The time, if time it was, would ripen
in its own sweet time. One thought of dawn.
One felt that things were shaping up,
somehow, that it was getting on.
Day broke. Upon the waters broke
in waves on waves unbreaking and
night fell, unveiling in its wake
one perfect whitened rib of land.
I slept, and while I slept I dreamed,
a breaking wave, a flowering tree,
and all of one accord I seemed.
I woke, and you divided me.
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.
With Sibum’s latest work, he delivers a change of scenery from previous outings, like Girls and Handsome Dogs, for which he won the Quebec Writers’ Federation's A.M. Klein Prize.
Sibum captivates his audience and sends them on a journey through what seems like his own life history.
Having grown up in Germany, then travelling to Alaska, Utah and Washington and finally settling in Montreal, Sibum has let his inspiration from different worlds and cultures infuse his poetry.
Through political undertone, Sibum compares past conflicts with their modern equivalents. This isn’t just another middle finger to the establishment; Sibum seems serious in his mockery of political targets, but underneath his words it is evident that he wants to find a way to change things, to make them better.
Through his characters, Sibum has left us questioning how we can make our own mark on the world today, a sentiment that can be shared by the young and experienced alike.
Sibum has managed somehow to mix humour, gravity, originality and truth in his writing. Within the portraits that Sibum paints with his words, we are always left with a sense of accomplishment, yearning and captivation. He brings readers back to the past by introducing a new kind of present. He has the power to change what we think is so normal in today’s world.
Pick up a copy and prepare to have your world changed.
(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.
