Book Reviews

Varied Voices

Catherine Owen (Author)
Shall: Ghazals. Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd
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Shannon Bramer (Author)
The Refrigerator Memory. Coach House Books
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Jennica Harper (Author)
The Octopus and Other Poems. Signature Editions
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Mark Frutkin (Author)
Iron Mountain. Beach Holme Publishing
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Tammy Armstrong (Author)
Bogman's Music. Anvil Press
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Karen Connelly (Author)
Grace and Poison. Turnstone Press
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Reviewed by Darlene Shatford

Shall:Ghazals, by Vancouver-based poet Catherine Owen, showcases a collection of 54 compact poems written in a variation on an ancient, Persian verse, a sequence of couplets that adhere to a “tender yet fierce form.” Owen’s preface-styled “Portal,” dated October, 2005, provides a context to the subsequent ghazals as it describes the speaker’s return to the poetic expression of experience. Beset with a mysterious illness that left her lying in bed exhausted and “broken,” the speaker recounts how she was able to do only nothing, for even language had become “painful, impenetrable.” However, the ghazal, the promise of the ghazal, then only a “flicker,” haunted her mind and “flooded” her body. Once she was able to hold a pen again, she became obsessed with the form, so much so that her life not only had been drawn into the poems but also had been “pared away to a relentless language.” She admits that the traditional ghazals are not her own, with their “contained couplets, mantras and rhyme schemes, with the oral force of community behind their chanted refrains,” but, evident in the collection of poems, Owen does know the emptiness, the loss, the smallness, and the beauty the ghazal wants and demands.

The poems, short and spare, allow only half-glimpses, slices of images, of the speakers’ awareness and experience, but somehow these are enough. The smallness of birds, a spider’s eggs, lips, leaves, crickets, and children signify the ongoing-ness and potential richness of life but are also used to point to its brevity, for the speakers are preoccupied with shadows and emptiness. It is as if upon reflection on new life, hope, renewal, the speakers are reminded of death, loss, and grief. For example, in the 28th poem entitled “Absence,” Owen writes, “I used to hear birds close to morning. / Now asphalt whimpers.”

Throughout the collection, readers are reminded of the struggle for poetic expression, for the speakers repeatedly refer to the written word, language, or poetry itself and, at times, question the power and/or usefulness of the art form: “There is only so much a poem can save. / Is there anything saved by a poem?” and “Some poems are like morning / - their light berates my seeing.” Readers are given some insight into the poet’s longing for the precision language can offer but, along with the poet, know how elusive language can be: “Again, the seasons collide. / Where is there place for a word?” Owen’s collection of ponderings on the poet’s uneasy relationship with language deserves more than a single reading; the poems are complex and compelling, worthy of study.

Although Shannon Bramer’s poems in her third poetry collection, The Refrigerator Memory, also resonate with a certain sadness, they are comprised of a diversity of characters and subjects. Far from stark, Bramer’s poems have a fairy-tale quality to them and are peopled with magical figures such as a clown, a fire-eater, a scientist of kindness, and a boy who can’t stop crying, among others.

Many of Bramer’s speakers confess to entertaining and committing outrageous acts. For instance, as a way to get back at her husband for flirting with her sister, the speaker in “Our Prosthesis” admits to hiding her husband’s arm in the basement after a night of drinking and, before bed, reads The Idiot long into the night: “My sister doesn’t / even know who Dostoyevsky is.” In the poem “Riding Hood Reads the Suicide Note,” Nana, although afraid of what Riding Hood might think, admits to loving the wolf and confesses her desire for “ a muzzle / of blood and fur.” Surprisingly, she says, “You must learn / to love those who trespass; they are the most interesting / people you will come across.” In “The Hot-Air Balloon Operator and Her Brother,” the brother, frustrated by his sister’s renouncement of her medical studies and her surprising new vocation, thinks he might “strangle her” and imagines her “body dropping down / through the sky, landing broken near the front steps, back / home where he might help her start again.”

Typically serious subjects such as molestation, terminal illness, and murder become quirky under Bramer’s treatment, comical even. The speaker of “First Husband” frankly states, “Like the young girl in that book / I murdered him in the afternoon. . . . I had longed to drag him, let / his head bump and knock on the antiques.” In “Elegy for Atlas,” Bramer surprises the reader with a poem addressed to the dog of a family in the midst and aftermath of a breakup: “I watched you. / The summer you chewed off your tail / to forestall the divorce.” Bramer’s voices, many of them startling in their grief, manage to rise above the moribund, refuse to be weighted down by complex musings. Their charming, sometimes absurd tones quietly fascinate.

Fascination with and examination of the “science of everyday life” are the subjects of The Octopus and Other Poems by BC poet, Jennica Harper. Harper’s speakers are innocent, questioning explorers, desirous not only of the uncharted terrain but also of the experiences on the journey itself.

Filled with investigations of love, travel, and other human behaviour, the collection speaks to the need to relate, identify, learn, and belong through a process of expression and reflection. In “Breasts: Case Study,” the speaker recalls her reaction toward her breasts at the age of ten, “the blobs on my / chest just extra weight, / jacket pockets filled / and turned inside out” and compares them to her mother’s that “continue to face forward. / They know the way.” In “Screw Roses,” the speaker waits her turn at the tattoo parlor, admitting she wants to be a “bad girl, hanging out / with the mean guys, loyal but unpredictable, / adored, adorned, / a leader of the pack / (vroom, vroom).”

Harper writes of lost men, sea life, maps, and music, and although some of the narrative poems tend to sprawl, the metaphors and imagery, largely exploratory and scientific in nature, provide tension and feeling. Harper’s work is engaging and promising.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #193 (Summer 2007), Canada Reads. (pg. 167 - 168)

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