Eve Joseph, Dismantling

 

family history

I am experiencing bouts of amnesia. Caught in the contradictions of time. One minute goes by and the whole story gets rewritten whereas years pass and the hands on the clock barely move. My grandfather took his youngest brother under the table and started to cut his throat with the blunt edge of a dinner knife. His mother had a fit and brought him a chicken. “Kill this instead,” she said, holding a glass of brandy for him in case he fainted. Forgetfulness is different than not remembering. Were it not for the feathers on the kitchen floor I wouldn’t believe a word of it.

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.” Or, as she offers to open her short “Introduction” to the collection:

Prose poetry, wrote Charles Simic, is where the impulses for prose and for poetry collide. Not a merging of form, but a collision. I am drawn to the energy of this impact and to the possibility of creating something new out of two established genres. Since 2013, following a thalamic stroke, I have not been able to write poetry in what we think of as traditional verse. Nobody really knows why. Prose poetry, with its long lines and little garden-box shape, tricks my brain into thinking I’m not doing what I most want to do.
            The poems that make up the first section of this book were written over the past six years and any flaws and imperfections are mine. The second section of the book is comprised of a series of centos – prose poems made up entirely of other poet’s lines. Derived from the Greek word for patchwork quilt the form collapses boundaries between the living and the dead and allows for unexpected alliances and conversations.