Isabella Wang, November, November

 

tears salt the good fabric
of her poppy scarf    there is slow quiet 

mapped ribbon developments
of our black ice 

future winters
everywhere    there is the mildness
of unanticipated clemencies 

showing us care
this salt    remnant of her leaving 

melting the ground    keeps us safe
while you are driving 

for miles    the heart pulses
distances the mind cannot imagine
to cross in a lifetime (“PASSAGE 2: NOVEMBER 2021”)

In the “Afterword” to her second full-length collection, November, November (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a follow-up to Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here], Vancouver poet Isabella Wang writes of her ongoing engagement with the work of the late Salt Spring Island poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021). Webb is a poet originally introduced to Wang through Vancouver poet Stephen Collis [see my review of Collis’ critical volume on Webb here], and Wang writes of time spent in the Special Collections vault at Simon Fraser University, listening to archived reel-to-reel cassettes of Webb reading, and conversations with Collis on Webb’s work, including discovering a previously uncollected poem in the recordings. She writes of grief, and of visiting “Syowt’s Bowl,” the ancient stone shape set in Salt Spring Island’s Ganges Harbour, an artifact that entered Canadian poetry through Webb’s Wilson’s Bowl (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1980), the title poem composed as her memorial for the Canadian archaeologist, cultural anthropologist and curator Wilson Duff (1925-1976). “why am i crying,” Wang writes, as part of the extended lyric “PASSAGE 2,” “grieving a person i’ve never met [.]” As she offers as part of her afterword: “Shared grief is like a weighted blanket. It is also a collaboration in the way that the six of us shared stories by the bowl and the moment we started reading our favourite Phyllis poems, Salt Spring suddenly started hailing.”

The poems that make up Wang’s November, November are composed with such deep and delicate precision; as a calendar of meditative space around grief, homage, illness and recovery. “parts of this body are negative / parts of this body are diffusely positive,” she writes, as part of the poem “THE BODY IS” in the third section of the book, “this body is whole / this body goes by one given name / except the parts of it removed [.]” Structured in five sections—“CONSTELLATIONS: NOVEMBER 2020,” “PASSAGE 2: NOVEMBER 2021,” “PASSAGE 3: DECEMBER 2021,” “PASSAGE 4: NOVEMBER 2022” and “PASSAGE 5: NOVEMBER 2024”—the third and fifth of which are composed of shorter, self-contained pieces, there is something really compelling in the way Wang offers this collection as a deep engagement with Webb and her work through a particular period, through Webb’s death and Wang’s cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery. Wang’s poems allow for influence and engagement with Webb’s work without overtaking Wang’s own lyric, offering a foundation for possibility across a delicate, open-hearted and deeply mature lyric. Webb’s work might have been the engine, but Wang is clearly at the wheel, as the poem “PRAYER ON AN OPERATING TABLE” reads, to close:

love effortless childhoods : branches of moss : their own little tree :
love so many beams of asphalt : the tongue becoming a highway : love
medicines : options are none : Deer Lake : hope country of nowhere :

Wang has become quite adept at pulling at the small moment, allowing the line to extend across a great distance, offering her own take on the long poem through sequences, sections, clusters of poems and, eventually, this book-length, meditative suite, all of which is wrapped around attention, and a deeply-attuned ear. Listen to the opening untitled poem of the second section, “PASSAGE 2: NOVEMBER 2021,” a section subtitled “for Phyllis and the Loving Crew”; the piece is dated “November 11,” the same day Webb died:

white pines    frosted window
won’t let in images of morning 

but sunlight until they melt

bus loop    bus drove by me
me stop-signed at another curb 

ice crystals write squiggly lines
where previous scratches    on glass 

feel everything 

                        talked to Phyllis
yesterday    said we both
enjoyed the company 

of your friendship

            her your anchor
your purpose for escape 

                        the city    your work
they are your two ends
            pulling on your Tsawwassen heart
keeping you steady 

    youngest of seven siblings
still feel everything