Eva H.D., the natural hustle: poems

 

THE BOYS AT THE PIZZERIA

Drinking wine from a can from a glass. Wood
table, mittens. Moved in this way and in
that. The young pizza guys: doughty stand ins
looking like boys I might have loved. They could
have been, bouquet of zinfandel lips, good
hands, ranginess of youthlimb, easy grin:
the lush sweetness of it, getting things done, thin
skin at their collars blistering so you’d

want to soothe that itch with cool fingers, palms.
You’d have wanted that, once, and gotten—or
not: let the bombs go off all over your
body then snuffed the winedark flame of its song,
get lit again. turned back toward the heat, youth,
rising like dough in the oven’s hot mouth.

I’m only seeing this now, Toronto poet Eva H.D.’s the natural hustle: poems (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2023), a collection that follows her full-length debut, Rotten Perfect Mouth (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and collaborative art/photography volume with photographer Kendall Townend, Light Wounds (2021). The poems that make up the natural hustle offer an assemblage of declarative scenes; a montage of moments wrapped around other moments, attending the immediate, it would suggest, of both the author’s urban landscape and memory. “Every summer,” she writes, as part of the poem “DONNA SUMMER,” “you entertain thoughts you’ve had before; through / a sweating glass, lacerated with heat, consider // whether there’ll ever be enough July, consider / the menu, the news from Aleppo, the breathing/ Chablis. You misapprehend, fail to think through / anything but your own righteous outrage, friends’ / afflictions, your partisan posture.” Through H.D., the past and the present interact, intermingle and even react, providing a suggestion that there are no singular moments, but those that connect in loose sequence. Everything holds, somehow, and everything connects. Composed as first-person narratives, these poems are rooted in landscape, even across great distances, meditative swirls and the backlash of recollection. “Back to the highway.” she writes, as part of the extended sequence “GOD AND THE PATH TRAIN,” “Ramones doing their / Cretin hop syncopations like a / bulimic mid-vomit like / this one song just has to leave my body, / a car cuts us off so close it’s / practically driving backwards. // Sunflower dust on everything.” Or, as the same poem offers, near the end:

I sit here in a clean cool blue
plastic seat not caring less
about Camus who never
as it turns out even
once mentions the PATH train—
whether god is at the end
or Hoboken—I dunno
what people see
in the guy.
He’s not a map.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Eva H.D.

Eva H.D. lives in Toronto and works in a bar where the floors are dirty but the licker is pure.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My last book was actually a turkey dinner, and while it received rave reviews, those people will say anything when they are all sleepy from the tryptophan.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I believe that, in no small part due to the genius of David Price, the Jays have what it takes to go all the way this year.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The great thing about this question is that I know what all of these words mean, individually.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
My poems usually begin as cake, but I hate sweets, so they end poorly, as poems. Then they become books, mostly because of how they randomly come together in the bottom of my litter basket.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Has anyone seen my creative process? I wanted to make a craigslist 'missed connections' ad for it, but then got bogged down in the details.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My friend's dad shares a birthday with Leonard Cohen. I think the most important question is, Does Leonard Cohen share a birthday with Leonard Cohen? Or is it just his birthday, full stop? Bruce Springsteen's birthday is a couple of days later, but there's obviously no question as to whether The Boss shares with The Boss. Of course he does. He's probably doing it right now.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The tallest brigantine captain I've ever met is six foot five, whereas your average writer is, what – maybe five ten? So, I would say the writer's role in this larger culture would be to start doing more pushups.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love the outdoors.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Be better.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I rise at first light and collect farm fresh eggs from the henhouse. While trundling this fine produce to the market in town, I silently compose ghazals for the morning dew, and commit them to memory without breaking one single, precious shell. In this way, I avoid making omelettes.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I ease off on the clutch.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of my aunt's French maid blanching asparagus.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Fibonacci would probably appreciate how you called nature a form.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Writers don't usually come into my work. The last time a writer came into my work, I asked him to take his Guinness glass off of the Pac-Man arcade table and he called me a cunt.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Yes.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Being presented with false dichotomies always makes me wish that Marty McSorley had my back.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Opposable thumbs.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great film was Lawrence of Arabia. Everything else is shit.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on my friend Ian to let me use his answer to question 18.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Eva H.D., Rotten Perfect Mouth

Still Life With Canadiana

The wind is going a hundred

miles an hour, mewling

in the chimney like a vodkathin drunk.

Pale broadloom, an automated

snowman. Three girls grow in choir

robes on the mantel: from left to right

their hair and faces lengthen.

The microwave is humming,

and the lights on the tree.

Pitch-perfect, two sisters on

matching florals grow limber

with Kahlua. Above the wind,

and below it, they scale the melody’s

frame, and descend.

Another sister pads in, towelling

dry her long, blonde hair, braiding

in a harmony.

In the hall, their mother and aunt

pause a discussion on cats.

On the sofa, their great-aunt closes

her eyes.

When the song is done, their father says

Dinner, and the  middle sister disappears

for a cigarette.

The frozen yard outside is so quiet,

she thinks it must have snowed

all over the world.

There is something quite remarkable in the poetry of Toronto poet Eva Haralambidis-Doherty, otherwise known as Eva H.D., through her first poetry collection Rotten Perfect Mouth (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2015). Remarkable, and rare, in the fact that she hadn’t published a single word before the appearance of this collection (something she shares with Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, who didn’t publish a word before the appearance of her recent first chapbook, as well as Calgary poet Nikki Sheppy). In her opening salvo, Rotten Perfect Mouth is a strong and compelling collection, and one from a poet I very much hope we hear more from. Her powerful and playful poems exist as a series of lyric narratives constructed out of personal observations, writing out stories of meteors and lies, various locations in and beyond Toronto, oceans, daydreams and conflicts, among other subjects both abstract and immediately concrete. There is a curious surrealism that permeates Eva H.D.’s collection, one that includes occasional, incredible quirks and connections that leap off the page. During her recent reading as part of the Ottawa Mansfield Press launch I could hear elements of the late American writer Richard Brautigan’s poetry, and his ability to blend opposing thoughts into unexpected images. There is something lovely and lyric and unusual in her poetry worth paying attention to, a kind of staccato pulse that races through her lines as she writes “The snow is pounding down / like a herd of ballerinas, / and fills up the window / between MYSTERY and / ROMANCE / with its white weight.” (“Why Basements Are Safe”), “The sky never touches the ground but races it, forever and ever. / Amen.” (“Racing It”), or the opening of the poem “Liberty Bell,” that reads:

Your fern hands, those saturated fronts

pealing down my ribcage, you Liberty Bell.

Furling and unfurling, green as tides,

and they are cream, snapping like sails,

tapered tethered doves.

The wingbeats a delicate violence.

Each one a fluttering, fickle heart,

daubing the air.

My little hypotenuse. My champagne

cork. My crocus. My snowdrop. My

holy holy shit.

My friendless renard, all tipsy

with va et vient. You jibtop.