Quebec Passages
Pearl
Pirie. Noun Trivet Press, $15 CAN/US paperback (36p) ISBN 978-0-9878663-3-2
as
a traveling companion
the blank page
could do better
sure, it flatteringly
wants to let me
talk about me
but discloses
not a half-note
about itself
Existing
as something between the chapbook and the trade collection is Ottawa poet,
publisher and blogger Pearl Pirie’s Quebec
Passages, a self-published follow-up to an earlier collection of
self-described “train poems,” between
stations (Obvious Epiphanies Press, 2011). The author of numerous chapbooks
and two trade poetry collections—been
shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010) and Thirsts
(Snare Books, 2011), winner the 2011 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative
Poetry—Pirie is also the author of a forthcoming third trade collection, pet radish, shrunken, scheduled to
appear with BookThug in Spring 2015. Part of the appeal of following Pirie’s
work over the past few years has always been in not entirely knowing where her
work might go next, shifting between narrative forms into more traditional engagements
with haiku as well as more experimental forms of language and visual poetry,
playing constantly with different shapes and possible sounds. Certainly, not
all of her attempts have been successful, but those that are far outweigh the
ones that aren’t, and through her curiosity, her work manages to accomplish a
series of unexpected moments and startling, even jarring, images. The fact of
her exploration and unevenness reminds me about what jwcurry once suggested about
the late Toronto poet bpNichol, that he wasn’t a great poet because everything
he wrote or published was great, but that he was willing to try everything.
Simply for the fact that he was fearless enough in his work that he was willing
to fail; and through that, he managed to accomplish things in his work that
hadn’t even been attempted before.
what
I’m missing
not a drunk, with many a sniggering
jest.
for hours I haven’t been asked
for change, bus tickets, a smile. no
crack-heads no off-meds. shoulders
soften.
not a single child with an ear-infection
nor cat pleading utterly cruelly
starved.
not even an unanswered ring of
telemarketer. have we outrun the food
chain?
are we suspended mid-air. don’t look
down.
don’t open your eyes. feign grade 2 sick
day sleep.
in quiet like this one could believe
in omens. or be susceptible to beauty.
A
number of the poems that make up Quebec
Passages give a sense of sketch quickness, as though wanting to get as much
down on paper as possible in a kind of note-form, skimming across a far larger
canvas merely suggested by what she has written down. In many places, meaning
is superseded by the play of sounds, allowing her words to simply bounce off
each other, connecting her lyrical dots as much by bouncing sound off and
across what the words might actually say. There is such a lovely sing-song
quality to a number of these pieces as Pirie utilizes a variety of information,
including historical, observational and personal, to craft a sequence of lyric exploratory
sketches composed during and around rail travel. Might the poems here and in between stations be part of a singular
manuscript that might see trade publication down the road, or is this something
continuous and ongoing, a project that might see multiple loosely-connected
published iterations over an extended period of years? “[O]r through the eyes
is to go thru / a very small aperture,” she writes, to open the poem “to fall
in love through the ear,” “to slip in under the skin, / for a filarial worm,
living is loving / is backwashing from the kiss / of mosquitoes into a person
[.]” Further in the collection, the poem “a country untouched” begins:
by civil war on our soil we are the
peacekeepers except for Oka, and squirmishes and wars before the Iroquois
Confederacy and deportation from Acadie and forced relocation to English homes
of natives and the children from Ireland made into slaves and 2012 with
twenty-three people shot on Danzig in east Scarborough and fourteen who died in
1989 at École Polytechnique, and police reported 121 incidents of impaired
driving causing death in 2011, and the small violences of shortened longevity
by tetanus 2005-2011 is 3 so forget that, measles 750 in 2011 but no death,
unnecessary grief, what else for the fret machinery? Smoking is responsible for
16.6 per cent of all deaths in Canada. But
(April
2014)
Purchase
Quebec Passages HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious
capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction
and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was
longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes
and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty
Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). He regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
