Eight Poetry Collections from Canadian Presses You May Have Missed in 2021–2022
or Gold Star Societies Can Blind You to Other Forms of Light
As David Orr states in his scintillating and snippy collection of essays and reviews called You, Too, Could Write a Poem, literary reputation is bestowed most randomly and not always on the most deserving. After all, prize committees aren’t made up of Apollos but of “regular old human beings” muddling within the strange public nature of poetry we have defined in contemporary culture as “part profession, part gaggle of coteries, part contest hustle.” And thus, inevitably, amazing books get erased and essential poets vanish because they don’t please the “right” people at the “right” time. If you look at any list of “Books to Watch for” the year after, you will readily notice that you didn’t hear of 80 percent of them again, a few more might have garnered reviews, and one or two will have received the acknowledged awards that keeps them in the eye and ear for at least a few months more. This is reality, not cynicism. It’s even worse for novelists, say, who have so many more bucks and thus, pressure, riding upon them. I’m a reader before I’m a writer and my work as a reviewer is core to my feeling that I’m making more and better poetry matter by caring enough to critically embrace it. So, for your delectation and hopefully purchasing action, here are eight titles from 2021 and 2022 that worthy Canadian presses released that most certainly didn’t receive the reads, not to mention the accolades, necessary to propel them to a more central position in this weird literary climate we all, however uncomfortably, inhabit.
1. Marguerite Pigeon’s The Endless Garment: a pocket epic in five collections (Wolsak & Wynn, 2021).
Poets don't often acknowledge fashion or sports or finances it seems so Marguerite Pigeon's The Endless Garment (slashed into five sections: Pre-Season, Fall/Winter, Resort, Spring/Summer and Diffusion) is a refreshingly strange foray into a realm too infrequently glimpsed within our genre. Her language is torqued and engaging and willing to delve. To wit: “Dolly Parton: whose dimple. Whose by dint of. / Whose patina. Whose many-coloured throat.”
2. Margaret Christakos’s Dear Birch (Palimpsest Press, 2021).
A long-time denizen of CanLit who hasn’t entirely had whatever a “due” is shines in Dear Birch’s leaping couplets, almost ghazal in feel and loose in perception as they lunge from trees to lovers to weather to social media to the GO train. Christakos is utterly adept at the narrative mode while still playing incessantly with language and emotion: “if someone came in / the night & decapitated you, dear birch, & / your reign over the patio, if someone should enter to burglar your branches or worse, / slice your trunk and grind the spine of it - / she would vomit.”
3. Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021).
This powerful collection from a writer more renowned as a novelist is bursting at its seamlessness with allusive illuminations of the Empire's absurdities, the herd mentality's doom and the burning turbulence of history in Asia. Lai offers slices of haiku-style summations and epistles of energy that address the awful disposabilities of the female body, the Hungry Ghost's eternal returnings and even a Polar Bear panning cap melting. The poems yawp, essentially, with all the once-silenced “gashes of the past.”
4. Sharon McCartney’s Villa Negativa: A Memoir in Verse (Biblioasis, 2021).
I’m an aficionado of much of Sharon McCartney’s work and in this unique memoir she provides a plethora of doors through which to enter her accounts: emails, notes on nature, texts, comments from friends, allusions to things read or listened to like Allan Watts or Bach and endless self-questionings. Her rhythmic knowledge of how to texture and pace a narrative is bang on and lines like these about anorexia sock the heart: “It's not lust. I do not want them. / I want to be them. Flat. Sharp. / Clothes loose on my limbs.”
5. Micheline Maylor’s The Bad Wife (University of Alberta Press, 2021).
The Bad Wife is an incantation of what-was, a litany of what-ifs, a sorcery of c'est la vie through which ghosts of Sexton and Shakespeare whisper, amid resonances of such living (and tough) poets as Chase Twichell and Susan Musgrave. Maylor investigates the construction of being a woman within patriarchal institutions and is punchy and unafeard, writing in forms from the long poem to quirky hymns. And this? Ow: “The last time you tried to touch me, I flinched. I think / how to let go? Easy. Drop a snow globe.”
6. Délani Valin’s Shapeshifters (Nightwood Editions, 2022).
This memorable debut collection is a testament to how personal accountings of travail, history and postmodernity's “pastiche collages” of Indigenous identity can achieve greater potency as they are filtered through traces of myth and fable. Sounds serious, and it is, but Valin also interposes such moments of aural levity as the “man who tans / his leathery balls on his balcony” amid the stirring landscapes of this astutely composed collection, its prominence possibly undermined by the award-winning Emily Riddle release in the same season (as alas tends to happen in Canpo).
7. Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s A is for Acholi. (Buckrider Books, 2022).
A is for Acholi gives readers what they need to hope for more in books of poetry: a new experience, a range of different ways of utilizing languages, an entrance into another series of worlds. Bitek’s excavations of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness offers the ear intense chants and the mind an engagement with the Black diaspora’s pain and joys as she sings in her alphabetical hymn: “U is for Acholi / U is for cartography of stories / U is for the relationship between an apple & sin & a curse.”
8. Robert Priest’s If I didn’t love the river (ECW Press, 2022).
Robert Priest has long been a Toronto constant as a poet, writer and musician, but he operates, as diversely talented and non-academic creators do today, more from the margins. And that’s okay. There are few poets who can articulate love, loss and the political like Priest who, in his latest compilation, segues readily within the barometers of the heart, from political lyrics to metaphysical sonnets like “On Star Divination”: “We guide them home when they are lost, our love so luminous / they can't avert their eyes. And yes, oh yes - stars wish on us.”
Catherine Owen is a poet, bassist, writer, tutor, editor, photographer, film props adventurer who lives in Edmonton, AB. Visit Marrow Reviews for more.
