Annick MacAskill, No Meeting Without Body

SALEM

One hungry afternoon

I ate an entire orange peel,

told my sister it tasted like the sun.

The neighbor gave birth to twins

and my mother returned with blood under her nails.

As crass as a teenager, my grandmother

moved in. Her moonlit flower-picking

became an escape attempt

that failed. We made six apple pies

one weekend. No one

could say no. I implored the skies,

tied my hair in twists

every night so it would curl.

Every morning the curls fell limp,

an argument I couldn’t win.

Lyric precision and lyric polish aren’t, as I might not really need to explain, the same thing. And while my interest in the lyric doesn’t necessarily gravitate towards the polish of a more straightforward line, there is something about the poems in Halifax poet Annick MacAskill’s debut, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), that compel my attention. Her poems are narrative, sure, but hardly straightforward, achieving an accumulation of thoughts and movement, as well as the occasional narrative disjunction and disruption, composed as polished poems both precise and slightly jagged, slightly off; punchy and visceral. She knows how to compose poems that suggest one purpose, and provide something slightly different (such as her attempts to twist certain Canadian standards), all while moving through a series of meditative, first-person lyric narratives. The poems in No Meeting Without Body range from good to compelling, and often with such a nebulous difference between that it becomes difficult to articulate. Needless to say, there are a couple of poems here that left me breathless.

BLOOR WEST

Cortege of Ukrainian pontiffs and delis

and storefronts boasting embryonic

commercial success and water pooling

where tawny leaves blocked the drains.

You were asking why we call the month

September, coming back from a friend’s

Apartment and kissing me as if you expected

answers along my gums.

I tracked the whale sounds

of your indifference and the ways crowds

lifted their feet for us to follow. A man

on the sidewalk held a sign that said

Will Poet for Food. You referenced your treatise

on disappointment with a hand

on the small of my back, your eyes

on what you swore was a cormorant

hanging in a butcher’s window. Later

I lost three years and the sight of you

to a bottle of Shiraz. But fall, that’s permanent.

I was on your street at the wrong hour

and you smelled of pine.