The Essential Margaret Avison (Robyn Sarah, ed.)
Although I do teach poems sometimes, I don't read whole books of poetry very often anymore. When it comes to poetry, at heart I read poems rather than books: give me an epic or a sonnet cycle or a blank-verse novel, and I'm tucking in for the duration, but collections can leave me feeling like I only needed some of what's between the covers.
This is a me problem, to be clear. I don't usually struggle the same way with story collections, where I'm comfortable that I've got favourites, but with poetry books, I end up locked in self-analysis and iterative lit.crit analysis trying to make an individual poem work for me. It's a me problem, but that doesn't mean it isn't genuinely a problem.
Still, the "greatest hits" poetry collection is a little different, especially in the Porcupine's Quill version where they've been selected by a particular person based on that reader's uniquely personal sense for the original poet's total oeuvre. They're consistently interesting, consistently provoking, and lately I've been reading The Essential Margaret Avison under the excellent curatorship and companionship of Robyn Sarah. In short, it was a brief joy; when there are only 48 pages of poems, you're able to make it last for only so long.
And for me, it's such a relief to be able to think that if a poem doesn't work for me, that's only because my reading preferences don't align with some other reader! Admittedly, Robyn Sarah's kind of a treasure, plus her long relationship with Avison means that these selections are more meaningful than another editor's selections would be, but regardless, I get to love the poems I love, and it's easier not to mind that there are so many other poems in the book.
In Sarah's view, Avison's work is "a poetry of inquiry, an inner pondering of her daily givens, to which we are made party" (p10), and she notes as well that her work is marked by "sharp flashes of the familiar" (p9). Those comments make excellent sense to me, even if that's not what I'm drawn to with Avison. Me, I really appreciate that I can find myself accepting or puzzling along with her, more or less engrossed with the reading relationship, when suddenly there's a passage that simply hits, ecstatically, and I'm brought up short.
Take the brief "Noted, Foundered," for example, which is about the sounds that the poem's speaker can hear: a carpenter's hammer, and a neighbour coming home with a few groceries. This is an atmospheric poem, in the sense that we're being given clues that'll help us occupy the poem's mental space, but there's a turn:
'These are the masks of the midcontinent
where sea once moved, a seabed levelled, dried,
baked, abandoned, ours for this interim-ever." (p44)
Probably it won't work the same for you, but I don't care!
When I read those lines for the first time, I was smacked by the reminder of geological time, more than I ever am by science fiction, by scientific nonfiction, even by academic research. We live on the surface of a planet whose rocks have all previously been molten or dust, a planet whose continents have been shredded and mashed together and re-shredded, a planet whose greatest mountain ranges are actively growing as the tectonic plates smash inexorably slowly into each other. An individual human life or death doesn't matter less beside all this, not in the way that Avison brings the world to my attention here; it's a spark, an explosion, it's everything that there'll ever be for this person, and this everything really is everything.
Or as she puts it in "En Route," seemingly offhandedly: "People are / potential crises, scattered everywhere" (p52).
We all need to read more poetry. Certainly I do, and it was so lovely to spend some time with Margaret Avison's work.
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