above/ground press fav chapbooks of 2017 - part 2

Sandra Moussempès, From: Sunny girls; translated by Eléna Rivera (March)

“These poems originally appeared in French in the collection Sunny girls, published by Flammarion in 2015” 

I enjoy translations for a multitude of reasons, but in particular because they either introduce me to work in a language I don’t know or because they introduce me to a voice I have never heard before, or both. In this case, I am new to both the poet and the translator. 

I don’t recall ever having read a translation through above/ground press before. It is possible that it has published works in translation and I may have missed. Either way it is a wonderful thing to do for both writers and readers. I commend rob mclennan on doing so.

I appreciate that the English and original French text is included.

I was intrigued from the opening lines, minimal and simple in structure but unusual and often fanciful in nature. By the second poem, which contains the line, “Poetesses who bet on the banal don’t ride mopeds despite appearances,” I was charmed. In French the sound is gorgeous, a real tongue roller.

The work contains a longer prose piece entitled “Momentary Resurgence of Visual Sensations”  which moves slowly through the actions of thought and speech. “I like voices she could say I like not synthesizing not telling not retracing instead of shutting up, I ask myself and my answer is a question that has become a remake of my supposed previous life, track the sound that delayed leaves my mouth track that which spills out in thought, do you think then that one can become a person that will come back that one can come back in thought in the though of those who question you?

I like the repetition and the minimal punctuation in this piece, the way it mimics the way we think, or at least the way I think, a kind of self-talk. There is something Lisa-Robertson-ish about the way the author turns philosophical musings on thought and speech into poetry, into a subject for poetry. The thread of desire.

The poem ends with “and nonchalantly the red sun penetrates the purely theoretical text.” I feel that about Moussemps’ poetry.

The final small poem “I had noticed an unadorned house” is three lines that end with the line “I hear a breath behind me”.  We continue after this poem, after this work. I like poems that end without concluding.

I look forward to reading more of Moussemps’ writing and Rivera’s translations and poetry.

Jessica Smith, The Lover is Absent including poems from The Daybooks (April)

I have been a fan of Smith’s writing since I read her first above/ground press chapbook, “Shifting Landscapes” in 2006. She may have been one of the first writers I’d seen, in addition to rob mclennan, to play with horizontal space on the page. I was excited by the possibilities of reading the text that was opened up via this space and various alignments.

Let me start by acknowledging the beautiful line art by artist, writer and tattoo artist, Alixandra Bamford, which I loved.

I’ve attempted to make a day book before and I’ve failed because my entries are too mundane. There’s nothing mundane about Smith’s poems, which feel tender, slow-moving and lush to me in the way that they unfurl like the vines on Bamford’s illustration.

You know when an artist creates something, and you feel this sense of kindredship with her? This is what happens to me when I read Smith’s work. For example, in “21 March 2015 / Brooklyn [and I apologize for not spacing the poems as they are in the text; get the chapbook and you’ll have the right spacing; also note that this is one reading of the text, there are other ways to read it and include the text on the left-hand side]:

“people still say ‘soul mates’/they mean/ this kind of ghost/longing for the one who fits with you”

or in “28 March 2015 / Buffalo”:

“I am sitting in your attic after Mark/Kaplan’s attic/ patron saint of mad women/fuzzy aqua rug/and perfect light”

Later in the poem, Smith describes perfume as “tiny vials of sensory experience/transparent or slightly golden/interruptive”.

I admire the way Smith takes such close up looks at things, watches and listens with such attention. There is nothing more rewarding to me than being offered the fruits of a good poet’s attentiveness, as I am here.

I love the way she translates desire into images that make sense once you know they exist…in “2 March 2015 / Birmingham” for example, “the boats of us/the same slippery wood/ribs shiny with salt” or “my wide love for you/kept toggle-closed/spreading like too-large wings” in “19 September 2016 / Birmingham.”

