Lori Cayer, Searching for Signal

 

step crisply out with your message
sideways eyes
                        say you’re likely
pissing blood again
despite that defiled organ
                                            carried
                        away like
                                            an air balloon

(likely)
(again)
I think in muted tones
                                        of bending
                        clenching
gleaning for a meal
                                    what was shed here

Winnipeg poet Lori Cayer’s fifth full-length poetry collection, after Stealing Mercury (The Muses’ Company, 20040, Attenuations of Force (Frontenac House, 2010), Dopamine Blunder (Tightrope Books, 2016) and Mrs Romanov (The Porcupine’s quill, 2017) is the book-length poem Searching for Signal (Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2021). Composed as a long poem that reveals itself through a sequence of accumulative, self-contained lyric fragments, there are some curious structural echoes in Searching for Signal with some of those first Winnipeg poetry titles I discovered throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s: titles by Rob Budde, Dennis Cooley [see my review of his latest three here], Sarah Gordon, Kristen Wittman and Todd Bruce (all produced, interestingly enough, through Turnstone Press; and it is hard to specifically know if this type of writing is something Turnstone has evolved away from, or is simply not utilized in the same way, but for poets such as Cooley). The echoes are those of pacing, rhythm and structure, leaning into what Saskatchewan poet Andrew Suknaski self-described as his “loping, coyote lines,” allowing the breath and the break on the page to articulate cadence.

this is the bent
branch indicating our direction
                                abandoned winter
                                                                nest
brought to your sudden bedside
                                                        so
we might replace
                                your presence
                                on the trail

Cayer’s Searching for Signal is composed as an elegy for her father, writing sketches on and around him, as well as the implications of their settler-space. She writes of and for a father, through his old age and across his long life, writing against his drifts and into a kind of clarity. As each page begins a particular thought, memory or sketch, there is an echo here, also, of Georges Perec’s classic I Remember, something George Bowering picked up on as well, through his memoir The Moustache: Memories of Greg Curnoe (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1993). Cayer writes to remember her father before memory is all she is left with. Addressing reminiscences and some difficult paths, she writes the loveliest of lyric threads, from his failing health and the inevitabilities to come. Cayer writes her father through a sequence of short lyric bursts that don’t connect in any particular narrative order, but offer short scenes, ideas and memories, collaging together into a portrait not only of him, but of their relationship. “I am replacing you / in my own words,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “the feeling is / gravel / shredding dermis / no bike / my list of topics incomplete [.]” This is a striking collection, one propelled by a strong sense of lyric and rhythm, and the possibility of a story that unfolds as memory does, in short bursts and out of sequence. There is much here to admire. And then, of course, the final page, that reads:

the sky

            should have

                                    but didn’t

fall in after you