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.
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
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Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading