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.
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading