Category Archives: Karen Enns

Author and artist collaborate beautifully

Correspondences

By Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein

McClelland & Stewart

Unpaginated, $35

Reviewed by Karen Enns

            Correspondences is a deeply layered collaboration between poet and novelist Anne Michaels, and artist and writer Bernice Eisenstein (author of the graphic memoir “I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors”). It is a beauty of a book, seamlessly blending form and content in a unique design that invites the reader into a communal place of remembrance.

The pages open out accordion-style between two hardcover plates. Read one way, Michaels’ long resonant poem unfolds; read the other way, Eisenstein’s portraits of writers, musicians, and artists, whose lives were brutally altered by the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges, peer out at the reader from muted backgrounds. Opened out completely, the gallery of faces spans the length of a large room. Eisenstein’s subjects include Anna Akhmatova, Bruno Schulz, Albert Camus, Charlotte Salomon, Osip Mandelstam, Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, and many others. The haiku-like text that accompanies each portrait is often, though not always, a quotation. Opposite the face of Tereska, a young survivor whose photograph was taken in a refugee camp, and about whom little else is known, are the words, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – Too?”

The end of one side of the book becomes the beginning of the other, pulling the reader into an endless loop of mourning. “Our eyes register the light of dead stars,” a quotation from the work of André Schwarz-Bart, speaks to the relentlessness of that pull; the haunting gazes in Eisenstein’s portraits are as hard to leave behind as they are to see again.

Michaels’s book-length poem begins in the dark, lyrical tone that carries the entire work: “The wet earth. I did not imagine / your death would reconcile me with / language, did not imagine soil / clinging to the page, black type / like birds on a stone sky.” There is deep grief in this elegy to her father and to the historical figures that shared his century. “A life is inextricable from a time, place, language,” she writes in one of the brief biographical notes that introduce the portraits, “If we seek it, if we are fortunate, our sensibilities and our grief find a true companionship — with certain writers, painters, composers, activists. To remember someone is also to remember this ardour, these allegiances, this necessity.”

The poem is a tribute to this ardour then, and to the ways in which language becomes a necessary part of its articulation, a connective tissue between the past and the present, between the mourned and those who mourn, and between the survivors themselves—the ones who have lived to tell the stories. Language, says Michaels, can either complete or dismantle us, “each word the reverse of a word.” Referring to the correspondence between Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, who appear as central figures (indeed, their portraits act as bookends on either side of the gallery), she writes, “For both, language was a leap of faith, staggering and minimal . . . .”

But this book is an artistic collaboration. Two art forms in dialogue can do more than one. If language seems inadequate at times, if it can make the leap only minimally, we have the visual to intensify the palette: “not two to make one, / but two to make / the third, / just as a conversation can become / the third side of the page.”

The accordion-style format means the reader has to physically support the book to keep it together. It is this act that adds a final dimension to the experience of Correspondences. The reader must also bear some of the weight.

Karen Enns’s new book of poetry, Ordinary Hours, will be launched in Victoria April 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Open Space as part of a group tour sponsored by her publisher, Brick Books. The three other poets featured include Arleen Pare (Lake of Two Mountains), Jane Munro (Blue Sonoma) and Joanna Lilley (The Fleece Era).

Poet sees prairie clearly

Seldom Seen Road
By Jenna Butler
NeWest Press, 76 pages, $14.95

Reviewed by Karen Enns

The title poem of Jenna Butler’s Seldom Seen Road, the Edmonton author’s third book, opens with the line “what is true about this land” and goes on to list these truths: that “ prairie is scant / but wears it well,” that “all signs last,” and “against earth / everything is transitory.” The final image of a sun that “catches your eye like a backward glance / alights  moves on” gives us a sense of the tone of these prairie poems and a glimpse, too, of Butler’s subtle exploration of fragility and strength: how they coexist and at what cost.

