Another Thursday, another poem. This time from Alden Nowlan (another of the greats).

The Word

Though I have the gift of tongues
and can move mountains,
my words are nothing
compared with yours,
though you only
look up from my arms
and whisper my name.

This is not pride
because I know
it is not
my name that you whisper
but a sign
between us,
like the word
that was spoken
at the beginning
of the world
and will be spoken again
only when the world ends.

This is not that word
but the other
that must be spoken
over and over
while the world lasts.

Tears,
laughter,
a lifetime!
All in one word!

The word you whisper
when you look up
from my arms
and seem to say
my name.

Reading Margaret Visser's The Gift of Thanks: The Roots, Persistence, and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social Ritual was a delightful experience. A detailed book about being thankful, about gratitude in all its complexities, about the importance of gratitude for the stable functioning of society. Visser makes it all a feast of discovery (the wealth of information included is wonderful!) and terribly relevant. [Side note: I use the word relevant frequently when talking about a book I enjoy. Probably because it is one of the virtues so many books lack. The good ones are usually relevant -- though they don't really have to be ('good' is always relevant)-- the mediocre or bad ones could at least try to be . . . to justify their existence.]

Visser looks at the ritual and meaning of thanking across cultures, encompassing various historical periods, and includes varied philosophical approaches. And manages them all with a grace that defies the imagination. It's a comprehensive treatment of this subject. And a truly fascinating one.

Two more quotes . . . from a section in which she expands on the relationship between gratitude and thinking:

"Truth, for Heidegger, is not correctness, but rather what is otherwise hidden from us but now revealed -- through thinking. The etymology of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, is 'not being the victim of oblivion, lethe.' (Lethe was the river in the underworld that caused those who drank from it to forget.) Thinking and philosophy have the task of revealing. Real thinking takes place in the thanc ['the gathered, all-gathering, thinking that recalls'], and it is what makes us human: the more thoughtless we are, the less human."

"Like thinking, remembering is a grateful action . . . The supreme thanks would be thinking -- remembering the gift of our being. And utter thanklessness would be thoughtlessness."

More from Visser's The Gift of Thanks:

"So gratitude depends upon education, and specifically education of the character, as parents acknowledge when they spend so much effort teaching it to their children."

"Superiority, narcissism, a sense of entitlement, and selfishness are all opposites of gratitude. And so are thoughtlessness and forgetfulness. 'One squeezes the orange and at once discards it' went the hard-hearted utilitarian maxim of Gracian, with its implicit understanding that this is no way to treat a human being."

Reading Margaret Visser's The Gift of Thanks and coming across fascinating bits of info and insight:

"German danken ('to thank') is related to denken (English 'to think'). 'Thank' and 'think' are one: a person given what he or she wants does not just grab the thing that satisfies, but takes the trouble to think about who gave it and what this giving means. Gratitude is not only an emotion, but also a matter of thought -- a form of awareness."

Also, "The English word smile has the same Indo-European root as milagro [miracles]." Love that.

And I find it interesting that she links Hobbes' views with King Lear's Edmund.

Later on she writes about related gestural manifestations like the tradition of kowtow, about the origins of bowing and curtsying:

"In the Middle Ages men knelt on two knees to God and on one to their superiors; women knelt on both knees to both God and human beings. Ceremonial kneeling to other people was known in the sixteenth century as a courtesy, which was behaviour refined enough to be the habit of courtiers. Bowing (the word rhymed with rowing) meant gracefully lowering the body by bending one or both knees.

By the nineteenth century the bow (now rhyming with bough) came to require rigid knees and bending the torso forward from the waist only. 'Courtesying,' shortened to 'curtsying,' now meant lowering the body by bending both knees -- with adjustments contributed by the feet -- and simultaneously increasing one's width by spreading one's skirts. This gesture became the female equivalent of a bow. . . It has been suggested that curtsying is inherently more submissive than bowing because it lowers the whole body."

Such a great read so far!

Playful, poignant, with a touch of the philosopher, Robert Moore's Figuring Ground delivers fresh personal snapshots and relevant tongue-in-cheek observations about life, art and . . . well . . . everything in between. I was looking forward to this new collection (having enjoyed his two previous works of poetry) and it did not disappoint. It is neither 'more of the same' nor is it a departure from his style. It blends the new with the familiar in a way that is perfectly paced, spaced, and parcelled out.

What Moore does so well -- taking an image and twisting the absurdity out of it until it becomes moving and/or profound -- is still evidenced in poems like "Earth's First Line of Demesne" (about aliens being greeted by a herd of cows) or "The Other Woman Constitutional" (in which the speaker muses on the advantages and disadvantages of taking on an 'other woman'). . . and a whole section devoted to excerpts from "The Golden Book of Bovinities." Wonderful!

