Bren Simmers, The Work

 

OPTIONS

My brother and his
wife have stopped
making long-term
plans. The window
shrunk to months.
A basketball and a
volleyball removed
from her uterus,
her colon gone,
part of her liver,
spots blooming
on her lungs.
Now it’s chemo
every three weeks
until that stops
working. So long
as there’s options,
don’t talk about
dying. She fights
to play with her
daughters each
day, bank enough
memories to outlast
their childhoods.

The latest poetry title by Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers is The Work (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), following Night Gears (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2010), Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015) [see my review of such here], Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019) and If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. The Work, as the back cover offers, engages “with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portion of grief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of losses—the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law’s terminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness.” There is an enormous amount of churning, as the book offers, through this collection, swirling and surrounding grief and illness and the roiling turmoil of familial health, all of which carry their own considerable and accumulative weight. “There comes a point / when the losses stack / up and all you want is / a few good years and / cash in your wallet.” Simmers writes, to open the poem “LOAD UPON LOAD,” the piece that opens the first of the book’s five sections. Simmers’ usual clear narrative lyric provides a tension through its very restraint and straightforwardness, writing the implications of grief, and the regrets around what can no longer be said, no longer be repeated, no longer be taken back. “The last night I was in an airport I ran / from one empty terminal to the next / looking for a time zone with my father / still in it.” she writes, to open the poem “ICE FISHING.” Further, to close the short poem, offering: “I could feed a village with / my grief. These days, / I don’t need a shelter or // an opening to talk to him. / Simply stand on the ice, / let the wind scale / my cheeks.”

“If I stopped taking airplanes / I’d never see my family again.” the poem “IF SATURDAY, AN EMPTY PARKING LOT” offers. The poems mourn the slow loss of family and connection, a connection that requires a physicality. “Hello // to putting on hard pants and still trying / to enter a conversation thinking yes,” ends the poem “HELLO/YES,” “how a single word sets you up / for connection in a time when // people can’t touch.” Focusing different sections on different individuals across this array of loss and losses, the poems of the penultimate section, “STILL MOM,” offer an erasure of vowels across the narrative, demonstrating a devastating progress of holes in her mother’s language as her mind deteriorates. As the poem “WHEN YOU STARTED HAVING ACCIDENTS” ends: “the sky is beige your food pureed you’ve / started to strike the aides during m rning care their / answer is always m re drugs on your birthday y u / said I love you back      it’d been m nths    when / friends ask I tell them that [.]” The Work is a book that holds these articulations of loss so completely that, as a reader, one hopes that the process might allow any reader a way into their own losses, and perhaps, the author, a way from which to move somehow beyond. This really is a powerful collection.

 

 

Bren Simmers, If, When

            About a hundred years after my grandmother Janet was born, I moved to Squamish, BC. Eighteen kilometres north of Britannia, the small logging-turned-tourist town is just an hour’s drive from Vancouver. Real estate agents will tell you forty-five minutes, but that doesn’t account for traffic or for accidents on the curvy section near Lion’s Bay. At the time, Squamish was rebranding itself as an outdoor tourist destination, and tension between ‘old’ and ‘new’ was rising, along with housing prices. Two major developments were also being proposed: a liquefied natural gas plant at the old Woodfibre pulp mill (just across the inlet from Britannia) and a ski hill north of town that butted up against the backcountry of Garibaldi Provincial Park. The community was divided on these issues as it tried to strike a balance between jobs, sustainable growth, and ecosystem health. I worked in an environmental centre; I felt lucky. I spent my days walking forest trails with kids, picking up salmon jawbones, counting bald eagles.
            As all this was unfolding, my father told me the story of [great-grandparents] Dinty and Isabella. As I researched my family history, poems began to emerge in their voices. While I never met my great-grandparents, I couldn’t help but see parallels between our lives, a hundred years apart. our need for community, connection. How we relied on wild places to make a living, on forests for recreation, lumber, fuel, and medicine. How environmental legacies outlast lifespans. At some point, what I was writing about Squamish started talking to an older life in Britannia. I began to think about larger cycles of time. This book is the result of that conversation across generations. (“Introduction”)

Given how much I enjoyed her prior collection, I’d been curious about Canadian poet (currently located on Prince Edward Island) Bren Simmers’ latest, If, When (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2021). Her third full-length poetry collection, If, When writes on a particular landscape of British Columbia, citing fishing and mining towns, moving through history and family histories, and connecting back to her great-grandparents who had emigrated to the same area from Scotland, a century prior to her own arrival. In certain ways, elements of Simmers’ west coast explorations of industrial work exist as both continuation and counterpoint to similar types of work-writing over the years by Barry McKinnon (pulp/log), Michael Turner (Company Town) or the late Peter Culley [see my obituary for him here]. “Some men stuff cotton,” she writes, to open the poem “WIDOWMAKER,” a poem subtitled “Dinty, 1914,” “in their ears to mute        My great-grandfather / ghosting the margins. / the artillery of drilling rock.”

