Cora Siré’s second book of poetry, Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light, weaves an unbound story of wild characters connected in homes and on street corners, across continents and languages, through eras and dimensions. Siré uses memory as a bridge to realization, and subtle humour as a path to truth rather than a way to allude it. Her words dig into the depths of people’s identities – ourselves, lovers, family and friends, strangers – to discover how much we can only guess at or what we might never know even over the course of a lifetime.

Divided into several sections, the book follows different forms of love and significance as they evolve over time, homing in on what is said and unsaid or said and not heard, whether in relationships or in commonly accepted history. Enigmatic dialogue pops up throughout between a changing “Him” and “Me,” often having the final words in several poems.

Me: So now we’ve got matching scars.
Him: But yours is beautiful.

Much of Siré’s poetry exists in less formal dialogue between the poet and the subject or between subjects themselves within the poems, as Siré investigates relationships, moments shadowed in the past, even the intimate depths of art and artists, such as different reds in Mark Rothko’s paintings. What at first seems in opposition is revealed by Siré to be rooted in connection.

Look deeply: Love and life collide
With fear and death. One is
Meaningless without the other, both
Trapped in frameless conversation

These connections reach across time, people, and thought, melting as if effortlessly into poetry – a sign of talent, certainly, but more importantly an open, perceptive heart and mind, always connected and discovering.

***

Jessi MacEachern’s debut book-length poetry collection deserves the concentration it demands. A long poem divided into six parts, A Number of Stunning Attacks plays with storytelling and style in intense, intimate imagery and stimulating abstract language. MacEachern is precise in her choice of words as they unfurl down the pages, surrounded by enough white space to let them move freely as needed – a delight with a greater purpose.

She keeps a notebook labelled dreams to have in which
The sunset is bound up like a cookbook
Piling its shifting bricks…………….to low clouds
………………………….a child surprised

The walls of the home have been a trick of light

Diving into the dream against reality, through day and night and disparity between genders, A Number of Stunning Attacks pries open another dimension between modernist poetry (and its manifestos) and twenty-first-century communication in bursts of online text and meme-able pith, with Kafka and Warhol careening through with commentary.

The automaton locks a door. The subjects are left with Kafka
An intelligent meaning to a word

“I was at a cowboy party—” As though this is an excuse for taste

The book grows into more white space, quiet with bristling contemplation of the world’s judgment of “Awoman,” so many women through so many years, inside homes and families, part of their own re-cobbled stories and the unchecked stories told by others.

Her family heirlooms remind them
……………………………………………………of you

……………………………………………………Orwomen

***

Author of over two dozen books of poetry since the mid-70s and a founding member of Montreal’s Véhicule Poets collective, Norris continues to expand on his prevailing themes, from love and world travels to the art of poetry itself and his melded “poet’s autobiography” (as the book is subtitled), adding both unpretentious wisdom and enduring wonder at the world.

I could speak their names
but what would that tell you,
what would I be saying?

There is the beauty
of a sudden density of life.

Life and its living, its constant flourish, are at the core of many of Norris’s poems, which intone that we don’t grow indifferent despite life’s repetitions and “dailiness.” Norris also seems to say that this is the life work of a poet: to recognize moments into significance, until every moment is recognized. Perhaps impossible in the daily bustle of life, but not in poetry.

Throughout the book, stories told through poetry stack up against observations and meditations on time, memory, aging, belonging, and all of life’s big and small relationships.

At night the stars tell us
as much about infinity
as we will ever know,
and the moon brings lovers
into collision, gently lighting
their way to mutable beds.

Concise yet refreshingly open with language and structure, South China Sea is densely packed and deserves a slow, reflective summer read.

***

Lived and dreamed experiences intermingle in the attentively structured poetry of Chad Campbell’s Nectarine. This exploration brings with it a return to the depths of empathy that people are capable of, despite how often empathy is obscured by the day-to-day, what amounts to modern survival. In Campbell’s poetry, nature transforms abstract ideation of life, death, and camaraderie into concrete moments of clarity.

the fire. Because I remember a time
before I held myself apart, I lay beside
the pheasant in his bed of heather, panting
in the brightness. Not alone, but together.

Yet the essence of nature isn’t in opposition to human activity, whether in the city, the countryside, or on the open water. In Nectarine, people take on animal- and plant-like attributes while animals poke around buildings and trees clock time. Campbell’s poems redraw the parallels between all things.

Uncountable, unaccountable things,
nectarines and an oak tree outside
the window growing moss green.
They left their words and carried on,
until only the words carried on.

Personal memories, observations, and their emotional substance drift through the book, tying the poems together with their threads and giving each image a vital and engaging weight to consider.

I could be whale
watching as the planets turn, pebbling
their bellies along clouds that seem
close as water bulged in a ceiling.

***

Memorial Suite embarks on a journey of illness and redemption that Jocelyne Dubois intentionally and affectingly shares. An artist as well as a writer, Dubois infuses her poetry with a folk-art sensibility, tactile images of everyday life, and unafraid statements about what she thinks of these day-to-day happenings – or non-happenings – whether her own or other people’s.

Stylistically moving from stream-of-consciousness stories to heavier, quieter reflections, Memorial Suite comprises a life felt in real time. At home alone, passing through neighbourhoods and greeting friends, walking the halls of a mental healthcare institution, or in the clarity of recovery, the biographical characters that Dubois draws, including her own, inhabit this world wholly, despite some people’s doubts.

Nurse, nurse, who makes me swallow pills
& calls me names behind my back

my sin, thin
brain, broken

I will stand in silence thick skin around me

breathe deep
grateful for not being in her skin

By the book’s third act, clarity of mind and poetic structure meet up in a calm place, but the path there remains essential. The essence of identity, creativity, and love break through in light of past experiences.

You talk of love & peace
but throw paint on those passing by
slash coats with exacto knives

This morning, I discover
a rip on my sleeve
Did you slash mine?
Did you mean to slit my heart?

Ultimately, after twisting and turning, Memorial Suite rests in the comforting reality of change and the value of investigating dark places with one’s own light as it grows.mRb