Some bovine wisdom: "Every cow carries the entire history of civilization / around all day in its mouth. It tastes like grass."

And

"Every cow is a poet of one thing.
Some are poets of the weight
of an instant's shadow on grass,
others of the way certain frog ponds
pull needles from stars. But only
when we gather together in stillness
do the real poems come. . . endless
breathing arrangements."

Ultimately, what really struck me about this collection was the more serious tone. I'm not really sure if it is (if one did a poem by poem comparison) more serious, but it feels that way when reading the collection. And I think it works well. There seems almost an unmasked quality to this collection that I found engaging.

To read some samples from this collection you can visit his site. And here's a favourite of mine from Figuring Ground:

Tonight by Robert Moore

At this hour I think of all the other lovers
bent over their poems

at a task that asks as much
as the crafting of watch from flower.

Or flower from watch. And I'm thinking
of you, the blossom of your ear pressed

to my chest in bed, listening to me
translate those poems I sent from written

to said; how in the throw of a single lamp
the way through and beyond seemed so clear

I wished all the lovers and their poems well,
a wish that started and stopped

with my heart's struggle to keep perfect time
within the scent and warmth of your attention.

Already that night seems like
such a long time ago. So much so

all the lovers and their poems
are back where they belong: together

and alone on the darkling middle ground
between beginning and end.

From The Divine Comedy: Paradise by Dante:

O grace abounding and allowing me to dare
to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light,
so deep my vision was consumed in It!

I saw how it contains within its depths
all things bound in a single book by love
of which creation is the scattered leaves:

Having just finished The Divine Comedy for the first time (I'd read bits of it before and all of the Inferno section), I was struck by how political it was and how interestingly troubled with questions of salvation as regards the 'pagans' or non-Christians (Virgil being Dante the Pilgrim's guide throughout until he reaches Beatrice and Heaven). This certainly isn't the religious faith of my upbringing (which was Protestant), but there are the inevitable touchstones of common belief. I particularly liked the above quote (reminiscent of Donne . . . or, really, the other way around). And the various saints likened to flowers, with the angels as bees. Wonderful image. Made me think of Milton's Pandaemonium, only its reverse.

And there were sections that made me think of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy with the blending of Classical myth with Christian theology. So medieval; I'm reading Lewis's The Discarded Image which talks about the medieval world view -- I love it when reading choices intersect.

It feels like a poetry kind of day (perhaps every Thursday should be a poetry day, Thursdays being rather dull in my neck of the woods). Today I'm in the mood for some John Thompson (one of the best Canadian poets of all time!).

This poem is taken from his incomparable Stilt Jack, a collection of thirty-eight ghazals that really need to be read as a whole, but alas . . . I can't, of course, reproduce the whole thing here.**

This one is no. XXVII:

You have forgotten your garden (she said)
how can you write poems?

That things go round and again go round.
In the middle of the journey . . .

Folly:
the wildflowers grow anyway.

I wait for a word, or the moon, or whatever,
an onion, a rhythm.

All the rivers look for me,
find me, find me.

The small stone in my hand weighs years:
it is dark.

To turn, and remember, that
is the fruit.



** In Stilt Jack Thompson writes an explanation of the ghazal and what he is intending to do with the form. He writes, the "link between couplets (five to a poem) is a matter of tone, nuance: the poem has no palpable intention upon us. It breaks, has to be listened to as a song: its order is clandestine."

It's a great title. And a good story. And I found myself becoming increasingly involved in the tragic and mysterious life of Brannagh Maloney (to be perfectly honest, I had difficulty putting it down after breakfast and just kept right on reading into the afternoon). Let the Shadows Fall Behind You by Kathy-Diane Leveille (and you can find her blog here) follows Brannagh as she tries to come to grips with the absences in her life, to understand the people who keep leaving and why.

When her expedition leader (and lover), Nikki, suddenly vanishes Brannagh is forced to come to terms with the mysterious present as well as her troubled past. Her girlhood friends, founders of the Tuatha-de-Danann club (a "self-a-steam" club of sorts), draw her back to the Saint John, NB area to heal and solve the mystery of her mother's murder where she discovers more than she bargained on.

The action shifts back and forth between Brannagh's childhood, her time working as a cataloguer on the ornithology expedition with Nikki, and the present. It is through memory and the ties of family and friends that she is able to solve her past and knit together her present.

