Toronto ON: Toronto poet and editor Terese Mason Pierre’s chapbook debut, Manifest (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2020), is a collection of eleven poems engaged with the intimacies and responsibilities of being uniquely human. There is a thickness to her short narratives; composed to unfold via a heart that feels both longing and the blood-pulse. Hers is a sequence of lyric of chants and performance, dry humour and truths, storytelling her poems across great swaths of time. “There is no leader,” she writes, to open “Aliens Visit the Caribbean,” “we take them to our women. / They say, ‘Oh, so you have finally joined the / universe,’ and we reply, ‘Careful, there is one / nation still using Fahrenheit.’”
The Study of the Imaginary
A scientist enters a wild
church,
steps into robbery and
ress,
wood scorched into effigies,
an infant spine underfoot.
With a weak light, she
assembles
her whiggish joints. When
she stands
at the glass pulpit, a
specter
announces her inspiration
with song—
she has removed the log
out of her
own eye, she has
sacrificed her
only child, housed the
preternatural
in her lungs forever.
Behind her, she can see
grace
unfold into fear and
collapse
a diamond tower, the
promise of
wholeness wither in a
paragon’s vise.
She tries to collect her
body,
but her bones will not cooperate,
a wheezing trellis. She holds
all the more
impossibility, coos
at the empirical. She settles
into the frame,
becomes human.
Montreal QC: I have to admit that I’m always a combination of baffled and impressed that Montreal’s Vallum magazine manages to consistently produce chapbooks by heavy-hitters (alongside their titles by emerging authors)—a list that includes Fanny Howe, Jan Zwicky, John Kinsella, DonMcKay and Bhanu Kapil—especially knowing how these titles seem to fly just under the radar. One of their latest is by Irish poet Paul Muldoon, his The Bannisters (2020), produced as “Vallum Chapbook Series No. 29.” Now, if you are one of those few who aren’t impressed by the fact that Muldoon’s work has won both Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and that he held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry (1999-2004), it would be impossible to not be blown away by the fact that he worked collaboratively with the late Warren Zevon. I mean, really.
The six poems that make up The Bannisters are composed as short, sharp, sketches—a blend of portrait and scene—that write on artifacts, mortality, memory and distance. There is a musicality underlying everything, and a wistfulness, perhaps, as a stone hovering for a moment after its final skip, before it sinks down to its final depth.
WAGTAIL
Sometimes, as I turn a
corner in County Tyrone, a roof of PVC
or corrugated iron
will scintillate no less
persuasively
than an unperturbed
stretch of Lower Lough Erne
abutting the lost kingdom
from which my family hails.
Primarily a thatcher, my
grandfather knew mange
was a complaint to which
his Clydesdales
were all too prone, yet may
not have recognized dementia
as a trait of the
Muldoons. Sometimes as phrase
such as “Hugh had begun
to dote”
will weigh as a Clydesdale’s
withers would weigh with withies
while the pied wagtail
crossing freshly turned furrows
is a tiny rowboat
glimpsed now and again in
the trough between storm-waves.
