Camille Martin, Blueshift Road

 
 

Identity as Norwegian Pagoda

It never was the right time to travel to Rome
to find yourself. Autumn fog and rainy wind
are symbols of crushed hopes—miasma
birthing counterfeiters who clutter the globe
with shields of Sistine junk. Praise the miasma.
Who wants to be gulled by the hand
that pulls back the curtain? Better to re-invent
metacarpals for houseflies, to hullabaloo
down the pike tearing blank after blank to bits.
Rome’s an imposter. Mimicry ripples
from the dying words of the last spelunker on earth.
Surf’s roar summons beached puddles ad infinitum.
Bred in chiaroscuro, savvy pilgrims fashion
caves of ice adorned with sequined plums
and settle in for a long night.

It has been a while since we’ve heard from Toronto poet Camille Martin (and some of us have missed her, truly), the author of the trade collections Sesame Kiosk (Elmwood CT: Potes and Poets, 2001), Codes of Public Sleep (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007), Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010) and Looms (Shearsman Books, 2012), as well as a variety of chapbooks, including Plastic Heaven (New Orleans: single-author issue of Fell Swoop, 1996), Magnus Loop (Tucson, Arizona: Chax Press, 1999), Rogue Embryo (New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 1999), If Leaf, Then Arpeggio (above/ground press, 2011) and Sugar Beach (above/ground press, 2013). Her fifth full-length collection, and first in nearly a decade, is Blueshift Road (Toronto ON: Rogue Embryo Press, 2021), an assemblage of poems working a variety of forms, continuing numerous structural threads that have existed throughout her work [see the text of my 2011 Influency talk in her Sonnets here], from the sonnet to the short sequence to the prose poem to the open lyric. As she discusses one of the poems that made its way into the eventual collection back in 2014, over at Touch the Donkey:

Each of my books seems to find its own centripetal pull. Sometimes it’s formal, as in Sonnets (a book of variations on the form), or as in R Is the Artichoke of Rose (a collection of short-short poems). And sometimes it’s thematic—even if loosely so—as in Codes of Public Sleep, in its way a tale of two very different cities (New Orleans and Toronto).

“Page Dust for Will” will probably be woven into a manuscript with the working title Blueshift Road, some of whose poems find their inspiration in the sciences, especially astronomy.

As part of that interview, Martin offers that the manuscript, then very much still in-progress as a singular unit (poems out of the chapbooks Magnus Loop and Sugar Beach are included in the collection), was working inspiration from “the sciences, especially astronomy,” although there seems just as much conversation around distance, and a search for both meaning and identity. She writes of not only shifts of air, weather and of attention, but of uncertainties around them. As her title poem opens: “Recalling a slight breeze of little consequence / on an unremarkable cloudless morning, // except for wearing blue plaid, / picking blackberries along an ancient // riverbank. And the breeze, of course.”

There is a thickness to her lyric, one that provides both precision and clarity across an abstract sheen. “You can still get lost.” she writes, to close the poem “Dawn Contracting, Inc.” “Direction’s musculature pretends to know due north / but hibernates in a Dead Letter Office. / In fickle weather, a promise nonetheless overflows, / drenching the petals of a larkspur.” Martin rourtinely references shifts in physical space, including shifts in landscapes and seasons, particularly autumn. “Untranslatable,” she offers, to close the opening poem, “Prelude,” “trading yellow crayons for leaves. / Undeterred, every leaf shades us.” Or, the “Autumn fog and rainy wind / are symbols of crushed hopes” she offers, in the poem quoted above. Further on, to open the poem “Shared Lattice,” she writes: “Fall flicks / off yellow / leaves one by / one [.]” In the same poem, a bit further, writing “page / after page of / variations [.]” There is something in the way Martin utilizes the sciences-as-subject, also, almost as a way to articulate both distance and connection, and a particular kind of uncertainty and anxiety, albeit one composed with a clear, steady line. Or the end of the poem “Druthers,” that offers:

Unplugged, I can still taste paradise
without feeling I’ve settled for self-evidence:

peel closing in around fruit; home and not-home
eroding in equal parts.