There is a curious kind of loose call-and-response to these narrative lyrics, the ways in which she moves from contemporary to elements of her great-grandparent’s lives, or the lives of her grandmother Janet, and the husband that eventually abandoned her and her children. As she opens the poem “MY GRANDFATHER WAS,” writing: “A drunk. A charmer. Dead / before we were born. A lumber man, / who bought timber rights, a planer mill / outside Prince George. Loaded / wood onto boxcars. Not spoken of.”

JACK’S TRAIL

Let’s call this paint chip
4 PM green. Lichen, liverwort.
Moss burgeoning into topo folds
enters ankles, backs of knees, hip
creaks. Call this forest bathing,
a phytochemical car wash:
chamoised by cedar boughs,
scrubbed clean by bottlebrush.
This sprung needle floor
the closest to dance hall,
to church, I’ve found.
High in the canopy, kinglets
ring their tinny bells.

She writes of work and industry, but only as an element of a larger structure of family relation and time, writing her immediate and the echoes of a century distant, and the lives of her great-grandparents through lyric description and short narrative bursts. Simmers’ work-to-date, through the poetry collections Night Gears (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2010) and Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015) [see my review of such here] and non-fiction Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019), are very much grounded in geographic and human spaces, writing the land and landscape upon which she exists, and If, When allows for a further consideration, that of the echoes of her own lineage across those same paths. “All his letters ink black by censors.” she writes, as part of the poem “AT LAST,” subtitled “Isabella, 1918,” speculating her great-grandmother’s thoughts at the end of the Great War. “Limbs intact / but his easy laugh? Time enough to reconcile the / men who left with the men who come home. / The men are coming home.”

Bren Simmers, Hastings-Sunrise

Friday night at Hastings Park.

Our beer in plastic cups. Pre-race,

the announcer tells us to look for

      a big ass, a line of muscle along the abs

      as horses bounce and prance past

patio tables, retirees with circled stats,

hipsters in fedoras, weekend warriors,

families and first-timers craving novelty.

The regulars drink inside,

beer rings stamped on betting slips.

Bred for impulse, live-feed TVs.

Minutes till the starting gun,

exam hush as their pencils wager

cubicle earnings against Luck

of the Devil. A flurry of hunches

before crack.

Cramped on their saddles,

Jockeys jack-in-the-box.

Horses try to outrun

whips. Call it sport or

9 to 5 odds I can’t watch.

Close my eyes.

A wall of noise

at the finish line.

Squamish,British Columbia poet Bren Simmers adds her voice to the poetic geography of Vancouver through her second poetry collection, Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015). Every time another poetry collection on and around Vancouver social geographies emerges, I’m amazed at the growing list of authors who have articulated that particular city through the scope of the poem, from George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and later Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008) to Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1972) and updated Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Talonbooks, 2013), to Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and so much further. There has been a whole slew of poets who have worked to articulate Vancouver, including: Meredith Quartermain, Stephen Collis, George Stanley, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Sachiko Murakami, Cecily Nicholson, Oana Avasilichioaei, Roy Kiyooka, Earle Birney, Clare Latremouille, Gerry Gilbert, John Newlove, Christine Leclerc, nikki reimer and Shannon Stewart, among so many, many others. I ask again: what is it about the city that inspires poets in such a way?

People we pass every day

become our landscape,

and we, theirs.

A friend tells time

by where she passes

the same woman

on her way to work,

which block. On

Granville, it’s opera man,

who belts out Puccini,

Rossini, Verdi maybe,

as he strolls the sidewalk.

Here, it’s the woman

in a tiara begging

outside McDonald’s,

the old man we watch for

at sundown, and he for us.

One of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods, the working class neighbourhood of Hastings-Sunrise sits immediately east of Vancouver’s fabled “Downtown Eastside” and has been experiencing a resurgence over the past couple of years, moving from abandoned buildings and evidence of drug use to a gentrification that includes condo development and an increase in small business. Simmers’ portrait, a lyric suite of poems that exist predominantly without titles, includes sketching out poems-as-maps, such as “Maps of Neighbourhood Swings,” “Map of Open Doors,” “Map of Autumn Tree Colour,” “Map of Christmas Lights” and “Map of Neighbourhood Routes,” all of which end with the caveat, “Not to Scale.” Simmers’ exploration of the Hastings-Sunrise area is very much constructed in terms of creating a portrait of the area through the lens of her experience, and one that works less as a portrait specific to Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise than the ways in which a neighbourhood becomes absorbed within the body, whether one allows it to, wishes it to, or not. This is a book about being present. Less critical than exploratory, Simmer’s Hastings-Sunrise is closer in tone and temper to similar works by British Columbia poets Elizabeth Bachinsky and Sharon Thesen than to, say, Stephen Collis or Cecily Nicholson, and her notes at the back of the collection echo that idea of domestic immediacy, as she includes: “A shout-out to Hastings-Sunrise for insisting I pay attention to my life in the present moment […].” Presented with little commentary, historical elements or critical gaze, Simmers sidesteps the usual portrait of a geography for a portrait of how a geography becomes internalized, and the ways in which we interact in urban spaces. In a poem on the local wading pool, she writes: “This park a shared / backyard, erases divides, draws / zebra foals and lion pups / to the watering hole.”