for a rattling mind and
cooped-up body
ecliptic this apparent
path
the best time to plant
from cultivated and
ponded poetics
four clefs incline
in mutual will-o’-the-wisps
and noise tremors
lift 19” TVs and manual
typewriters
soil and irrigation, the
infrastructure rows (“a voice that will clamour: correspondences 1-4”)
The latest from Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, following Triage (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and the Governor General’s Award-winning Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], is Harrowings (Talonbooks, 2022), an expansive lyric structure of fragments around agriculture, sustainability, legacy and responsibility. Centred around the physical act of planting, Harrowings writes on agriculture and ethical sustainability, placement and displacement, offering, as the back cover writes: “[…] pulses of memoir from the poet’s childhood growing up on a farm, as well as from more recent pandemic experiences volunteering for a local agricultural enterprise led by people who were formerly incarcerated. Considering movements organizing for food security and related, resurgent practices, HARROWINGS also contends with ‘the farm’ as a tract of colonial advance.”
The
collection is set in three lyric sections—“carver (a hand in relief),” “well
black on the neither side, it will rain” and the four-part “a voice that
will clamour”—as Nicholson works an accumulation of short bursts, moving
from moment to moment as a singular, ongoing examination. “behind the barn,
across the treeline and a ditch / distinguishing property // out cornrows along
thin strips of habitat,” she writes, as part of the opening section. A page
further, she offers: “I can feel my place in extraction / hear how to centre /
how hard to decentre [.]” Nicholson manages the lightest touch of lyric across
the line, across the canvas of the open sequence, writing such weight through an
evocative language, and such lovely music across a poetry of both document and
witness. “the lake over stern draws,” she writes, amid her “correspondences,” “agitation
welds // worth what power concedes // for four nights with shore as the lake
leaves and returns / speaking of sturgeon // to witness ospreys / the dry mouth
of the streambed, physical confines for future water [.]” Invoking and quoting
writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and even
Robert Kroetsch (“But how do you grow a poet?”), Nicholson writes through
and around the rippling effects of displacement, class, incarceration, and the
legacies around the history of Black people in “western Canada” (as specifically drawn from Douglass' work). As the first of
her quartet of “correspondences” includes:
narrative deep ruts the
DNA sweeps
into the quickening dusk
an essential community outside
inside multiculturalism
the big mouths,
bellies, and bottom lines
celebrate with food
seasonal presente
all strength to traverse the dark rural roads
There is something of the attentive ecological urgency to her lyrics, akin to Lorine Niedecker, perhaps, or to more recent self-described eco-poets, seeking to ground her language in the earth, attending to a consideration of healing both individuals and their surrounding communities, as well as ecological systems themselves, through the ability to plant, sustain and harvest.
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