Cecily Nicholson, Harrowings

 

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.