Mona Fertig, Islander: New Poems

 

I Follow the Arrows in the Aisles

At Mouats / the wind patiently blows the flag half-mast and
everyone is strangely calm / the clock tower reads ten to two

in the grocery store / I can’t find goat yogurt or toilet paper
I follow the arrows in the aisles / on the floor / making sure I do not

cohabit space / hug a friend

make contact / only with my eyes / cotton mask over mouth and nose

I follow the arrows in the aisles

everyone is strangely calm / adjusting to plexiglass / drinking like a fish
circling home like border collies / washing hands like raccoons

there is no safe room to hide in / no virus-free shelter

we adapt to survive / stream like a squall / devour desserts like queens

disoriented / breathless / we take Sunday drives / reroute our lives

garden like addicts / zoom in our cocoons

discover online shopping.

Salt Spring Island poet and publisher Mona Fertig, the author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry going back to the 1970s, offers herself as a “Poet Returning to Form” in her latest, the collection Islander: New Poems (Salt Spring Island BC: Mother Tongue Publishing Limited, 2024). This is her attempting her way, as she describes, back into the lyric, as her first-person poems offer an intimacy across the immediate geography and landscape of her surroundings, articulating a casual exploration of words that had been previously lost. “After decades of publishing other writers,” she offers, as part of her “Afterword,” “I had decided there was still one more book of poetry in me.” Islander: New Poems appears to be her first full-length collection since The Unsettled (2010), as she writes of joy and grandchildren, the village in spring, flowers and rain, as well as the strange distances required through pandemic lockdown. “the boat bobs all winter,” she writes, as part of the sequence “Folklore Is Tradition,” “a maple-and-alder-filled hearth /smokes from the chimney // they enter the heart of the house // sleeping till spring.” Composed as a kind of lyric journal, she writes narrative stretches of meditation and description, the physical space and situation of her island, offering a love song to a space and a community. Further in her “Afterword,” she writes:

I’ve always been a very slow writer. A poem sometimes took years to finish. But the opposite happened with Islander. A multiplex of new poems emerged over a year to mix with a handful of drafts I had started in earlier times, and two long sociopolitical poems I’d written in 2018 and 2020. I relaxed into this humble wave. It was a warm welcome back.