Thursday Poetry Round-Up

Since the weather has started to cool down in the past couple days, and the leaves are beginning to turn colour and loosen from their branches, and there's an undercurrent of wood smoke in the breeze, I'd be lying if I said it didn't all put me in a contemplative mood. So, with the spirit of contemplation in mind, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to bring a few recent poetry notices to your attention. 

A couple weeks ago, Catherine Owen's The Marrow Review did a nice roundup of two of our poetry books chosen completely at random: Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway by Alexandra Oliver and Meniscus by Shane Neilson. Oliver's 2013 Pat Lowther Award-Winning Canadian debut gets a favourable nod for its "sing-songy, Philip Larkinesque, rhyming, mannered, smart, continental and often quite droll" lyrics while Shane Neilson's "sophisticate and slant" musicality  in Meniscus is praised for its "bleeps & grinds & mellifluous witnessings to loss." Owen is especially fond of Meniscus for its controlled yet intense exploration of "elegy, insanity, injury and adoration."

Susan Gillis has been doing some great work on her newish blog Concrete & River of late, and this past week saw the posting of a short but fascinating exchange between her and Amanda Jernigan. Jernigan describes the various ways in which localized speech, a magical house of books in Virginia, and the life-altering experience of motherhood have informed her work and vision over the years. You can read the full exchange here. Jernigan's Groundwork was a 2011 Best Poetry Book, and her 2013 Cormorant follow-up, All the Daylight Hours, was a National Post Canadian Poetry Book of the Year for 2013.



Catherine Chandler's sonnet "Coming to Terms" received a Laureate's Choice Award earlier this month in the Great River Shakespeare Festival, Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest (Winona, Minnesota). It was singled-out among over 400 submissions by poets from thirty-six U.S. states and seven countries. The poem, which also won the 2010 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, appears in Chandler's Glad and Sorry Seasons. See why Eric Ormsby says there is "no form of which Catherine Chandler is not a master, from quatrains and Sapphics to ballads and pantoums. She is an especially brilliant sonneteer." 

And finally, Kerry-Lee Powell's Inheritance, which is our lead fall poetry title and which is making its way through the printers at Coach House as we speak, is a 49th Shelf Most Anticipated Fall Poetry Book. Kerry-Lee's fiction has won her a two book deal with Harper Collins as well as accolades from the likes of Nathan Englander and Junot Diaz, and her poetic debut is a fierce and moving one. It should definitely be on the radar of all lovers of Canadian Poetry.

And now back to my coffee and weltschmerz.

I Shout Love and Other Poems

Today's poem-of-the-day courtesy of Dr. Neilson. For the elephant in all of us.

I Shout Love and Other Poems

from Meniscus (2009)

I'd shout love if it weren't ridiculous,
if there weren't an elephant in the room,
if sonnets were romantic instead of credulous-
semantic, if this brand of mutual doom
indemnified grief beyond my belief in you,
and you, my public policy, my secret sharer,
even whispering this is shouting, blue-
in-the-face, gasp-intake, self-scarer,
laryngitic, involuble, I watch you sleep
and think of timing, of elephant dance,
of this longing and belonging steeped
in my groped finesse. Perhaps I'll prance,
preen and shriek, mate for life.
The elephant is reluctance. Be my wife.

The missionary mating practice of the elephant, as imagined by 18th-century French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon). From his 44-volume Histoire Naturelle.

The Telegraph-Journal reviews Meniscus

Meniscus is a journey through the mind, poetry its means of travel.

From descriptions of a stormy, painful childhood and mental illness to reflections on love, New Brunswick-born physician and poet Shane Neilson delivers strong images and lines exploring much with quick, deft phrasing and choice diction.

Four groups of poems feature a strong narrative line throughout, abundant in intimate and revealing language. Neilson opens the collection with a poem called Recovery. He then uses the first grouping of poems, which focuses on the violence of a father against his family, as a starting point to access the evolution from mental to emotional states.

Following a narrative arc, we glimpse the frightening as well as the emotionally epiphanic. In The Beaten-Down Elegies we witness the terrible pain of violence where there should be love. Using metaphors drawn from the land and labour, with allusions to religion and drinking, much attention is paid to hands, to work, to the hard business of making a living. The speaker tells us, "I try to look like an accountant / at his ledger, but look instead on a fixed // post: totemic, obscure. In the end there is fear."

In the second section, Manic Statement, we see a dissolving self, an identity fragmented. An interior world at risk: "Your fortune is to collide, / collapse and wake up // to wreckage. Sanity / is the worst injury, tomorrow // the wound."

In the third grouping, Seized, there is physical fragmentation. Exploring seizures, physical and emotional, seems to be the business of this collection. Meniscus is never more visceral than in this section, with its "electrocuted songs" and its "sound like a thousand cannons." We follow the speaker's off-balance balcony fall from ambulance to hospital, from seizure and delirium to the aftermath of "the dream procedure."

