Movements in Jars is an appropriate title, because this early collection from Meghan Jackson (and new Canadian press Chaudiere Books) feels like exactly that: tidy piles of striking images that are compelling if not always clear, as though the reader has discovered an old room, the contents of a series of mason jars on a shelf, cloudy and enticing.
We get "green dress moving / in green room / hand outstretched / to touch leaves," which begins the poem comparison image first (rather than actual object) so the reader figures out in the fourth line we're talking about a tree. Well, er, possibly. This kind of poetry is delicate - it can fail if the images are even a little too disconnected, leaving a frustrating heap. But Jackson does well here, creating work that's in focus just enough to be meaningful with effort, and yet incoherent enough that putting together the pieces is enjoyable. Poetry David Lynch would appreciate.
At times, poems provide images without even giving the reader any real action, necessarily, as in parade of dolls:
come wide
vinyl eyes
through
the kitchen
and wandered
without bending
knees into
the living
room plastic
arms stop
motioned in
a Polaroid
of tea
coffee
and plastic
conversation
At first it isn't about much, but the idea of "wandering" mixed into a stew with "kitchen, plastic, Polaroid, coffee" leaves the reader with a loosely unpleasant, shifting image of suburbia, now buried ("Polaroid") in memory. I do wish poets didn't leave words sitting on their own line, more or less using a line break instead of simple punctuation. On its own, one word can so rarely gather any momentum or meaning. Or to put it another way, compare the line "coffee" with "vinyl eyes," above. "Coffee" just isn't strong enough, pardon the pun. But I love other moments, like "plastic / conversation."
There were certainly poems I've have preferred to see one or two steps closer to clarity, here. Another poem that ends with "miscellaneous tangled objects," simply doesn't leave the reader with enough, given the use of a generic word to cover the objects. Far more often, the images are a treat, as Jackson opens an artichoke to find "postcards / milk / frames / ball bearings / sandcastles / arms / salmon / flashlights / round faces / swollen lips / microscopes / june beetles / ice / pennies."
This is a patient kind of surrealism at work here, not frantic or impenetrable, or overly satisfied with its own cleverness. The dominant impression the reader is left with here is a quiet, sharp voice that could easily be overlooked, and deserves more attention.
Alex Boyd is co-editor of Northern Poetry Review.
In 2004, a year before he died, Richard Outram gave a manuscript of 115 unpublished poems to Anne Corkett and Rosemary Kilbourn. According to their introduction to the book which resulted, South of North -- Images of Canada, the collection was "written in three months in response to a request from the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto to provide a text for a song cycle commissioned from the composer Srul Irving Glick, in celebration of the Club's ninetieth anniversary in 1998. Of the 54 poems...continue reading
You were born in Toronto, but raised in Ireland. As a writer, do you feel conscious of having a foot in each world? Do you see yourself as having a unique perspective, and do you see strong distinctions between Canadian writing and Irish work?
I do have a foot in both Canada and Ireland, but in that I am hardly unique: millions of dual-citizen Canadians daily experience what James Joyce called "having two thinks at a time", and are the better for it. I am well schooled in the literatures of both countries, so maybe I do enjoy something of a unique perspective on Canadian literature, but while some sharp distinctions exist between Canadian and Irish work, there are also...continue reading