Review | Poetry: Barb Carey

The Day-Breakers

By Michael Fraser

Biblioasis, 96 pages, $19.95

The Toronto poet Michael Fraser brings history alive in his third collection, a stirring tribute to the Black soldiers who fought for the Union in the American Civil War, hundreds of whom were African Canadians. Fraser inhabits a wide cast of characters “jawing in rhythmic tongues,” and vividly portrays the misery of hunger and disease afflicting the recruits, as well as the horrors of the battlefield’s “bullet-laden tides.” The language of the poems is terrific: a fresh, striking vernacular (glossary included) that’s both lyrical and gritty in its immediacy, whether he’s describing the wounded being “horse-carted/in from the frontline’s smurry thunder-/stone conveyor belt” or expressing the shock of Lincoln’s assassination (“It feels as if the ground is grease-fried/and welded with thunder”). The images of the war’s carnage are particularly visceral, but Fraser also writes affectingly of the soldiers’ idealism in this powerhouse of historical revisioning: “Arrowing towards Savannah,/coloured soldiers carry the seeds/of a new nation.”

After Beowulf

By Nicole Markotic

Coach House, 142 pages, $21.95

The epic Anglo-Saxon poem about the exploits of Beowulf gets a cheeky feminist makeover in Nicole Markotic’s fourth book of poetry. The Windsor poet is faithful to the story’s broad strokes and all of the usual suspects appear, including the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother (who doesn’t have her own name, as in the original). But Markotic sends up Beowulf’s “celebrity-heroism” and undermines the solemnity of the story with acerbic editorial comments and by mixing contemporary slang with more archaic language, as in her description of warriors who “so have their hate-on/for the demon swamp heathen, yes?” Her editorializing includes pointing out how “guy feuds” among kings are settled by “men selling/their sisters and daughters/to solve pesky grudges.” In the notes, Markotic writes that she drew on numerous translations and movie adaptations of “Beowulf” but wanted to “fun-around with this manuscript.” The result is both an irreverent romp and, paradoxically, a work of scholarship.

The Invisible World Is in Decline: Book IX

By Bruce Whiteman

ECW, 98 pages, $21.95

In one passage in this final book in a poetic project that Bruce Whiteman began in 1984, he writes of poets who “celebrate the old stories.” In a way, that’s what the Peterborough poet does too, engaging with Western literary tradition, the muses of Greek mythology and classical music. But he also offers deeply personal reflections on aging, loneliness and love; thus there’s the immediacy of an individual life set within the wider context of history and culture. The project as a whole (a long poem that covers almost 40 years and stretches over nine books!) is a pensive record of time and change; and this concluding book is full of poignant images: the memory of a lost love is “a mere afterimage/something your hands go through like smoke or water running/from a tap”; mortality is a game of musical chairs (“One/by one your friends must leave the room, as the music stops and/starts again”).

Nothing Will Save Your Life

By Nancy Jo Cullen

Wolsak and Wynn, 80 pages, $19.95

In one poem in Nancy Jo Cullen’s fourth collection, she writes, “I have no idea what’s coming next. Sometimes I laugh; sometimes I just go/bonkers.” An edgy humour and a sizzle of anger run through many of the Kingston poet’s frank, conversational meditations; in “TBH” (the acronym for “to be honest,”), she slaloms through topics ranging from economic inequality to aging, but at the heart of it is a mother’s worry about teenage daughters (“We told our daughters, do not walk through that park; we said/you are a public space”) and the influence of social media (“always on the receiving end/Of stand-out online dating photos”). She also reflects on gender expectations elsewhere: “how hard it is to kick the habit of obedience,” she writes, in a poem about growing up Catholic. Death is a recurring theme, too, but even these poignant poems of loss — commemorating her parents, a brother, a beloved dog — buzz with life.

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