And, finally, the fourth section, titled Love Life, knits the experience of pain into something foreign and shared, engaging the senses in another kind of upheaval. Poems that follow the various states of delusion, or fear, are juxtaposed against sensual poems of love, physical and emotional.

Meniscus is a collection about the deep-down difficulties of life expressed in language that knows where it's going. These poems are rife with sound and shot through with images that stop and grab your attention. A physician's sense of diagnostic diction and a poet's sense of arresting image makes a forceful combination.

Heather Craig is a poet and writer based in Grand Bay-Westfield.

Daily Gleaner Reviews Meniscus

In November 2009, Oromocto native Shane Neilson received the Mimi Divinsky Award for History and Narrative in Family Medicine at the 2009 Family Medical Forum in Calgary. The award, which is accompanied by a $1,000 cash prize, recognizes the narrative account of experiences in family medicine.

A second honour came Neilson's way with the publication of Meniscus which sees Neilson move away from chapbooks to his first full-length trade book of verse.

Meniscus, according to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary means (1) the curved upper surface of a liquid in a tube; (2) a lens that is convex on one side and concave on the other; and (3) a thin fibrous cartilage between the surfaces of some joints.

All three meanings could be applicable.

The first section of Meniscus features the poems in Neilson's first chapbook, The Beaten-Down Elegies (2004). These are memory poems of growing up and witnessing how life is lived through the eyes of youth.

The second section, Manic Statement, contains various utterances relating to the medical profession. Bipolar, for example, is a brief, but very poignant expression of this affliction in which "all roads/ are mad."

Life on 8 Lane is another deeply moving poem that relates existence in a psychiatric ward along side that of "the city in perpetual drizzle" as "the sun still rises and sets." There is no cure is a poem that has reflective metaphors on the parallels between farmers and doctors noting especially how "the doctors shake their heads like farmers do/ when the season's bad."

The section titled Seized records all sorts of messages from the doctor's viewpoint on such topics as open head injuries, seizures en route, the ambulance, the MRI, and the OR.

The last section, Love Life is complete with paradoxes on numerous aspects of life and its precious significance.

On Realizing his Toddler Will Become a Woman and Before Irony express well the theme of the section, which has considerable emphasis for Neilson's daughter.

Neilson, who grew up in Oromocto, attended Oromocto High School, and the University of New Brunswick before studying medicine at Dalhousie University, now lives in Guelph, Ont., where he is a family physician. Although the practice of medicine and the literary arts are not always compatible, Neilson clearly demonstrates how it is possible to be successful at both.

Meniscus has an excellent balance in which the medical practitioner spans the vital features of life and death with precision, understanding, care, and realism.

- reviewed by MICHAEL O. NOWLAN

For The Daily Gleaner

Shane Neilson's Meniscus

Shane Neilson's first trade book Meniscus has come in for a bit of late season praise I'd like to draw your attention to. Carmine Starnino has listed it -- alongside Wayne Clifford's Jane Again and Robyn Sarah's Pause for Breath (3 of 10? Hey! Not bad!) -- as among his top 10 poetry titles this season. There's a review up at Agora and the excellent Quill & Quire review is up online as well. This past weekend The Winnipeg Free Press also reviewed Meniscus, saying:

SHANE Neilson's Meniscus (Biblioasis, 93 pages, $18) is an example of that rare and defining moment in a poet's career when subject and language meld into authentic poetic voice.
Meniscus is the first full-length collection by Neilson, an Ontario physician, who takes on the confessional with precision and purpose.
Neilson doesn't hold anything back when he writes about what he knows best: the horrors of child abuse, the darkness of illness and the equally challenging states of love.
What is most compelling is Neilson's unsentimental range of emotion. An abusive father who taught his son "in the end there is fear" is also a farmer who, after losing $30,000 in one year, "lightly shovelled / shit onto sun-browned spots."
Every line is taut with pain and heart under Neilson's staunch eye. In For my father, he writes:

it is about being able to bear the load,
be it two cord of hardwood on a truck,
two cord in the ledger, the two cord of the heart,
two cord hauled out from backfields
and split with the hydraulic, carried in a child's arms
and piled head-high.

Why Confess? - A Shane Neilson Post

Shane Neilson's Meniscus is due from the printer mid-next week. In a guest-blog post, he writes about the poem as act of confession.

* * *

Why confess? Why take the personal and attempt to sanctify it in a poem? Why take what a few friends and family should know, and offer it up to a public?

