Waiting Room
Jennifer
Zilm. BookThug, $18 paperback CAN/US (104p) ISBN 9781771662147
MUSE
IN AUGUST
Her muse for poetry is an old woman. She
declares this on an island in the wilderness—it doesn’t matter where as long as
it’s either Ontario or Québec. She says her mother was always kind to her. Her
mother says she would leave her young daughter alone in the kitchen, baking.
Alone with flour, eggs, oven, elements, because she didn’t want to discourage
her but couldn’t watch her do it wrong. The Crone Muse prefers heavy, dense
sentences. The Muse as Landscape says I
am the road you are walking on, pay attention. The Muse as Pioneer
Housewife hides the bodies of her sons beneath wet soil as territorial markers.
Sometimes the Crone Muse says I am happy.
She forever holds someone’s memory of burnt cookies—an absence with the flavor
of smoke and hard crust.
The
author of two poetry chapbooks—The whole
and broken yellows (Frog Hollow Press, 2013) and October Notebook (dancing girl press, 2015)—Vancouver poet Jennifer
Zilm’s first trade poetry collection is Waiting
Room (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016), a draft of which was shortlisted for the
2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. The poems that make up Waiting Room are constructed out of a
mix of experimental fragments, erasures and more formal lyrics, ranging from
sonnets and centos to poems with titles such as “The Committee Meeting,”
“Footnotes to the Associate Professor” and “Email to the Full Professor.” As
she describes the collection in a recent interview conducted by Stacey Seymour
and posted at BookThug: “It has four sections. The first is about the dentist,
the second about the academy, the third is about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
and the fourth is about therapy. There are a lot of doctors in it.”
From
the density of her shorter poems to the stretched-lyric of her longer
sequences, the collection refuses to be held in one particular structure or
space, but instead reads as a series of explorations, moving out across a broad
range of subjects, styles and constructions. What makes this collection so
compelling is not only the range of structures within, but in seeing Zilm’s
openness, as we see her attempting to understand some of the broad range of
possibilities that poetry has to offer.
S.ELECTIVE
S.OOTHING R.ADIANT I.NVENTORY:
a cento drawn from the flower
innards notebook
To be precise about precise about the
expanse of flesh
takes the eye away from the grey words
until the self dis-owns
birds gather[ed] into the mesquite tree
confessing to existence
the self. They’ve told
how people get over themselves. That
mystery:
this life you returned to me, this one
life
beyond the cruel reach
winter, an individual summer.
In the middle of the tunnel,
each moment is place,
how many of these places in space have
already been
earth as full of life as life was full
of them.
When next we find ourselves
don’t give up the ghost. What we mean is
attend.
One
of the most striking pieces in the collection has to be the suite of fragments
“Dead Sea Strolls: A Dissertation Erasure,” a poem that came out of her studies
at the University of British Columbia, a poem she tangentially refers to,
further in the same interview: “In 2012 I decided to give up working on my
dissertation on gender, angels and prayer in the Bible and the Dead Sea
Scrolls. I made the decision at the Vancouver WORD Literary Festival which made
me happy because the word became flesh etc. So I determined to write a book in
lieu of a dissertation. The book is also an elegy for that lost dissertation
but it’s also an elegy for some people and a celebration of a neighbourhood. I
wrote the book in 2013. I gave up reading novels that year and read only
poetry: that was pretty inspiring.”
AN EXTENDED DESCRIPTION OF DAUGHTERS
A daughter took on a heart—no longer
minded.
She
spoke in dialect, sending up
God with hymnic style.
She
spoke, inscribed
her garment in the thousands of their
language.
(April
2016)
Purchase
Waiting Room HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he
shares with Christine McNair. The author of nearly thirty trade books of
poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010,
the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted
for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the
VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac
press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle:
stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we
are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs
above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview),
seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds),
Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the
Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). In fall 2015,
he was named “Interviews Editor” at Queen
Mob’s Teahouse, and recently became a regular contributor to both the Drunken Boat and Ploughshares blogs. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton
as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts
reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
