Neva
The boat moves through
bloated canals in perpetual twilight. He’s got a girl stuck like a burr to his
shirt. We talk a little. His petulant intelligence reminds me of someone else. We
clink bottles. A drawbridge strung up with lights breaks apart. We motor over
wakes of jostling riverboats. A spray of white fireworks erupts from the
embankment. I laugh, giddy from the extravagance of such staged beauty. We glide
under a footbridge. I reach to slide my hand along a steel beam at its convex.
Montreal poet and translator Melissa Bull’s first trade poetry collection is Rue (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2015). Previously
shortlisted (in manuscript) for the Robert Kroetsch Award, the back cover informs
that “In English, to rue is to
regret; in French, la rue is the
street—Rue’s poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and
motion. Punctuated with neologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the
collection explores the author’s upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood
of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and
loves across North American, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist
father’s struggles with terminal brain cancer.” The poems in Rue are physical, rough and personal,
and tied directly to her Montreal, a city, at least through her poems, not
always capable of either forgiveness or escape. Most of the language in Bull’s
poems is relatively straightforward, focusing on short scenes and plot-driven
narratives, writing out tales of travel with her mother, prostitutes in
Montreal and other short missives designed nearly as love letters/postcards to
and from a city she can’t help but love, can’t help but admit is so deep
beneath her skin that one could simply not be separated from the other. So often
her missives are presented uncritically, simply describing a scene and allowing
the reader to come to their own conclusions:
Plaza
Saint-Hubert Reconciliation Number Double-Digit
Headless mannequins
pivot from their heels and bump into each other in clumsy slowmotion. Pigeonshit
crusts the sidewalks. The odd passerbyer surprised to scope our makeout spot. We’re
on a park bench between a discount houseware shop and a store full of 1950s
child mannequins gussied up in satin first communion wear.
One of the baby
mannequins is black, the others are oh-so-precious white in white.
Where
the poems really shine is when Bull allows the language, as opposed to the
narrative, to propel, which make me wonder why she chooses to write so much of
these as poems instead of short (ie: “postcard”) stories. There are some
intriguing movements and moments of prose in this collection, occasionally
shaped to look like poems, but crafted and considered closer to a collection of
short stories. Does shape or form really matter? Throughout Rue, there are pieces that are quite
remarkable exist alongside poems less so; more often than not, the weaker poems
are the ones in which she engages more with line breaks, somehow looser than
their prose-poem/story counterparts. And yet: I want to see what Bull is really
capable of. This collection merely hints at a far more fearsome power. I would
like to see how that develops. I want more.
Two
Pears
The first poem I sent
him about himself.
It was a postcard. From
Vancouver.
Probably bought at the
art gallery.
Two
pears, with crumbling cheese.
The
sounds of the CBC
Peach
tea
I don’t remember the
rest. I was thinking of a day after high school. In January or February. His girlfriend
was gone maybe singing a dirge. We could be freer without her monitoring the
exchange of our love. (You’re fucking
each other, she said. You have to
understand how sick she is, he said.) I sat on the counter I’d have to
Javex-clean that night. Peter Gzowski on the radio. A pre-night-shift 4 PM
ease. Fragrant peach tea. A block of very old cheddar. He ate his raisins on
the side, cupped them into his dirty hands, grabbed them out of their plastic
bag with his dirty fingernails and tossed them back into his mouthful of yellow
teeth ungraciously and glad.
(Remember: a bowl of
walnuts on Hampton Street, the mystery of a nutcracker not in the shape of
ballerina boy in Christmas garb.)
No comments:
Post a Comment