The working title of my book was “My Manic Statement,” a reference to the granddaddy of the confessionals, Robert Lowell, and his “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” Lowell has been the presiding genius of this collection, not in terms of style but in terms of the confidence of utterance: I tried to do what Elizabeth Bishop said in a letter to Lowell, that Bishop might write about the events in her life but she doesn’t have the historical position that Lowell easily mines. I wanted to take a personal history and make it brittle, I wanted to make that history somehow relevant and pressing to more than just my own need. I wanted soul-excoriating poems that I could at least confirm had the ring of truth.

Many years ago, the first manuscript –drivel- I sent out to publishers was a collection of political poems, mostly about the then-ongoing war in Kosovo. One editor wrote back asking what knowledge I had of war, what legitimacy I possessed; he said it was a basic question that people would ask, how I was positioned to speak, if I was authentic. (What was understood: who was I kidding, really, a boy from New Brunswick.) I was devastated by this comment, and resolved instead to write about things I could verify; the war poems, little trinkets as I look back now, began to fall into the shadow of the only tumult that I really knew, and the only experience I could ever have.

But that doesn’t mean I’m left with a confidence. People have read my manuscript and said, “I think I now know you too well,” which means that there is the cringe factor in the confessional; but what man has not grieved, or longed, or succumbed? A man of serial failures and dogged persistence? One might say, “That’s just biography”, but I like to think that instead it’s authorship: these are the only things known to me, and are therefore the only things I can adumbrate, the only poems I could ever write, and the fantastic, odds-defying nature of the survivorship is the ringing back and front story of the collection, that it was written in spite of an unusual adversity. Rilke said in “Archaic Torso of Apollo” that “You must change your life” but as someone familiar with the confessional I know that the opposite is true, that my life changed me, and the very stuff of poetry is an investigation of states, of crossroad moments, of blunderings. Why not compose statements-in-poems that attest? That wrangle and pratfall? That “say what really happened?”

And then there is that great redeemer, love. It validates, and the book can be read as an in extremis love poem. The “I” of the book, used, I admit, as a function of the bondage of self, is rescued when the “I” looks at the cost: mounting, unmanageable. “I” becomes a love letter, a recognition that I owe all of this kingdom to “you.” Lowell broke the rules here, populating his poems with juiced biography, presenting one of his wives unfairly as a contrast; all of my use of the personal pronoun is an admission of culpability, a springboard to launch into reflection and not pronouncement.

But confessional, yes. A manic statement.

Poems About Children (A Shane Neilson Post)

(NB: Biblioasis is publishing Shane Neilson's first trade book of poetry in the fall of 09, and he has agreed to help out around Thirsty with the occasional post on anything related to poetry (which means almost anything). I've been stockpiling these of late, as all of the travelling has kept me away from the blog, but I'll start getting these posts, as well as other reviews and other original Thirsty material, quite soon.)

Poems about children should obey a certain ethic: there should be nothing embarrassing about them, nothing potentially damaging; the child should be able to grow into an adult and not have misgivings at being so portrayed. A prominent Canadian poet, after hearing me read an otherwise innocuous poem about my daughter, mentioned that her children forbade her from writing about them. I asked the poet if there was any transgression involved, if any confidences were betrayed, and she said no, just that her daughters were “very private people” and in order to preserve her relationship with them, she obeyed.

This anecdote gets to the fundamental ruthlessness of poetry: it has to get at a thing, it has to turn it over and over, it has to possess a knowledge –not necessarily factual- that is revelatory in character, or at least speaks to the revelatory capacity in the reader. Something must be discovered. Often it is a feeling, most commonly of a regarding and unprepossessing love, but sometimes of regret, sometimes of loss. And these are honourable things, and I told the poet so, I told her that love poetry is hardly a means of commodification of her parenting and that if the poet was to take into account matters other than poetry, as a refusal, then where would the poetry turn? I told the poet that I write about my children as they are loved, as they are a part of my life, and excluding them from that life would be excluding them from the best part of me, as Milton Acorn once said in the asylum in a letter to Joe Rosenblatt, it would be unnatural and granting them a power they should not possess, that they do not deserve. I present their best selves, questing, learning; and children are best reared, as Seamus Heaney has said, when commented on frankly and in earnest. They exist in my life, and in my imaginative life; I would be betraying myself if I were to exclude them. I told the senior poet that her children were both taking themselves too seriously and not seriously enough, and that she herself was too fearful, and if I had not been interrupted by my wife, who commented that my son wanted his father, I may have got myself into trouble by disobeying the other ethic of writing about one’s children: one has to be sensitive to emotional tissues. I had to let this woman’s poetry be the captive of her progeny. I picked up my son, checking my own motivations, considering him my son, not opportunistically as proto-poem material. Indeed he will play amongst the lines, I will not refuse him those lines, in some way he deserves them, they are talismanic and will attest of his hold on me. But never did I think, and I feel this absolves me, Now I have the material, the experience, for poetry, as I let the life happen, without also squelching the poems that come as a consequence of my love, not as a looting of it.