Throughout, Butler’s eyes and ears are committed to fine observation–“frantic counterpoint of orioles”, for instance, and  “pinwheels of hummingbirds”–but it is her use of the tough language of farm labour and life that really charges the poetry. Axes and mattocks pack a consonantal punch, as do words like scythes and balers, feeder roots, the east quarter, back forty, a pickup “shunting like a heifer,” fescue and gumbo. Some of the most striking lines combine this aural muscularity with a delicately framed lyricism:

from the hill    you watch
the back forty gone to muskeg
& tamarack     the shifting dance of
slough birds    white pelican lifts
a pleated wing
to steer out over dark water
navigating the skin of things

these still     black places
this accidental light

The central section, Lepidopterists, is a collection of epitaphs to prairie women interspersed with poems named after butterflies like “Riding’s Satyr,” “Gray Copper,” and “Jutta Arctic.”  Images of women like Mary Norton, who starved to death in 1728 near Churchill at the age of twenty, become bold points of focus, like eye spots, against understated poems such as “Afranius Duskywing”:

unremarkable
she rests amongst
the buffalo bean

what is slight
goes unnoticed

hush of two generations
finding flight
lapis wings
bluing the air

The poems are filled with abandoned towns and farmhouses, deserted railway tracks, the many signs of human interaction with the land that last: a “bell tower gone to pigeons,” and a church “down to staves”. There is haunting and grief in “the way heat eases & / pummels a town / when the elevators fall  when / we are faced with / the rubble of their passing”. Fragility and strength are sometimes interchangeable, and solitude is simply part of it, the toll: “Look back all you want / one cart track ambling / mercurial skyline.”

But there remains a deep commitment to the prairie that “knows the right of it / where you are is where you stand”. That place, it seems, is not necessarily static. Butler chooses a quote from Alberta Wriiter George Melnyk to introduce her collection: “On the prairie, one twists around and around until the straight horizon line turns into a circle, and the visual turns visionary.” That gradual shift, that process, according to the poet, has much to do with the gaze of the seer. And tough love. In “Called Back,” a husband returns with his elderly wife to the place they know so well. Her weathered focus on what matters most is clear:

she scours the porch
at the seniors’ residence
thinks forty years of northern spruce
slimwillow loon-call

nothing to fasten on here but
claretcup     paintbrush
sunbruised petals she spots & loves hard.

Karen Enns is a Victoria poet and musician.

Poems flare with precise intensity

New Theatre
by Susan Steudel
Coach House Books, 95 pages, $17.95

Reviewed by Karen Enns

A short, untitled poem in the first section of Vancouver resident Susan Steudel’s New Theatre seems designed to look like a typewritten, anonymous message. Words are cut and pasted across the page, slightly off-kilter, but the images are clear and the phrases crisply articulate: “a study of channels”, “the coal bird”, “Grace in the/ noon water.” This sense of shifting ground under precision-tuned language runs like a fine thread through Steudel’s striking debut collection.

From the opening “sound list” translated into russian using both cyrillic and roman alphabets, Steudel invites the reader to listen hard and manage the grand leaps, not only between language and meaning, but between things themselves, the stuff of them. A meditation on time uncovers surprising (and delightful) aural and imaginative connections:

“Noon. A grumble. A black currant.”

“Tea. The stain in the iris.”

“Evening. River ice clinking into water.”

“The hour. Graphite on paper, a blunt guide.”

“Bath. Giant, silent elk.”

Central to the book is the section called Birch, inspired by Robert Payne’s biography of Vladimir Lenin. Steudel gathers points of illumination and lays them out, side by side, to form a kind of collage. Found poems, lists, quotes from Lenin’s own notes, and word games become the “multiple foci/ through which sunlight tapers to flint sparks.” Mayakovsky, Kandinsky, Tolstoy, and Akhmatova make brief appearances in this series of historico/political poems that bears the chiselled starkness of a siberian plain:

he saw in forests the hardness and purity of
a styled movement,
a lone person in a birch forest

closing his stride;
‘organization of professional revolutionaries,’
this one thought like circling wolves.

Scenes, a more autobiographical long poem, focuses on eleven different domestic settings. Stage directions offered in square brackets create a flickering focus; the reader is urged to step in and out of the poem to reconsider, listen, look again as “loose regattas of dark capsize and drift.” The question of what is real or solid is never resolved. Even clarity is fragile: “But here is the tree, bright as limes/ and the pure call of glass owls.”

In the end, Steudel’s committed vision crosses the spaces she creates. We are left with images that are tightly wound and visible, moving toward us from the outskirts:

I wake beneath dark lamps,
my window fractions into deeper darkness.

A flooded road,
faces of the brown deer and limping buck.
From an antler
grass trails by the roots.

 In Theory and Practice, love is “the magic of intersections: street crossings,/ intersecting lines/ converge momentarily then go streaming off.” This may be the most fitting description of Steudel’s poems that flare with intensity as they negotiate enormous distances.

 

Karen Enns is a Victoria musician and poet.