Alice Burdick, Ox Lost, Snow Deep: poems

 

I enjoy hearing your ghost stories.
Prove me wrong about the spirit world.
Knocks, steps on stairs, in the great beyond
there’s a Q&A with a rapping ghost.

We continue to turn into flames, to ensure
a profitable press conference. Research
into the blaze of finer flashbacks. Pranks
with apples on steps,, cracked toe knuckles.

Sell tickets to the expository tale. Very
dramatic, but people don’t like the real story.
Onstage a foundational fan
discovered the original ghost body. (“Old School Human Skills”)

The latest full-length poetry title from Lunenberg, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, following Simple Master (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2002) [see my review of such here], Flutter (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], Holler (Mansfield Press, 2012) [my review of such appears to have fallen off the internet], Book of Short Sentences (Mansfield Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] and Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, selected with an introduction by Alessandro Porco (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] (as well as a slew of chapbooks going back to 1993) is Ox Lost, Snow Deep: poems (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2024), produced as part of editor Stuart Ross’ A Feed Dog Book imprint. Following the compactness of the poems of Book of Short Sentences, it is interesting to see how Burdick moves across longer forms. “To whom it may concern,” she writes, towards the end of the nine-page poem “Suspenseful demographics,” “you must surrender / the love song of sentient life. The truth is, / we will all be fuel cells. You brought me here / to speak with our fierce opponents, so / I might as well speak.”

Ox Lost, Snow Deep held as an assemblage of thirteen longer poems, rife with surreal humour and first-person domestic, turns of phrase and observational twists. “It’s no problem to find the real story.” she writes, as part of “Suspenseful demographics,” “Live a wet dream, of which / an attack started the trajectory.” In each of these extended poems, it seems there’s always a direction she’s heading in but in no hurry to land, weaving and bobbing across her short sentences to see what might be possible along the way, which most likely alters her destination. Follow along with her sequence “Big Trouble in Little China Trouble,” for example, composed in response to the 1986 film Big Trouble in Little China, that begins: “Name, occupation: tourist bus. / Meat of this table a green flame. / Oh, sure. Sorcery because it’s real. I talk / and eat a very small sandwich in the Pork Chop / Express. The cheque is in the mail. / Rainy vegetables are funny. / Geese sing from boxes, / dumplings steam, / daytime dog.”

While even an experienced reader of her work might wonder where she might be going, there’s never a sense of Burdick’s narratives at loose ends or lost, purposefully stretching out across a landscape of unexpected delights; we journey with her, seeing what she catches across the lyric. “They were not statistics / to themselves,” she writes, as part of “Life irritates art,” “Potentially infected salads // The printing press and mystic joy // The lyric, a scream // Too many write dull and straight / regardless of identity.” Her accumulations offer wisdoms and seek out questions, playful and incisive moments of sharp clarity carved through a musical flow of colliding words, sounds and ideas. “I thought the creatures around me were both here / and not. Not an absence of presence,” she writes, as part of the poem “Practice,” “but human at some point, even as echoes. Echoes of air made into form; my demands / were simple: you may enter only / if you tell me something interesting. / Practice memory to release into air.”