Sina Queyras. Expressway. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2009. 80 pp. ISBN-10: 1552452166, ISBN-13: 9781552452165. $16.95 (paper).
Sina Queyras’s GG nominated Expressway is not so much a departure in her writing as a thematically focused expansion of her previous musings on the car and the road as trope for ourselves and our culture, which is to say our car culture and our road culture. Somewhere along the way our acquisitive ambitions have gotten out of hand and our transportation infrastructure has became not just a means to a destination but the means to our own end both socially and environmentally. In these sharp, astute poems are day trips, long road trips and the building of roads. These poems could well have been generated in the car, that ubiquitous place we all spend more of our time than we care to realize. While drafting this review I was surprised the extent to which my own head is filled with car and road metaphors; I had to make a point of not using phrases like whizzing by, ramped up or spinning out of control.
Through the first half of the book the poems move swiftly taking hard swings at our notions which left me gasping with shame at our collective selves. This book and its series of journeys could have been too much the treatise or scolding if Queyras had not written it from the reference point of her own life, beginning with the death of her father, a road builder in a time when people were eager to be dazzled by progress “Now that you are willing to sign the waiver/without reading./Now that you are willing to say yes.” and freedom, and the open road meant the possibility of a happy, wealthy future with never a thought of consequences.
“Beautiful, beautiful the road stretching, birdlike, yawn-
ing from its nest, not all caught up in itself, not googling
itself admiringly, just being its daily self, how we all ride
its coattails.”
The grounding of these poems in the personal is not a sentimental act, however. Queyras moves the reader through a relentless enumeration of our downfall—our isolation from one another as we constantly move from place to place, the decay of the infrastructure and the damage it’s done to the planet at large and asks circular questions about our culpability and chances of redemption. The first line of the book is a question and the questions do not let up for the duration of the collection. Given to lengthy free association, Queyras also makes good use of the list and adds a measure of the unfinished statement leaving the reader plenty of room to take part in the conversation, in the search for an answer to her questions. While not adverse to thinking my way through a book of poetry, I found the questions to be rather heavily used and too old-fashioned for the weight of the text. On the other hand I was consistently arrested by her ruptured, incomplete phrases and the airy gaps they provided the text.
Moreover, this work is a conversation, a poetic body/soul debate between the Poet and the reader, the Poet and interspersed characters representing various ideals, the Poet and the Self. Most sections end with a conversation poem more like a parable each identically entitled ‘A Memorable Fancy’. “I am seeing, she said at dawn, her feet squelching. Can / you hear me? //Yes I hear you but you delude yourself if you see anything / other than what you choose to see.” Perhaps another kind of conversation Queyras opens is in the short section entitled Crash, which exemplifies the darkest side of where car meets culture, in this case where car crash meets Google. The entire section is edge to edge text like an internet page and is comprised entirely of car crash headlines harvested from the internet. It is a staggering offering of ‘the same, only different’ and yet the reader knows it is only a small sampling of the endless ways our car obsession also exists in cyberspace.
This book is a lament surely, but one where images of nature are stark reminders of what is beautiful along the way. This is nowhere more evident than in the middle section where Queyras stops to offer us some oxygen before the journey continues. Having also taken the time to walk the expressway and see the road from the perspective of the road builder, here she wisely slows the narrative down to the pace of the walker before resuming her speed. The section called “Some Moments from a Land Before the Expressway” is another beautiful use of found text, this time from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals. Queyras cleverly condenses bits of journal entries to give a whole sense of a time when roads were mostly large paths and people walked and walked and walked, not only to make their lives possible but for diversion and entertainment and edification.
“Wm writing his Preface
To Borrick’s, to Ulswater and Churnmilk force,
At Fleming’s, to Grisedale Tarn, the Michaelmas
Daisy droops
Wm still unwell.”
The last section of the book brings us back to the present and imagines the worst extrapolated future, the best rebuilding and starting again. The poems here, while still unflinching, are filled with those delicious revelations that close reading brings, though some readers might fault her for an overabundance of the philosophical admonishment, especially in the last dozen or so pages. But it is here she makes her point most clearly, offers us her best answers to her open questions. I felt the closest thing to hope Queyras allows as I read “Tell the people not to worry so much about their own / gardens. Tell them to worry about the one garden.” While not able to offer reconciliation or rebirth, Queyras’s answer to the juggernaut of modern existence is defiance. The reader is no longer allowed to be an alienated observer but is identified as a culpable participant.
“I have been walking toward the future, she says, I want to meet it/head on and, when I do, I want to know what to say.”
Born in Saskatchewan in 1961, Lori Cayer has made Manitoba her home since 1969. A poet and editor of poetry, Lori has been a participant in Poetry in Motion, Poets in the Schools and, the MWG Poetry Tent at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She has hosted reading events, facilitated poetry workshops, performed poetry readings in more than one city and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a past member of the CV2 and Staccato Chapbooks publishing collectives and has served as chair of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild. She is the co-editor of poetry for the literary journal CV2. Her most recent accomplishment is that of co-founder of the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She works by day as an Editorial Assistant for a National Research Council Scientific Journal.
