Allie Duff, I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought

 

Annual General Meeting of the Tors Cove Sheep

By boatloads they were hemmed and jostled
Hundreds of cuddle-faced ruminants
brought by Noah’s hilarious dory
to their summer-long baycation

Squint to see these white specks across the bay
on a green island-cliff; a flock
enjoying blueberry season.

At the annual general meeting
of the Tors Cove sheep,
shear-holders, regimented
and rosacea-cheeked,
are regarded with suspicion
but soon all are shorn and ready for heat.

They discuss leaves of absence,
the winter’s wooly accomplishments,
and bleat their mission statement:
to cud chew for hours
on forbs, clover, and grass

indulgently, without
            dividends.

As the back cover for St. John’s, Newfoundland poet, stand-up comedian and musician Allie Duff’s full-length poetry debut, I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) offers: “In I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought, the poet leaves her childhood home of St. John’s, Newfoundland to live in the country’s capital. Familial relationships, complicated by chronic illnesses, are juxtaposed with looming disasters, both actual and imagined, as the writer navigates her stubborn yearning to be ‘some other kind of woman,’ and to ‘live fiercely’ against the odds.” Duff composes a sequence of short narratives across the lyric, offering a portrait of home caught in part through her time away, and Duff offers a distinct view. “High in the red oaks / blackbirds dive and land,” she writes, to open the poem “Constance Bay,” “scattering clouds of white moths. // Sentenced to hunt / each moment and pin it down; / the past is mine, the past is mine, / and it’s nobody’s, too.” She writes of spring flowers in the capital, but more often than not, her gaze is east, glimpsing home in short threads on grandmothers and kitchens, the hostility of weather and dreams of reaching out, and reaching back.

It is interesting to see any landscape through the lens of its writers, and Duff offers an intimacy to her poems, one quite different than the Newfoundland passages and landscapes of Michael Crummey’s Passengers: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2022) [see my review of such here], for example, or the Newfoundland scenes of Matthew Hollett’s Optic Nerve: poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2023) [see my review of such here], or even Adam Beardsworth’s No Place Like (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]. In comparison, Duff holds to small spaces, small geographies, writing out short narrative bursts less as scenes than moments that string together through the collection across a far wider, and expansive, tapestry of landscape and being. She speaks of the weather, of family; she speaks of boatloads, and sheep. She writes of what intimately can’t be but anywhere else than in her corner of Newfoundland. “Something alive under the snow / makes it shiver,” she writes, to open “#DarkNL2014,” “like it’s asking not to be / shovelled, scraped, or salted. // For a few days / we get a taste / of living in the dark.”