|
|
- EDITORIAL
- MEDITERRANEAN POETS: Achour Fenni
- Fatima Naoot
- Rana al-Tonsi
- Sabina Messeg
- Tal Nitzan
- Simone Inguanez
- Samira Negrouche
- Adrian Grima
- ICELANDIC POETS: Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir
- Sigurdur Pálsson
- Adalsteinn Ásberg Sigurdsson
- WELSH-BELGIAN POETRY WORKSHOP
- POETRY REVIEWS:Softly Creaking Englishes
- FOUND IN TRANSLATION
POETRY REVIEWS:Softly Creaking Englishes
J. Mark Smith: Notes for a Rescue Narrative
Oolichan, 2007.
Reviewed by Janice Mathie-Heck
J. Mark Smith’s Notes for a Rescue Narrative is an astonishingly fresh collection of evocative poems which conjure up images in nature and of places in the midst of it: clear water, whining mosquitoes, poplars, the moon, the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, the Nahanni River, Fort Simpson, the Athabasca Valley, aboriginal Deh Cho trappers, the village of Field, ice-fields, sunlight, dragonflies, grasses, lily pads, pines, beaver, bear, moose, the Mackenzie Plains, muskeg, moraines, columbines, butterflies, alluvial fans, jays, Mount Stephen, swans, salmon, loons, Saskatoon berries, birch, mountain ash, the vastness of the tundra, evergreens, kelp, monoliths, horses… He sets human relationships against the sweeping backdrop of that natural world of the Canadian North and its history. He focuses on traveling and moving forward -- walking, flying, driving, canoeing -- and existence is pared down to a nomadic search for sustenance, both physical and emotional. His poetry is deceptively simple, as he is a master of metre and rhyme. Some of his verse reminded me of Kipling. He reveals everyday experience in sharply perceptive, profound ways, and contrasts the complex technology of urban life with the harsh demands of survival in the wilderness.
In the poem, “Walk”, a destitute man dressed in rags lives his life by choice, and is far closer to nature and freedom in the city than are the crowds of commuters that he passes on the sidewalk. It seems futile for everyone to be rushing forward by various means, as they will all eventually reach the same destination. “Out of an Airport” compares the sound of a Cessna engine with the drone of a mosquito, and we witness the primitive Dene hunter listening to recorded humming sounds on his tape player. Nature and technology mix, and sometimes clash. In “Burgess Shale Tub Toy Meditation”, the poet muses on how the bright, plastic water toys are imitations of evolving prehistoric crustaceans, as he sits high on a mountaintop in a makeshift bathtub:
It is nostalgia runs a pulse through hopes
of days live once as fossils in that shale,
and sends me kittening after my own tail.
In “Real Flight”, he captures the fragility of a float plane caught in blinding mist, and yet the pilot skillfully navigates through the threatening weather and relies on his knowledge of the area and a bit of luck:
and this tin-can sentence cracks in the thread of utility,
[…]
[...] With unspeakable tact,
he puts us down on the lake.
Man copies nature, as in the wings and pontoons of an airplane, but the bird’s, the mosquito’s, and the dragonfly’s design cannot be matched.
Life is seen as mundane, and yet there is comfort and solace as well as threat and malice in the familiar. In “She Will not Have It”, a widow continues to prune the trees that her late husband once cared for. She moves through the cycle of sorrow, regret, and fortitude, and honours his memory by this act. In “Sweetness”, the ordinary act of digging potatoes and casting them into a pot doesn’t seem significant until we learn that a farmer’s frustration at not reaching his dreams causes him to vent his anger on his wife, who in turn, rationalizes her plight. In “A Few Tasks”, death is sudden, unexpected, ordinary, and no one knows when it will come. Some of the children,
wanting a few tasks,
eager to begin
may perhaps meet the same fate.
There is irony in his words. In “A Winter’s Day”, due to inclement weather, he is stuck for five frustrating hours in a jet with his fellow passengers. Max Sebald, in contrast, on a clear and perfect day, travels by car on a familiar road and “guns into the all-too-soon”, dying, with no delay. Memory is a recurring theme, as Smith reflects on the sharp poignancy of losing his father. In “Voice that Came across the Water”, he says that he is
in a trench on the far circle of a shell-burst
of remembering.
In “Equipment II”, he finally comes to terms with that loss, is able to resolve the issue by burying his father’s skis, poles, and climbing helmet in the mountains of eastern California, and encounters “a chaos of welcome”, rather than what he feared would be an unbearable task.
Smith has his finger on the pulse of the essence of life on this planet. In “Of Luck”, he tells us that sexual desire and the will to propagate our species is what propels us forward. There is chaos and pure chance in the universe, but
swans, too, paddle in pairs.
Black husks from the fall’s salmon run strew the shore.
Women’s bellies will continue to swell, and children will keep being born. The aboriginal Dene woman walks with her baby strapped to her breast, just as the woman of European ancestry walks with her child in a Snuggli. People huddle at night in their tents of moose hide, listening for the sounds of the bear in the brush. People lie awake in their brick houses, straining to hear the footfall of the intruder on the step. Human experience and fear are eternal, and everyone relaxes with relief as “something approaches and goes away.”
Life is a journey – a river. In “A River Story at Forty”, Smith tells us that the current
[...] will soon slow
to shallows, braidings, and yes
meanderings, [...]
[...] we’re all running
the same wave over again,
and steering through it too. [...]
wary of dénouement, [...]
tuned to all water music,
to the singing of what is,
as you have known it, among
those who’ve heard you, and sent their
own murmur on. Laughter, love,
dissent: flown past: doubled back.
(Tell it again.) You were born!
In all its strange twists of fate, we are all on the journey together -- in different times, in different places. The river is a metaphor for celebration of the “dumb luck” that we – out of chance couplings, out of primitive germ cells, out of millennia of evolution (and maybe a touch of the divine) -- have the good fortune to share, to tell stories, to witness, and to revel in the flow of the water as we splash, float, and paddle on it. But it can just as easily turn on us and swallow us up. Smith captures the bittersweet paradox of what it means to be alive; but for now, the ripples and the ebb and flow of our conversations “have the afternoon sun on ‘em.”
Janice Mathie-Heck is a teacher, poet, translator, editor and literary critic who lives in Calgary, Alberta. With Robert Elsie, she is the co-translator of the Albanian writer Fatos Kongoli's novel The Loser, Seren, 2007.