Kristjana Gunnars, Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems

 

In the garden there is a bower for melancholy,
a hidden garden where I can stay with this sadness
Wisteria hangs overhead, lilacs emit their scent
and birds wing past at extraordinary speed.

There are fragments of eternity in all passing things.

Saturn is still in the universe with all its moons,
Artemis, goddess of the forest, gives me green
thoughts in a green space. 

Tall pines lean slightly in the grey mist of distance,
branches tangle with branches again a backdrop of haze,
water, sky, overhanging rock. I now think 

Love is a story
that has failure in it, complexity, something
foreign—a story I tell myself
when I am at a loss for words. (“A Moment in Flight”)

Icelandic-Canadian poet and prose writer Kristjana Gunnars’ seventh poetry collection, and first full-length poetry title in twenty years, is Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems (Brooklyn NY: Angelico Press, 2022). Twenty years is a long gap for anyone between collections, and it is interesting to see how the structure of her poems have very much shifted into a variation on the lyric essay, having evolved from the points on a grid poems of early collections One-eyed Moon Maps (Victoria BC: Press Porcépic, 1980), Settlement Poems 1 (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1980) or Settlement Poems 2 (Turnstone Press, 1980). Gunnars’ work emerged out of a 1970s and 80s engagement with prairie mapping, the long poem and mythologies of origin and family patterns, connecting her work to an array of her prairie contemporaries: Robert Kroetsch, Aritha Van Herk, Dennis Cooley, Andrew Suknaski and Monty Reid, et al. One can easily see an echo or even influence of Gunnars’ structures in a collection such as Reid’s The Alternate Guide (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1985), with both writers engaging very deeply in how lyric mapping is composed, and stretched across the landscape of the full collection. Eventually, her attentions shifted into prose as well, producing five novellas over the space of a few years—The Prowler (1989), Zero Hour (1991), The Substance of Forgetting (1992), The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust (1996) and Night Train to Nykøbing (1998)—all of which were recently reissued as a single volume through Coach House Books, The Scent of Light (2022) [see my review of such here].

Given the twenty years since the publication of her prior poetry collections Carnival of Longing (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1989) and Silence of the Country (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2002), the six poems that make up Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems—“A Moment in Flight,” “Fraser and Salmon,” “Threadbare,” “Black Rose With Rain,” “Under a Winter Sky” and “Moon on Fire”—have shifted in structure from her prior published poetry, seeming far closer to the prose essay-poem than more traditional lyric. The first section even appeared originally in more of a prose form, subtitled “an essay on melancholy” and produced as a chapbook through above/ground press in 2020. There is something in the poems collected here that suggest the two structural threads of her published work have merged—her poetry and her prose—allowing for the best of both structures, and meeting somewhere in the middle.

The “Six Longpoems” collected here are composed as a suite of six individual examples of meditative, sequenced thought, writing on melancholy and mortality, love and faith, environmental devastation and the material of dailyness. “It’s such a strange experience to outlive time like this,” she writes, to close the poem “Threadbare,” “so strange.” Writing on time, aging and the shadow of death, there has been a meditative quality that emerged through and within the sequence of her novellas, but one not so prominent in her poetry as it is here. “Life in small details.” she writes, as part of “Black Rose With Rain.” “All stable, unchanging, without surprise. / I find myself in a world of autonomous speakers.” A bit further down the page, offering: “The duration of things is vast / but never empty. There is no such thing / as empty duration.” She offers a foundation of mysticism; referencing Joyce, Siddhartha, Borges and Rumi, hers is a lyric of beginning and endings, attending a lyric of spiritual dailyness and lyric pilgrimage. “The Phoenician sailor said: judge me as a man / whom the ocean has broken.” She writes of death, weightlessness and the turning of something (being) into something else, which is also nothing. “What I would like is to linger a while / in quiet contemplation.” There are often times that those who work in multiple forms can have one certain readers prefer over the other, or one more striking than the other—Elizabeth Smart the prose writer, say, working with lyric experiment the way Elizabeth Smart the poet never could—but this particular work seems a progression of both Gunnars’ poetry and prose sides. No matter which element of her writing you prefer, this is where all those threads not only continue, but meet.

Every night I see the space station passing by.
The lights are blinking and it has great speed.

You were asking if time stops above the clouds
in space. We were wondering if time is real.

I remember saying the astronauts come back younger.

                        On the third night he says
                        even numbers are evil omens—

I know you can live your life in both directions.
I learned that when I saw the Fraser and the Salmon

trying so hard to touch below our feet.

 

 

All of this is about love. (“Fraser and Salmon”)