Natalie Lim, Elegy for Opportunity

 

If Mary Can Do It 

I give myself permission to write
about the small things. a trip
to the ice rink. the bus ride home.
cherry blossoms in full bloom. anything to feel
like I have anything at all to say.
my pen pal in Tokyo writes a book
and I find out through Twitter. it’s getting easier
to see the future. marriage and a kid,
two probably, unless I change my mind. I want
people to remember me. I want to write like she did.
focused, intentional, whole poems taken over by a flock of starlings
or a blade of grass. not this wild tangle of thoughts
all pressed in together. I would blame
the internet, but I think it’s just me. I want
to stop living through late-stage capitalism.
I want to do something about it
but without getting in trouble. I don’t care
what you say – I need to be good. tell me
about despair, Mary. tell me if, at the end,
you felt you had done more
than just visit.

The full-length debut by Vancouver poet Natalie Lim, winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, and author of the chapbook arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022), is Elegy for Opportunity (Hamilton ON: Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn, 2025). I’m curious about the way Lim approaches narrative and her first-person lyric: offering the suggestion of something relatively straightforward, but curving a bit. “I’ve only written love poems for months so it feels like I’ve written no poems / at all.” she offers, to open the prose poem “Love Poems Don’t Win Contests,” that begins the collection. “Instead of writing, I’m sitting on a park bench in early spring, the air so heavy with pollen and promise that it’s hard to breathe. I make eye contact with a dachshund wearing a coat and yet all I do is complain.” There’s something intriguing and almost wry about the way Lim acknowledges the economy of poem composition, including attempting contests, writing her failure as an accomplishment (or the other way around, perhaps). “I am scared of killing everything I touch,” she writes, to open “On Biology,” “this includes people, which is new, / and plants, which is not. / did you know we lose vertebrae / as we age? we’re born with thirty-three and die / with twenty-four, usually, the lower ones fusing together / by the time we call ourselves grown.” Lim’s poems are immediate, and the collection provides a myriad of lyric shapes and purposes as Lim feels out possibility, the way one could argue a debut full-length collection should be, seeking out what options the lyric form might allow. She works poems big and small, expansive and uniquely condensed. There’s a meandering element I quite like, a fresh counterpoint to far too many poems that one can see the ending from the beginning. Lim’s poems are thoughtful, unafraid of exploring within a particular moment, or making sharp turns; they move as needed with a quiet confidence. I’m quite taken with her short poem “Winter in Ottawa,” a poem she is possibly unaware holds a title similar to one of John Newlove’s final pieces. As her poem, dedicated “for the Love Poem Collective / after Manahil Bandukwala,” begins:

the Rideau Canal doesn’t freeze over
for the first time ever.
it feels like a sign, although
I’m not sure what of.
global warming, I guess. our
impending doom.
but we sit in the café
and talk about love poems
and the dread can’t touch us.
I think the cold makes me better.