War of words

(Louie Palu/Globe and Mail/Canadian Press)

The Canada Council for the Arts is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. To honour the occasion, the Council, which administers the Governor General’s literary awards, has permanently bumped up the purse in each category from $15,000 to $25,000.
 
Usually, the GG’s jury for poetry recognizes several old hands, and gives a nod to one or two new faces — and this year’s list of five finalists is no exception. In style and substance, the collections range widely, from an inventive, impassioned eco-polemic about the way we live now to a pair of books steeped in history. Their only real commonality is that they are all solid contenders.

(Brick Books)

All Our Wonder Unavenged, Don Domanski’s eighth collection, is the most otherworldly book on the list. I mean that in a good way: just as a landscape seems different when lit by moonlight rather than daylight, so the familiar world acquires an eerie cast in the Halifax poet’s work. “The universe is held in small things/for safekeeping,” he writes in one poem. Small things inspire Domanski’s meditations, but they lead to big questions about cosmic time and our place in Creation. Domanski sees the “lustre of the infinite” in the stars above, but he also reverently notes it in the natural world around him: dragonflies have “wings sheathed in calligraphy,” while blades of grass cast “the shadows of eternity’s alphabet/small Aramaic strokes of darkness on parched ground.” Indeed, Domanski holds his earthly surroundings in such high esteem that there’s no division between animate and inanimate — stones are “balanced on their one footstep” and water “enters a room trembling.”

Domanski can be enigmatic, but there’s something truly entrancing about his mystical vision of the world. There’s no better image-maker in Canlit, and All Our Wonder Unavenged is packed with compelling examples: roots are “scaffolds packed in soil/where dark ages hang filling their throats with water”; a flock of finches rising into the air is “like all the holy places/pulling away at once from the earth.”

(House of Anansi Press)

If Domanski’s work is ethereal, Dennis Lee’s yesno is grittily — even grimly — down-to-earth. In this collection, the well-known Toronto writer (a past GG winner, for Civil Elegies) turns tour-de-force wordplay to political purpose, and challenges us to wake up to the planet’s environmental crisis. As the polarities of the title suggest, the poems seesaw between despair and hopefulness, shifting from prayerful entreaty (“blue planet, hold on”) to a harsh Jabberwocky of gloom (“Bad abba the endgame. In-/seminal doomdom alert”).

These are brief, compressed poems with forceful rhythms; words and phrases are often rammed together gratingly. It’s not pretty, but that’s Lee’s point. The misshapen language and fragmented syntax mirror what Lee calls “the “whacked grammar of terra/cognita.” As he puts it blisteringly in the opening poem:

if it walks like apocalypse. If it
squawks like Armageddon.
If stalks the earth like anaphylactic parturition.
If halo jams like septicemic laurels, if
species recuse recuse…

Lee has an (alarmed) eye on the future. Two of the other finalists look to the past for their raw material. In fact, the poetic equivalent of historical biography is a thriving sub-genre in Canlit. Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (which won the 1970 GG) is probably the most celebrated of the type. But there have been numerous others, including a half-dozen or so in the running this year.

(Pedlar Press)

Brian Henderson’s Nerve Language is one of those titles that made the GG cut, and deservedly so. This is the Kitchener poet’s ninth collection, so he’s got a track record, but he hasn’t really been on the major awards radar until now. The book is based on the life and memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, a 19th-century German judge who was committed to an asylum when he suffered a mental breakdown. Most of the poems are dramatic monologues from Schreber’s point of view, and they offer a piercingly vivid, frightening portrait of madness. Schreber loses his grasp on reality gradually; the poems, too, slide from orderly composure to delusion-ridden agitation. An early poem hints at the storm of madness to come:

Dervish, I read, means doorway.
Entering a room, or a memory, or a life,
perhaps as others are leaving, or after they have left.
In a dream, not being able to get back in the way I’d come.

Out in the garden, everything that was once familiar
is left to gather its truth in the rain,
strangeness soaking into everything.

By turns harrowing and poignant, Nerve Language is also a meditation on identity. Stripped of everything that supports his sense of self — his job, his home and his wife — Schreber struggles to feel whole. “How will I keep hold of who I am, ” Henderson (as Schreber) writes in one poem. Moreover, he begins to question the nature of that “I,” and becomes convinced that he must connect with the feminine side of his character. It’s a fascinating story, with contemporary resonance.

(Nightwood Editions)

Rob Winger’s impressive debut collection, Muybridge’s Horse: a poem in three phases, is also inspired by a 19th-century figure. But the Ottawa poet goes a stylistic step further (à la Ondaatje et al.) and blends lyrical poetry, prose and material from documentary sources to render the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who revolutionized our understanding of movement. In the words of one source quoted by Winger, Muybridge was

the man who split
the second,
as dramatic
and far-reaching
as the splitting of the atom

Muybridge was also a frontier figure in a geographic sense: he traveled widely in the American West and in Guatemala at a time when these areas were off the beaten path. At one point, Winger writes that the photographer “concentrates so hard on details that he loses his horizons.” That doesn’t happen to Winger. He offers a wide-angle, panoramic view of Muybridge, including social history and even an account of the finer points of the photographic process. At nearly 200 pages, Muybridge’s Horse has the richness of detail and dramatic sweep of a novel — it’s certainly the list’s heavyweight in size.

(McClelland & Stewart)

Margaret Atwood’s The Door is a heavyweight in a different respect altogether. “The god of poets has two hands: the dextrous, the sinister,” she writes, and this collection showcases both Atwood’s own linguistic dexterity and her willingness to look unflinchingly at the sinister. As she puts it in one poem, “no deferential smiling, no baking of cookies,/no I’m a nice person really.”

A number of the poems are mordant reflections on the public role of poetry, sometimes from the insider point of view of a writer challenging an indifferent populace, sometimes presenting the audience’s side:

Enough of these discouragements,
you said. Enough gnawed skulls.
Why all these red wet tickets
to the pain theatricals?

Atwood has always been a poet of sardonic social comment, and there is plenty of strong material here, focusing on the usual suspects (war, injustice and our political apathy) and written in lucidly spare, charged language. But The Door also includes meditations on subjects such as mortality and aging, and these more intimate poems are equally affecting.

Atwood won the GG for poetry just over 40 years ago, for her first book, The Circle Game. Could she be a repeat winner this year? With this strong and varied a field, it’s difficult to predict.

The winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Award for Poetry will be announced Nov. 27.

Barbara Carey is a Toronto poet and critic.

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