Stephanie Bolster, Long Exposure

 

It is not something that begins.

 

 

 

 

Before there was land there was water.
A place silted itself up.
Around the time of the pyramids
parts of other places made this place. 

Some of the youngest land in the world.
People came to stay.
The river was why.
Where some already traded on the high ground
a city of settlers suggested itself.
Later a café that would survive the storm
and in the swampy parts farther from the river
a place where those called free
and those who didn’t get to be
went on Sundays to dance.

The long-awaited fifth full-length poetry title from Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster is Long Exposure (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025), a title I’ve known of as in-the-works for some time, given an excerpt of the work-in-progress appeared as the chapbook GHOSTS (above/ground press, 2017). As well, her title that takes on a slightly different sheen, given that fourteen years have passed since her prior full-length title. Long exposure, indeed. Bolster is, as you might already know, the award-winning author of White Stone: The Alice Poems (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 1998), which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Award, Two Bowls of Milk (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), Pavilion (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2002) and A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (London ON: Brick Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], as well as a small handful of chapbooks (including four from above/ground press). Across her published work to-date, Bolster continues to focus on the book-length project, but through a poetic that began with an attention to finely-honed and self-contained, densely-sharp lyrics, gradually evolving into this new flavour of book-length suite: a stretched-out sense of the fragment, which accumulate across the sentence and staggered narrative into the form of the long poem. As she writes, mid-way through Long Exposure: “Rail cars full of oil slid faster down / the slope until at the curve where the town / was a birthday party exploded and a woman / with cancer who’d chosen not to mark / this year still lives because she didn’t / go. All that long-dead / plankton lit the sky.”

Across the three decades since her debut chapbook, Three Bloody Words (1996; 2016), her poems have evolved from those original, diamond-carved shapes into a lyric pulled apart, allowing her poems to breathe, and into this extended, full-length accumulated structure of fragments, accumulations and pinpoints. There is almost an element of the Big Bang to her evolution as a published writer, from that incredible density of lyrics in White Stone to this current collection, twenty-seven years later, exploded across the length and breadth of the boundaries of the poem, of the page. “Upheaval meaning the earth moved.” she writes, mid-way through this complex patterning of fragments. “Unrest meaning no one slept.” What earlier held as restraint has still that same control, but one far more confident, mature; more open and adventurous, with each title-to-date playing a variation of the long poem, working in the book as her unit of composition.

Meanwhile the trees. It cannot be said often enough
how many leaves. Yesterday a cloud
in the shape of wind the girl M said and a cloud in the shape
of the inside of a fish.
            That you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish.

As the back cover of Long Exposure provides: “After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. These questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in.” In her own acknowledgments at the end of collection, Bolster offers: “What began in 2009 as an interrogation of my unsettling fascination with Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans became an education that has lasted for 16 years and does not end here. I am grateful to those who have supported this project, reading drafts, asking questions, and posing challenges.”

There are people who make miniatures of ruined libraries with trees in them.
There are people who take photographs of miniatures of ruined libraries.
These are the same people. 

The people who spend evenings looking at screens that display photographs
of miniatures of ruined libraries with trees in them know
it could always be worse. Are too lucky for their own good.
What does that mean.
Why must suffering.

The poems are more pointed, but the canvas across the collection, far broader. Bolster’s poems allow for such small precisions, as well as the spaces between thought, where the poems themselves, the collection as a whole, coheres. “My address a caption.” she writes, amid her exploration through New Orleans. She writes on human story, on those that document, on the long and short of aftermath. She writes on how some devastations run across and through generations, holding far worse effect than what might be originally catalogued. “They are singular,” she writes, “not. They are / You through not you or maybe you yes you / you and you and you / are me are not me I am not me.”

Bolster works through detail, through document, offering, as the late Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay (1909-1996) coined her own sense of the long poem, the documentary poem, although one that works primarily through her own response to response, through secondary sources. Bolster responds to these responses, citing a heft of detailed research, working a long poem around observation, exploring what, precisely, it means to observe. What it means, and what it might cost, through these disasters, man-made and preventable.

A bomb dropped on a ship
in a harbour off an island
far from the coast, the ship’s name
the name of a dry and inland state
the colour of the Mars of the mind.

Long Exposure circles the histories, stories, depictions and documents around human disasters, from the Chernobyl nuclear explosion of April, 1986 (both the world’s worst nuclear disaster and the most expensive disaster in history), the tropical cyclone Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in August, 2005 (and the extensive destruction, response and aftermath), Japanese internment camps in British Columbia during the Second World War, to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and resulting tsunami in March, 2011. Bolster’s exposure is long, and purposefully so, and it takes a while for her study, her portrait, to come into focus across such intricate detail. She writes of memory, loss, and death. “In the dream where nothing’s left / is freedom. I hold more / than I can.” Having worked poems around various degrees of Victorian control, attempting to shape the environment, forcing nature itself into their own designations and depictions, from zoos to gardens, here Bolster focuses on specific points of man-made disaster, articulating the human and environmental costs of what could and should have been prevented, from the cruelty inflicted through uprooting entire communities via internment, and multiple instances of capitalism and neglect leaving further communities more exposed to environmental consequence. She names observed, and observers; she articulates a multitude of voices from ground level. The book asks without asking, what are we doing to each other?

He went inside and with no power
he kept the shutter open long enough
for what light there was
to seal the scene. 

            *

Until he presses, nothing happens.
When he presses, the nothing affixes.
Prints are made.
Walk into rooms of walls, look
into the rooms on the walls. 

            *

The larger the negative, the more.
In the print of the wreck of a room
(smaller than the room, larger than
the mind) are things we wouldn’t have seen
had we been there. (Some of us
were. Is there ever us?)