Clare Goulet, Graphis scripta / writing lichen

 

Normandina pulchella / elf-ear

Tender translation,
pulchella whispers
diminutives in dutch,
in finnish, friesian,
little shell, tiny bowl,
hamster, elfin, as if,
in secret, wet bark
on a fallen branch
had sprouted for a prank
a hundred pairs of ears
cut from green felt. Official
status: vulnerable. Crouch.
You must reshape yourself
in miniature to see
this rare thing: a conference
of listeners. Each an open
invitation to kneel,
place your giant’s ear
on its tiny lobes: it says
ssshhh, it says: be
smaller.

I’m fascinated by Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia poet Clare Goulet’s full-length poetry debut, Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), a collection of poems approaching language as the means through which to articulate a detailed study. “So pretty it shocks: pink smarties / shaken out of the box,” she writes, to open the poem “Icmadophilia ericetorum / candy,” “picked on a whim / for the green-room rider, pleasure spreading / its plush blue blanket every which way / over moss.” There is a curious way that Goulet’s language propels, composed as field guide, scripting a detail through language that suggests hers is a somewhat slippery subject matter: is this a collection around the collection and study of lichen, or a means through which to discuss something else entirely? Possibly both, honestly. Goulet’s poems provide a kind of layering, of waves and sweeps, writing around and through the subject of lichen, multifaceted enough to ply meaning upon meaning. “Lichen as armour is truth inverted: / a bullet-hole flowers,” she writes, as part of “Parmelia sulcata / hammered shield,” “cancer / takes root, a wound is blessé.”

There is something comparable, obviously, to Goulet’s explorations through the minutae of plants, language and Latin to the work of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of her latest here], although Goulet seems to offer her explorations not as an end but as a means through it, such as the poem “Zaubreyus supralittoralis / dreaming,” that offers: “I have not been honest, not told you / years collecting lichen made a river of forgetting / which meant not thinking / about him.” Akin to Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” or Monty Reid’s The Alternate Guide (Red Deer AB: Red Deer Press, 1985), the poems emerge out of the prompt of the original study of lichen, but instead wrap that research around other considerations, other functions, across the length and breadth of her lyric. She writes of the Greeks, intelligence reports, Shirley Jackson, Mae West, Plato, Mad Men, cartoon gestures and other touchstones, utilizing her research as both core and writing prompt, offering a solid line of meaning thick with context. Listen, for example, to the poem “minim,” that ends:

Empty bars of music are where you rest,
this white sheet filled with smallness
as if the whole orchestra had assembled
for a lone note.
                           O Pedicularis
Linnaeus has written
without a word.