Part mystery, part romance, all beautiful prose, the novel suffers a bit from the many different narrative threads. There's a lot going on here and it doesn't all come together as neatly as one might like in 270some pages. On the other hand, the prose is a pleasure to read. Leveille knows how to put descriptions and characters together, and she's not too shabby at believable dialogue either. I found this an enjoyable novel to get lost in, and the 'sisterhood' as seen through adult eyes added a necessary tension that kept me turning those pages.

An excerpt:

There was a pale line of lemony light, thin as a slice of paper, on the horizon when Brannagh first spotted Nikki's canoe. Initially, she believed he had been unsuccessful, that it was the cold that made him sit so rigidly and gave his face (he was hatless) its stunned, washed-out blur. But then he drunkenly staggered out and pulled the canoe to shore. He bent down to pick up the tarp, now as thick as the trunk of a tree. Alex fell to his knees and Brannagh took a step back, crooking one elbow and raising it to shield her eyes.

But she could not block out the march. Nikki's slow lurch up the ridge, his arms outstretched, the lower half of his body bent, seeming to move in discordant rhythm to the stiff top half, while the tarp with its heavy weight within seemed to throw his balance off-centre and keep him from ever cresting the ridge. He seemed to struggle without gaining any ground and became a surreal cinematic image, moving yet frozen forever on the black and barren ridge.

Colloquial, quirky, and compelling, Barry Dempster's Love Outlandish* centres love and lust in all its variations, joining slang with figurative language to create an immediacy that is engaging yet thought inducing. This collection will draw you in, rough you up, and send you back into the world marvelling at how much fun it all was. And then you'll return, begging for more.

In the juxtaposition of disparate images, by allowing the colloquial to play about in the fields of the poetic, Dempster repeatedly illustrates dazzling pyrotechnics of line and image and language. Look at these lines (from "Lack of Light"): "the sun suddenly ta-dahs, all / fanfare and ribbons." Or these (from "Willingness"): "Love is nothing // like an expectation, instead / a wham from out of nowhere, / years rippling around us like comic strips."

The elasticity of the imagery he employs is fascinating. Dempster joins images together that are both surprising and delightful. Like the opening line from the poem "Glowing" in which he inverts the expected in one deft move with "The sky has flung open its bedroom windows today."

There are so many examples to choose from, really, to illustrate that this collection is a must-have addition for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. In "The Phone Rings" the sound of a telephone is linked to the drama of opera. In "Yoga Class" Dempster gives us desire and want in a basement, "prayers / spraying in all directions, the scattershot / of fate." Love and germaphobia co-exist in "Oozing," while a "man in the moon gives one / of those wry romantic grins." So much fun!

Here's one of my favourites from this collection (one of the better examples from the long tradition of "Come Live with Me" poems):

Come Live with Me by Barry Dempster

Come live with me, I'd like to share
this watch that doesn't tick, this
TV set that takes the sickness
of the world and wraps it
in sex and show, this chimney
growing taller with each blast of heat,
this window staring at a dying oak
and calling each loss a gorgeous miss.

I want to live closer to the core of
all my things, the springs and screws,
the blinking lights, the seams that separate
the do's from don'ts, the gleam
within the shine. I want to be right here
when you find the perfect word
strayed across the line and learn
the courage it takes to face a brand new story.

Please, come live with me, the sun
with its hundred arms, the steam of the tea
floating from lips, the damp spot on the pillow
where soul squeezed through. I want
the marrow, the stretch, the stirrings of green
deep within your eyes. I want the house
to catch your flame, soak in your perfume,
surrender its bones to the creak
only your feet can play.

Come live with me, I'd like to share this
death without a name, this breathing
that aims to outlast desire, this wholeness
belonging to the both of us, like the loops
and straggles of conversation,
or the soft babble of a kiss.

* yet another great book of poems available from Brick Books!

Currently Listening To: Emma Cook

Just Came Across (via Cormorant Books Blog): Muse Books Reviews
looks like a good place to read about more books!

Recently Read, Enjoyed, and Need To Blog About (i.e. more to come):

• Let the Shadows Fall Behind You by Kathy-Diane Leveille
• Figuring Ground by Robert Moore

Recently Watched and Enjoyed: The Reader. Beautifully presented and staggeringly well acted! Morally complex is an understatement when it comes to this film, though. But I like the questions it raises about guilt, complicity, and shame. I'm not sure how one could more clearly illustrate (in fiction) the devastation of national guilt and individual complicity than this tale of interwoven secrets. I'm thinking it also says a great deal about the power of the written word. And that's a fascinating thread to think about in terms of what goes into constructing a humane society.

