Douglas Burnet Smith was born in 1949 in Winnipeg. Author of twelve volumes of poetry of which Voices from a Farther Room was nominated for the Governor General's Award, he currently divides his time between Paris, France and Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He teaches English literature and creative writing at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish.
This collection reminds one of Richard Parry's Imperfect Penance in which Parry explores the life of Georg Trakl. Here, Smith engages in a poetical exploration of the life of Marie Curie. Is this a new direction in poetry? One perhaps derived from David Solway but substituting real, although fictionalized, characters in the stead of the ones Solway invents.
The introductory poem to Sister Prometheus is titled ‘Le Panthéon, I: Installation, 21 April 1995. A bit of background is needed to understand this poem. The Panthéon is located in Paris, France. In 1744, King Louis XIV vowed "if he recovered from an illness he would replace the ruined church of Sainte-Geneviève with an edifice worthy of the patron saint of Paris."(Wikipedia) Although construction began immediately, innumerable delays prevented the completion until 1789. By that time, the French Revolution had begun "the new Revolutionary government ordered it to be changed from a church to a mausoleum for the interment of great Frenchmen." Such literary luminaries as Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola are buried there. In 1995, Marie Curie became the first woman to be interred there which leads us to the latter part of the poem:
They're fond of quoting themselves, especially on the subject of female intelligence, how it contaminates their world: "First it was the respectability of the Sorbonne, the good name of Science. And now, on all occasions, France." And so, Pierre & I dance, & share the last, eternal laugh, since it turns out that my demure but irrefutable presence here, & not the clever equations of Foucault, makes the great men rotate in their marble graves.
The Foucault referred to is not Michel but the one whose pendulum rotates in the entrance.
In ‘Warsaw, 7 November 1867, we are introduced to Marie and the times into which she was born:
The rest are whipped stumbling in chains to Siberia & the luckiest are the hundreds who will become meals of thawed flesh next spring for the hundreds who will follow, & unfortunately live. In the midst of this official ‘Russification,' under the sign of the horseshoe, the arrow, the cross, on Freta Street, the fifth of five, I was born & named immediately after the Black Virgin of Chzestochowa: MARIA SALOMEA SKLODOWSKA.
A pattern emerges, a pattern of prose poetry, and the question is raised: why is this not prose? -- a question which has been asked since Baudelaire. The only answer is the elevated language in which it is written and the compression of images which state without stating. We can see the fictionalized account of this biography by which it vaults into the world of poetry in 'On the Way to School, Gymnasium No. 3, 1879':
A bomb in St. Petersburg had delivered Czar Alexander II to his examination by the angels. Knowing he'd fail, Kazia & I danced gleeful in an empty classroom. Mademoiselle yanked us by the braids to the office of the Superintendent. But he already knew I'd win the gold medal, & merely sent us home with stern letters of instruction on how to properly mourn the nation's loss. So we did, in secret, with lemonade & chocolate ices.
The style is interesting. There is one problem though. Unless the reader is interested in the life of Marie Curie, the prose becomes quite ponderous. Devoid, for the most part, of any poetic devices such as metaphor, rhyme, meter, interesting endstops or caesuras, there is not much to hold ones attention. Certainly, prose poetry can be entertaining, even delightful. And certainly, Burnet Smith has taken the risk of extending the prose poem to comprise an entire book. For the fact that he has taken that risk, he can be thanked and appreciated. Unfortunately, at least for this reviewer, interest stops midway through.
John Herbert Cunningham is a writer of poetry, reviews and whatever else he can put his pen to. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba where he hosts the radio show on CKUW-FM Speaking of Poets every Sunday from 4-4:30. He writes reviews in Canada for Malahat, Prairie Fire, Arc, Antigonish and Fiddlehead and, now, the Northern Poetry Review, and in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Galatea Resurrected and Big Bridge. In other words, he is an opinionated s.o.b.
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?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
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