Delighting The Reader With The Unexpected
In her well-received first poetry collection, Fish Bones, Gillian Sze drew inspiration from visual art, creating “poetry written in the ekphrastic tradition.” She shifts her attention downward from gallery walls in her new book The Anatomy of Clay, to the dust from which we were made (according to the Book of Genesis – and did you know that the Hebrew for man is “aw-dawm,” kin to “aw-dawm-ah,” meaning red clay?). Her title is drawn from The Aeneid:
“The flesh that is laden with death, the anatomy of clay:
Whence these souls of ours feel fear, desire, grief, joy.”
Let’s not forget the cliché for human fallibility: having feet of clay. It suggests we have not totally evolved from Adamic clay, and that we are still friable, like an undercooked vase. “We are all born part mistake,” she writes in “Wake Up.” The mood of this book is generally of loss, separation, incompletion – about learning to live with loneliness or absence. Many of these poems draw on the everyday observation or experience – indeed, one section is titled Quotidianis – in order to build to a poignant moment. A prose poem in the “write a list of instructions” genre ends with:
“This is how you cry. This is how to break gracefully. This is how you tuck yourself in at night.”
As well as the allusion to Virgil, Sze leans on E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens, among others, for epigraphs. These two are rather opposite poles of 20th-century poetry – Cummings favouring informality, no capital letters, and an almost childish joy in experimentation, while Stevens’ work is more formal, measures, but often opaque in its imagery. On the surface, Sze’s style is closer to Stevens. Her poems are usually built of a series of declarative sentences, carefully punctuated, in short stanzas. Her sensory details are exact:
She reads cracks in the pavement,
Steps gingerly over the lines,
The road stretched
Like a palm.
Her oversized rubber boots
Slap the backs of her calves.
from “Divining”
There are also, again, like Stevens some sudden leaps into the mildly surreal which have more impact due to their jack-knifing off from controlled diction:
We cleaned the hours, tidied the minutes
Until there was no time left.
from “Flutter Bug”
Despite the themes enumerated above, this is not confessional poetry. While Sze is precise with her imagery, she is careful to keep exact details of her personal life ambiguous. Of course, as Hitchcock taught film-goers, it is usually more effective to suggest than to simply show. The reader is unsure whether the various “yous” who represent relationship(s) in her poems are aspects of the same person, male, female, or both. A starting and memorable poem about her father , “Forced Retirement” ends with:
Years later, when our doors were locked
And you never tried our knobs more than twice”
We are left wondering exactly what the father’s intentions were … and whether he was locked out of the house, or merely his daughters’ rooms.
There is little doubt that Sze is a poet of considerable talent. She is precise with her word choices, and knows when to end a poem before it morphs into sentimentality or overstatement. I look forward to her next collection in the hopes that, as she continues to develop, she will find a less restrictive form and let the E.E. Cummings side of her burst forth a little more often, surprising and delighting the reader with the unexpected.
Anatomy of Clay
Gillian Sze
ECW Press, Toronto, ON. 2010
102 pages, $18.95