Also Recently Watched and Enjoyed, But For Completely Different Reasons: The Deal. A humourous look at Hollywood film-making starring William H. Macy (he also co-wrote the screenplay). It's hilarious in spots and funny throughout.

"Maybe everyone invents the world in order to describe it to someone else." Leaving Earth

Helen Humphreys' first novel, Leaving Earth, centres on the world of aviation in Depression era Toronto. A young female pilot named Willa Briggs is asked by the already famous -- not to mention glamourous and daring -- aviatrix Grace O'Gorman to help her break the endurance record for flight. Meanwhile, a young Jewish girl named Maddy, disillusioned and dissatisfied with the cruelty (antisemitism) and drudgery surrounding her (her parents eke out a living at an amusement park), attaches her imagination and emotions to the romance of Briggs' and O'Gorman's endurance record attempt. Grace O' Gorman's husband is forced to watch while two women try to fly into the history books.

What struck me immediately as I began reading this novel was how, even with her first book, Humphreys knows exactly what she's doing in terms of pacing, characterization, and poetic use of language. The way she places us in a scene with finely spun descriptions! The way the dialogue reads, spot on! How did she manage to excel at all the essentials right away?

This novel has surprises -- twists in the plot, turns of fate and character -- and moments of sheer beauty. The Lost Garden and Coventry are still my favourite Humphreys novels, but this would be a close third.

Excerpts . . .

"Willa smiles back. She is surprised at how emotional she feels, realizes how isolated she was with only Grace's helmet to look at, the shoulders of her overalls. And Grace has only the exposed cylinders, the exhaust pipe, the wires of the engine to gaze out over. She must be glad to see me too, thinks Willa. They are tossed up in the air, a shiny bouquet, and what they have now is each other. Willa looks at Grace and, for the first time, thinks of her not as a magazine photo or a newspaper headline but as someone who is like Willa. Someone who is within reach."

And yet is not within reach. So much about this novel is about what is out of reach, what cannot be grasped no matter how hard one tries. Control is elusive. But there are words . . .

"The cloudy day gives way to a cloudy night. No stars and the moon shimmering in the sky. They circle the harbour, looking down at the lights of the city, the stars of the ground. It's a calm night, not a lot of wind, and they coast slowly around and around their worn groove in the air. At close on midnight Willa throttles back to forty-five miles per hour. The engine drops out of its own sound and for the moment that it takes for her ear to adjust to the new timbre there's just the perfect notes of the wind plucking the rigging wires.

As they're coming over the city side, flying west above the C.N.E., there's a sudden spurt of brightness from below, a wobble of light in the sky beside them and then huge illuminated patterns in the air. It takes Willa a moment to recognize what they are. Letters, words. A telegram of light.

HELLO GIRLS -- KEEP FLYING."

I've been reading Edith Wharton novels again. I've been completely wrapped up in the world of Miss Bart and her 'friends.'

To say the life of Lily Bart is tragic is an understatement. Yet, somehow, Wharton manages to create a character in The House of Mirth who is both frustrating and admirable. One could argue that so much of the tragic events that plague Miss Bart are results of her own flaws, but this is not entirely true. Her flaws become weapons in the hands of her false friends. For all of the characters in the novel have flaws. Not all of the characters are in a position to be punished for them. And I'm sure we've all seen that kind of action in 'real' life.

I cheered Lily on throughout most of the narrative while, at the same time, felt that tug of horror as the inevitable began to unfold. Left by friend after friend, discarded or manipulated, derided by fate, Miss Bart manages to alienate those she needs and placates nothing but her own sense of what is decent. It's horrible and wonderful all at the same time. If I wasn't a Wharton admirer I would be after this read.

The House of Mirth put Wharton on the literary map (in 1905) and I've been wanting to give it a try for some time now. But what a consuming read! I found the tone far more scathing in this novel than in The Age of Innocence when it comes to the depiction of society and what happens when events work against the beautiful but ill-equipped. And since people are people, regardless of shifts in social stratification, this tale is as relevant now as it was a hundred years ago.

Peopled with the likes of beautiful, indecisive, precariously situated Lily Bart, aloof but subtly intrigued (and intriguing) Lawrence Selden, and a do-gooder who idealizes both (Gerty Farish), this novel requires us to examine what happens when herds of humans manipulate reality for personal amusement and/or social power. I just love this book!

A quote or two . . .

On the appearance of belief: "The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets."

A conversation between Miss Bart and Mr. Selden on the meaning of success:

Selden pushed his hat back and took a side-glance at her. "Sucess -- what is success? I shall be interested to have your definition."

