick White attempts epic proportions while his speaker reflects on the human drama against a cosmic backdrop. Interweaving fields of imagery that range from Greek mythology and astronomy to biology and neurology lends a grandeur to poems full of rhapsody, despair, or humour as they consider the human condition. Drawing on Prometheus as the mythic over-reacher who steals fire from the gods to assist mankind, White’s view is experiential and existential. With metaphors that shift planes from one verse to the next, there is a tortuous quality to his poetry that reflects some life-threatening situation with heightened awareness and often angst.

In the first poem, “A good day to enjoy being lost, adrift,” (9) the existential tenor feels almost hearty. A spider web image employs imagery drawn from biology that mirrors similar fields of imagery in neurology and astronomy:

It didn’t take me long to learn by living me
to be afraid of everyone else. That every moment of life
was death-defying in extremis, a highwire act
on a spinal cord stretched like a single filament of a spider-web
between one abyss and the next. (9)

Ordinary life has required a dare-devil attitude for the speaker to survive. He concludes that he must respect others for the same bravery that must be required of them to meet life’s challenges. Far from setting himself apart in this charged relationship with life, White in “I don’t care if you remember me or not” tells the reader that he does not concern himself about fame, and laments in death only that he will find himself separated from humanity and, hence, alone:

There are gaps, there are voids and abysses,
there are neuronic synapses, godheads, bardo states
and black holes we all have to bridge sooner or later.
Love’s one of them. Death’s another. And life’s
a country road with so many potholes it’s shell-shocked. (74)

A shift from cosmic abyss to pothole marks one of these changes in metaphoric plane characteristic of White’s verse. We notice how these shifts have the effect of taking one on a mind journey in which one feels as if one has entered a clearing where a new perspective is offered on what has been said before.

In “The highs are fewer as I’ve grown,” (96) White talks about revelation. His interest in the mind’s surprises while applying his poetic techniques of shifting metaphors and enjambment captures the experience of discovery:

I’ve always been intrigued by the mystery
of the way the mindstream bends like a wavelength
around the corner of its own going
and what seemingly appears out of nothing
like poppies full of dreams in the blood. (96)

Again, an image from neurology finds common-ground in one drawn from physics, and we sense a grand panorama unfolding in one’s mind. Like Dylan Thomas, White draws metaphors out of disparate fields of imagery to create resonant impressions (that transcend the individual images used to create the impression), and thus, he puts meaning through twists and turns to arrive at evolved ways of seeing.

In keeping with the experiential and existential stance elsewhere in Redshift, pain becomes an incentive for creativity as in “Eleven seas of awareness in every drop”:

I strum on my spine
like bruised guitar in the corner, trying
to come up with a bridge to the chorus
of a new string theory that might help explain

why I act so much like a cosmic membrane
with a broken ear drum. (105)

“Creatively playing in agony” (105), the speaker employs imagery as intricate as it is sinister in its convolution (reminding the reader of the “spider web” (9) across the cosmos in the first poem). Throughout Redshift, a sense of despondency and despair is not unmitigated by humour as the playful and ironic juxtaposition of the “broken ear drum” (105) analogy in relation to the more grandiose astronomical “string theory” suggest. Nevertheless, in only one poem in the collection do I sense the speaker’s personal comfort and happiness, and that poem is about a kitten which the speaker adopts from a friend, “My Feral Kitten, Ripple” (107-109). Even this poem, however, reaches beyond its own boundaries to evoke a profound and evocative image relating to the human condition:

If Kafka’s right, we all lie in the lap of a vast intelligence
but it doesn’t pet me the way I stroke you
as if I were first violin in a string band on a streetcorner
playing music on your melodic fur. (109)

Just as pain is an incentive for creativity in “Eleven seas of awareness in every drop” (104-106), despair becomes another kind of inspiration for writing poems in “Come to me in rags of blue fire” (130-131). Here, bathos mixes with pathos as the poet-with self-irony (in identification with the speaker who has lost his faith) invokes the comic image of the “goat whose piety is a broken horn” (131). These imaginative shifts and the originality of the verses dazzle but at the same time leave one a little stunned:

lift him up in the rain above the sphinx in the desert ripe with diamonds,
and let him know, softly remind him, confess and confine him
like a cemetery covered in a keyboard of snow
until he confesses there’s an asylum in the heart of chaos
that sings to itself like an emergency constellation. (131)

Not only does White share Dylan Thomas’s habit of applying freely associated metaphors (whereby he seemingly pulls diverse images out the hat of his subconscious) to create a composite impression, but he also shares with Thomas certain aural effects that lend musicality to his verses.

Redshift is a thick collection of poems (186 pages), well integrated by patterns of imagery and theme, with some of the most striking and unique metaphors that seem born out of some personal and overwhelming struggle. Referring to the astronomical phenomenon of a star appearing red when it retreats from the viewer, ‘redshift’ encapsulates a feeling of life’s retreat after a spectacular (painful and/or full of angst?) fulfilment. Although at times I found the verse difficult while the imagery changes gears too many times for me to absorb their combined significance, and often the lines ran overlong and seem verbose, here is a poet with a charged vision and much to say about what it is to be human and to struggle.

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