Robyn Sarah and I go way back. I don’t mean we are lifelong friends—in fact, we hardly know each other. But our paths have crossed many times since the 1970s, literally and/or literarily. There’s something inexplicably gratifying about seeing a local artist’s complete career trajectory (or just about) unfold before your eyes, in the slow-mo of real time.
The first time we met, I was a student at Champlain College, on the South Shore. At the time, the offices had yet to be built, so the teachers sat at library carrels packed into a future classroom. My English teacher’s “desk” was back-to-back with Sarah’s. He introduced us one day, telling me she taught Creative Writing. “Oh,” I remarked with a seventeen-year-old’s faithful parroting of some critic’s high-minded opinion on the matter, “can creative writing be taught?” And she replied calmly, “Well, I teach it.”
A few years later, the very first book I reviewed—for a McGill student publication called Hejira—happened to be Anyone Skating on That Middle Ground, her fourth book of poetry. Not so long afterwards, I ran into her and the same teacher sitting outside at a Park Avenue bistro terrace. I told her I had reviewed and enjoyed her book.
Since then, we have attended the same literary functions from time to time, I have published many more book reviews, primarily nonfiction, and a volume of my own poems. Robyn Sarah has racked up a long list of poetry books, one collection of essays, and two of short stories.
And perhaps that is why it is fitting that I take a good look at her latest collection.
Overall, this is a meditative collection: quiet, thoughtful, and decidedly careful.
There’s a school of thought that associates all artistic risk-taking with the brashness of youth, and another that recognizes that the need to build one’s writing (or acting or painting) chops takes years. Some genres, neuroscientists tell us, peak early, but writing of all kinds takes life experience, and not simply bravado, to attain greatness. And greatness requires the ability to take risks.
Many of these 52 poems are solid, insightful, and tightly written, and a few feature eye-widening turns of phrase. But all are safe. These are the poetic equivalent of curling up on the couch with a blanket and a cup of hot tea on a winter day.
And this carefulness arrives despite of, or due to, the sense of doom with which the book begins. The 9/11 attacks provide a clear and easy starting point for pondering mortality, which I suppose is fair game. However, the trouble with using world events as motifs or central images (as some contemporary novelists have found to their chagrin) is that those images had better be damn good, because everyone knows plenty about the real events. They almost belong to the public, to the world, so anything you might have to say has to be either startlingly intense or completely over the top—no half measures allowed.
As might be expected, I found the first poem to be inappropriate for the subject, and even for leading us into the collection at all.
Something fell.
Where?
It seemed to be in the house.
Downstairs?
I heard –
I thought I heard something fall.
…
Waiting for the other
shoe to drop. (Hearts sink.
Hopes plummet.) Something fell:
was it our face?
the towers?
an empire?
“In the Middle of the Night”
This poem’s plainness is not so much minimalist as minimal. The horror of the day—and the subsequent proclamation that “everything has changed [for the worse]”—deserve a richer treatment: not more words, but stronger ones.
The second poem, “Wake,” a terzina, works better, both as a poem and as a poem-about-9/11. Form can compensate for lapses in attention that might be glaringly obvious otherwise.
Once was a dream. Ground Zero marks the spot
It tumbled. Was the weakness in the frame?
The time to strike is when the iron’s hot.
Once was a dream: how soon the sons forgot
To prize its estimate, except in name!
The game’s is worth the candle, or it’s not.
“Wake”
From then on, until the second section, sorrow, death and regret shadow each page. Here is a typical poem, in its entirety.
No words, no will to words.
April days are bright
My hope’s in hiding.
A whistling among the bare twigs.
Nothing wants to ignite.
Drawing my sadness over me
like a thin blanket, what
shall I fasten on? or let me unhook.
Wind chasing sand along the curb?
Blind sparrow chirp?
April days are bright.
I do not like what life has scribbled
in my blank book.
“Dry Spring”
This is not a bad poem, or a particularly weak one. It just fails to say anything very new about the permanent November of the soul, even without bringing to mind a certain other poem about the yin and yang of the month of April.
The others in this vein are also delicate and deft, but watery. I almost imagine a certain reluctance to delve into the feelings at hand, as if go further would mean wallowing, being indulgent. A sensible caution, I suppose, because that would set the bar even higher: if we are to read a poem about misery or self-pity, it had better be amazing!
A strange thing happens in the next section. The tone shifts to a kind of “surprised by joy,” and the subtlety and tip-toeing are appropriate. Here is another whole poem.
Drunken bees cling
and doze in the cups
of the rainy hollyhocks
And afternoon is still,
the day a dull silver.
Summer malingers.
Soon she will drop
her kid gloves
and abdicate to fall,
But for now
this lull is our cradle.
“Lull”
It is hard to say why the gossamer touch that succeeds in the painting of a lazy summer day falls short in the gloomier poems—does sorrow or regret require more passion lest we fail to take it seriously?—but I suspect the foreign territory of the gently celebratory poems is more inspiring. That may be why we find lovely lines like “”Kettles are heating in every kitchen/for the birthing year (“Last of December”) or “Down in the valley blew/a cheesecloth wind,/ screening the curds of cloud/from the whey of haze (“Once was full summer”).
A little less delicacy informs “Mile End, April into June” (quite significantly in the context of this collection, a segue from the chiaroscuro of April to the brightness of June). The relief over the end of winter, and winter’s dregs in early spring, is palpable. (And nice to see some Montreal details!)
Hot at last. On Avenue du Parc
old men in undershirts
lean out of upstairs windows,
elbows on the sill.
Mornings and evenings they lean out
from small dark rooms,
their faces striped
with sun and shadow.
“Mile End, April into June”
In strange contrast, one of the strongest poems, full of vibrant images, rides the momentum of disgust, not the upsurge of joy. I find myself searching for others in the collection with the visceral grittiness or humour of “Lowly,” but only “A Splinter” comes close (“all told, full five hours of fidget/for the sake of a digit”). Who knows why an earthworm provided inspiration, but I’m glad it did.
Pink as discarded chewing gum
it comes to the surface in rain.
Segmented like a bellows.
Hoisting its length in sections
along puddle asphalt.
It is all muscle; elastic.
It draws itself forward in rhythms
of flex and slack.
It retracts when touched.
“Lowly”
Pause for Breath, as a title, suggests poems about the fundamentals of life—for what could be more essential to life than breath? As a book, it indeed captures moments of inspiration and expiration, literally and figuratively. But despite some lovely glimpses here and there, these poems are as ephemeral as puffs of air.