"Success?" She hesitated. "Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I suppose. It's a relative quality, after all. Isn't that your idea of it?"

"My idea of it? God forbid!" He sat up with sudden energy, resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. "My idea of success," he said, "is personal freedom."

Listening To: Glenn Gould talking about wanting to be always surrounded by music (and extrapolating from that fact his gratitude at not having been born in the 19th c before radio/recording devices, etc). Yes, I'm watching Glenn Gould: Hereafter, loving the immediacy of it. I'm always fascinated by anything Gould so when Mr. Inkslinger brought this home I was very happy indeed. What I love about Gould -- what comes through so well in this documentary -- is the humanity of his eccentric genius, the accessibility of his personality through sound even after all these years. One of the women being interviewed has just said of Gould's Well-Tempered Clavier, "[He] plays it like a prayer." Indeed.

Just Read and Loved: Helen Humphreys' jewel of a first novel, Leaving Earth, and Barry Dempster's wonderful new book of poems, Love Outlandish. More on both to come.

Recently Read and Enjoyed: Alexandra: The Last Tsarina by Carolly Erickson. Neither particularly in-depth or notably perceptive, this narrative which follows the life of the tragic last Empress of Russia, Alexandra of Hesse, is nonetheless an interesting and moving read -- though I'd still recommend Nicholas & Alexandra by Robert K. Massie over this particular bio. And I'm now moving on to his Romanovs: The Final Chapter. The story of the last Tsar, Tsarina, and their family, is almost unbelievable. That two shy lovers, so misunderstood and somewhat ignorant (as all of us are about a whole variety of things), should have born the brunt of so much anger and the cold efficiency of the revolutionary machine seems narrative overkill, so to speak, and yet so much about reality does smack of overkill. What is the quote? "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." Mark Twain.

Recently Watched and Didn't Hate: Bedtime Stories. In many respects it is a typical Sandler film -- cleaned up and Disneyfied. But I liked the play with the fantastical and the hammy cuteness. And it did contain truly funny bits (everything involving Russell Brand was hilarious) and an engaging, if oft-visited plot (pseudo- loser makes good due to needs of family and belief in and from same).

It's been almost spring here for the last couple of weeks. Almost spring, with deer socializing along roads in the evenings and robins flocking on morning lawns. I'll be glad when it's fully spring. Our yard is, for example, still fully covered by stubborn snow and the anticipation of it melting is all consuming.


But the sun is warmer, and the presence of robins is a promise.

And don't you just love it when something good is handed to you -- perhaps across a table -- on a sunlit, almost spring afternoon? A book of poetry, maybe, that you take home and read in one sitting.

A friend gave me a copy of Molly Peacock's The Second Blush and I'm enjoying it immensely. From teacups to rather obscene gargoyles (and virtually everything in between), the images are arresting and the wordplay is vibrant and inspiring. Now I'll have to go back through it, slowly, and appreciate as well as enjoy.

It looks like April is shaping up to be yet another month of great poetry.

Listening To: Beethoven's String Quartet No 12.

Recently Read and Enjoyed: Noble Gas, Penny Black by David O'Meara. Accessing the glossy, sometimes shallow, land of pop culture is something that seems to characterize a good deal of Canadian contemporary poetry. Not all attempts to blend poetry and pop are equally successful. When a poet who knows what to do with language pulls in references from cultural ephemera, however, as in this collection, the experience is heightened by the fresh images . . . especially when attention is paid to the sound of words as aural images. O'Meara certainly knows how to play those lines. This is what I mean:

North Sea Music by David O'Meara

We left the island.

The ferry's engine beat a deep
drum; the hull palmed

and slapped the crest
and trough of waves, like

a castanet's concave clap.
I hear the chant now;

something to the tune of
never, shush, never, oh, never,

never coming back.

Did you notice how the rhythm of the fourth and fifth lines perfectly echoed the sound of the waves being described? And the sixth line? So much fun!

Currently Reading and Unsure About: The Tsarina's Daughter by Carolly Erickson. So far, it reads like underwhelming teen fiction. I can't quite put my finger on why it has that feel, though. I'm thinking the teen fiction feeling comes from the tone and/or approach of our first person narrator (Tatiana). The impression of being underwhelmed might be a result of the different 'take' on the well-known family dynamic of the last Romanovs (although, admittedly, I have not read a great deal of post-Cold War scholarship on the subject). At any rate, I'm witholding negativity at present. This isn't what I'd hoped for, but who knows what may happen on the next page . . .