Lisa Fishman, One Big Time

 

Two weeks is better than one week
which reminds me
this is quarantine, by law
staying in place
14 days
Border Control will call every day
they said, but haven’t yet

I make a list
two moose one loon the single
constant chipmunk
multiple birds
no boats except a metal row

& scruffy kayak

cloud      sky

temptation

to plainest words (“July 10-13”)

I’m charmed by duel American/Canadian writer Lisa Fishman’s most recent title, the compact and Covid-era One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025), following her debut short story collection, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], and a handful of prior poetry titles including Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. One Big Time is composed as a kind of lyric sketchbook—less a density than an exactness and easy precision—across eight small temporal poem-captures. The table of contents for the collection, titled “TABLE OF DAYS, 2020,” lists her eight lyric poem-sections as “July 10-13,” “July 14,” “July 15,” “July 16-18,” “July 19,” “July 20,” “July 21-22” and “July 23-24.” While the poems offer an immediacy of moments, sketches and relays, the framing sets this firmly as a pandemic response, and a title that suggests the uniformity across that time, the perpetual, endless now of timeless space that occurred within lockdown. “you could just say / not anything / in the forest / under hemlock,” the opening poem begins, “waterbeing going by // meant to write waterbody // but it came out waterbeing / under treebody [.]”

The immediacy of Covid-era responses of titles such as British writer Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020), Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], Barcelona-based American poet Edward Smallfield’s a journal of the plague year (above/ground press, 2021), Toronto poet Nick Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], not to mention my own pandemic-suite of essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022), composed across lockdown’s first hundred days, find new ground in Fishman’s lyrics. There’s a calm to this collection, even with the framing, the background, of uncertainty across that first Covid-era summer. There’s also something quite graceful to the subtleties of a smaller collection—the poems themselves take up but thirty of the fifty-six pages of this published book, allowing for a great deal of open space, which I very much appreciate here, and seems a smart and deliberate design-response to the requirements of the poems—one fully aware of the lyric geographies she moves through. “The river Niedecker / wrote of minerals / comprising blood / I think she said we’re made of / rock,” she writes, as part of “July 20,” “she of the Rock / River / but I think she said that / near Lake Superior [.]” The immediacy of Fishman’s notes provide something far quieter, more immediate and localized. Fishman offers something intimate, and detailed, through her sketchnotes from the landscape of a borrowed lakeside cabin, somewhere on the Ontario side of the border, syllables across a deliberate wish to retreat and refocus, in part through the very act of writing—“Present location / for nine more days: / up hwy 129 / north of Thessalon / Ontario // North of U.S. / Undone States”—where she holds to solitude, and an attempt, a sense, of grounding calm. “and down there is the lake / full of fish / and there is no reason / to stop writing [.]” Or, elsewhere, as she offers: “Where the lake cuts through the forest it does not / show you.” she remarks. “Go around.”

5:30 a.m.
Morning star and Crescent moon
in dusky light (orange red purple)
an hour later, light’s bright yellow
then silvery yellow
then clear or no color, transparent
light

A novel confused me just this year
bc she was talking about dusk
first thing in the morning, at dawn
so I looked into it and sure enough
dusk is really
a quality of light, not a time of day
(light with colors)

& yesterday “at dusk”
the dusky light was blue

I notice not being tempted
            to say so what (“July 14”)