Bren Simmers, The Work

 

OPTIONS

My brother and his
wife have stopped
making long-term
plans. The window
shrunk to months.
A basketball and a
volleyball removed
from her uterus,
her colon gone,
part of her liver,
spots blooming
on her lungs.
Now it’s chemo
every three weeks
until that stops
working. So long
as there’s options,
don’t talk about
dying. She fights
to play with her
daughters each
day, bank enough
memories to outlast
their childhoods.

The latest poetry title by Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers is The Work (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), following Night Gears (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2010), Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015) [see my review of such here], Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019) and If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. The Work, as the back cover offers, engages “with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portion of grief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of losses—the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law’s terminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness.” There is an enormous amount of churning, as the book offers, through this collection, swirling and surrounding grief and illness and the roiling turmoil of familial health, all of which carry their own considerable and accumulative weight. “There comes a point / when the losses stack / up and all you want is / a few good years and / cash in your wallet.” Simmers writes, to open the poem “LOAD UPON LOAD,” the piece that opens the first of the book’s five sections. Simmers’ usual clear narrative lyric provides a tension through its very restraint and straightforwardness, writing the implications of grief, and the regrets around what can no longer be said, no longer be repeated, no longer be taken back. “The last night I was in an airport I ran / from one empty terminal to the next / looking for a time zone with my father / still in it.” she writes, to open the poem “ICE FISHING.” Further, to close the short poem, offering: “I could feed a village with / my grief. These days, / I don’t need a shelter or // an opening to talk to him. / Simply stand on the ice, / let the wind scale / my cheeks.”

“If I stopped taking airplanes / I’d never see my family again.” the poem “IF SATURDAY, AN EMPTY PARKING LOT” offers. The poems mourn the slow loss of family and connection, a connection that requires a physicality. “Hello // to putting on hard pants and still trying / to enter a conversation thinking yes,” ends the poem “HELLO/YES,” “how a single word sets you up / for connection in a time when // people can’t touch.” Focusing different sections on different individuals across this array of loss and losses, the poems of the penultimate section, “STILL MOM,” offer an erasure of vowels across the narrative, demonstrating a devastating progress of holes in her mother’s language as her mind deteriorates. As the poem “WHEN YOU STARTED HAVING ACCIDENTS” ends: “the sky is beige your food pureed you’ve / started to strike the aides during m rning care their / answer is always m re drugs on your birthday y u / said I love you back      it’d been m nths    when / friends ask I tell them that [.]” The Work is a book that holds these articulations of loss so completely that, as a reader, one hopes that the process might allow any reader a way into their own losses, and perhaps, the author, a way from which to move somehow beyond. This really is a powerful collection.