I follow Smith on social media and I was overjoyed when she shared her experiments in dyeing fabric, the different textures she used and the natural materials and plants. Her poetry has this appeal for me too: “Swede-blue eyes/against the dark red houses,” “fields of wildflowers,” “slightly blue translucent webs” in “27 June 2003 / Ulvön / Sweden.

In “The Lover is Absent” Jessica Smith offers us the wild, untameable light.   

In “poorsong one” (March), Lisa Robertson writes “You May Pleat This Verse/or cut across freshly/To Make Any Sort of Refrain/That may be needed/Very Often/We are in Great Error.” I’d like to have this as a stitching sampler on my wall. This type of humility is one of the many things I admire about Robertson’s writing.

Another is her engagement with texts from earlier ages, particularly Medieval France. This chapbook opens with the cover of “Les chansons de Guillaume IX, duc d'Aquitaine (1071-1127), this edition published in 1927, known as the earliest troubadour and he wrote in the Occitan language.

I love this chapbook for its whimsy, for the possibilities of rearrangement, for the collage-like nature of the accumulated imagery, for the oddnik phrasing and the list-like nature of the poems. “The Current Enlivened/Between Comet and Cricket/Between the Bark and the Core/Wildrose and Girl.” From Scarce Dawn/Rimes Person with Song*”

Poems are formatted like songs, centred with title caps on each word and titles in uppercase. In the above poem, we are told in a footnote that “She appears wearing Pucci” and “52 out of every 154 syllables / Are bound into Pattern.”

Each page of this chapbook offers surprises, whimsical and beautiful juxtapositions. The relationship between the offerings and the songs of Guillaume X? You’d have to ask the fox of joy.

Buck Downs – the hack of heaven  (July)

There’s a humility to these short, spare poems. “I’d settle/for getting my tail/pinned back on –” (a Loop is not a circle), “life that beats/the philosophy/out of me” (switchborn cinder) and “I do not know/what I am talking about/and I am talking about it –” in handyman of the spirit. I almost get a feel of blues music with lines like “a curious crow/born to quick picking//lay down raging/wake up running/back to my home door” in bottom wheel and “it ain’t no sin/to keep on living” in dragon slider or “that fool made a man out of me” in Lamentude. The style is intimate. I feel like the listener the speaker is writing to in a poem such as the earth is rent: “silver bells are ringing/a dirge for those who yearn.”  There’s a lyricism and loveliness to some of the imagery: “hybrid means/to a shared end//twin cats in the wild//like some relative/I didn’t know I had//bruise colored hay/we made” in sweet reaction. And a  quirkiness too: “kisses like pop tarts,/sugary/& crisp where they/burn the mouth” in what I did not plan/to do today.

There are engagements with song. Stevie Nicks song lyric from Dreams as poem title and word play of You were always on my mind becomes “always on my grind.” There are philosophical musings about death and time and love here. The whole chapbook has a laid-back feeling. Kind of Kerouac/modern day Beats.

Sarah Dowling – Entering Sappho (July)

The cover is a map, which hints that we are not talking about Sappho, the poet. A note introduces the poetry at the beginning of the chapbook claiming that “the town was named by the original family that settled here in the late 19^th century, and they were fond of Sappho’s poetry.”  I was hoping that this town was made up, but it is real, located in Washington.

This is a long, incantatory and sensual poem that opens with a list poem chant of numbers and places and a disappearance and this form appears once more in the middle of the poem and then again toward the end. Like Sappho’s poems, this feels like a song. The work is evocative of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter. I confess that Carson's translations of Sappho are the only Sappho translations I have read. 

These are long, serpentine couplets, and  the content has to do with the body’s reaction to desire, to love. Here this desire also translates as agony, anxiety and cold sweat. I loved the sound in this poem, the buzzes and the sibilance, the liquids and the repetition, the rendering of the madness of yearning. I cannot do justice to the energy of this poem, but here is one example for me of this coiled up energy about to break free: “My  heart in my chest—thousands of/bees hovering around hives—all//invisible—then it is a subtle fire whose/scents radiate through my skin—"