Vera Hadzic, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery

 

CUBIC METRE OF INFINITY

after Michelangelo Pistoletto

This morning at the cemetery
a dead bird lay on the grass.
Half its throat, its globed rib cage,
and snappable bones exposed
to the elements. These animal corpses,
the kind you find beside the road
or on the lawn, are whistles
the wind blows into.
In the graves human bodies
do the same thing but unseen.
Turn into channels of air,
pathways for worms, infinite
things in an enclosed space.

I’d been eager to get my hands on Ottawa writer Vera Hadzic’s full-length poetry debut, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2025) [see her ‘six questions’ interview here; her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], produced as part of Stuart Ross’ imprint, A Feed Dog Book. Following her chapbook debut, Fossils You Can Swallow (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], the poems in Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery (a stellar title, by the way) are expansive, and meditative; offering interesting rhythms and line-breaks across universes of intimate moments. As the title poem writes: “The single devotion to modern life is this: / keeping things inside yourself. This applies / to emotions, credit card details, urine, the impulse / to swear in front of children. Some of us are better / at this than others.”

Hadzic writes on art, history, literature, Benedictine monks, livestock, fish, Johnny Cash, death, snow, the internet, nail clippings and dead birds, etcetera; offering less a series of direct responses than incorporating ideas into her weave of far larger, more expansive tapestries of propulsive narrative thought. “The way flat fields / turn to gold hills / in waves.” she writes, as part of “OSSO BUCO,” “There is something I should be doing. // The heat in the chest, / the rising furnace / of the horse’s corpus; the crushing / of one’s own rib / cage; the horse on the ground, knowing, / or waiting.” Her poems are just so big, so precise; exact, even through and almost because of their expansiveness, attempting to navigate, articulate and investigate elements of the entire world of experience across her attention, wherever that might send her. “The monks communicate / by finger and wrist when / eating; a moving text of metacarpels,” she writes, as part of the poem “MONASTERIO DOS JERÓNIMOS,” “the major mechanism illumi- / nating the thin working page, / the palm. Boiled egg splits / gently under the tooth and lip. / No one can speak while / eating, and it’s just as well, / because no one will mention / the dark spot consuming / the wall. No one can speak / of it but the stone / animals, and they’ve sworn / silence.” There is something intriguing about how these poems float between poems and essays, poems and short stories, all seeking out ways to best understand her thinking across such vast distances.

There is, for example, the four-part narrative piece, “FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH,” a poem that reads a bit like a short story by Stuart Ross [see my essay on his most recent collection of short stories here], writing elements of surrealism, both swirling and propulsive across a huge mass of text. Here is but the opening of the five-page third section, “The Author,” that begins:

I once met Ernest Hemingway in Toronto. I was lost in the subway
and late for a concert. Ernest Hemingway was sitting in a coffee
house and writing clean, simple prose. This prose had periods
and precise words that were well-chosen and always sufficient.
It was both summer and winter, both rainy and snowy, and the heat
of the sun made sweat melt into my back and worm
like an excretable minnow back into my bloodstream, so that my
body was like the water cycle on a singular human scale, a tiny
microcosm that pumped out fluid and reabsorbed it almost instantly.
“How do you like Toronto, Hemingway?” I said Hemingway because
this is the way almost everybody refers to him, all the time. The first name
wastes syllables, when the last name is already an efficient synopsis
of all he wrote. I refuse to write William Shakespeare in my essays.
I want to cross out William when students write his full name in their
Essays. I want to write in the margins. Everybody knows who
Shakespeare is. Everybody knows who Hemingway is.
What’s the likelihood someone mixes him up with the wrong
Shakespeare? Oh, your reader might say upon reaching the sentence
where you mention Lear, oh, this is the Shakespeare who writes plays.
I mixed him up with the Shakespeare who sells mattresses. Or, I mixed
him up with his father who sold gloves. Or, I don’t want to read an essay
about the guy who wrote plays. I want to read an essay about a
mattress salesman who has the same name as a famous
playwright.