Amanda Merpaw, Put the Ghosts Down Between Us. Anstruther Press, 2021, 50 copies.

http://www.anstrutherpress.com/

It shouldn’t be so difficult, writing about Amanda Merpaw’s first chapbook, given how personal and human and wonderfully grounded these poems are. But Merpaw, despite her warm and relatable voice, is not always so straightforward. Her poems can also unsettle reality.

An easy entry might be the last poem, “Rhizomatic Thinking.” Here are the first lines:

We’re drinking coffee in January’s

bed. It’s raining. The harbour

hammers high at Lake Ontario.

what an inconvenience. The end

times, I mean. Can I unwelcome

the undoing? There’s burning beyond

the cusps of our cups. All of it,

actually, on fire. Last year I learned

to love a woman.

This feels like listening to a friend tell a story. There are many admirable traits, from the nice use of shorter and longer lines to the very effective enjambment. I particularly like “harbour / hammers” which delays and therefore emphasizes the alliteration, and “The end / times” which gently undermines and makes almost humorous the reference to all the shit that’s going on in the world. There’s also the movement, from the ordinary and personal to the larger crisis (but still expressed personally) to several more enigmatic lines. And then back to the personal confession. What a terrific opening.

In Merpaw’s poems I feel the poet’s mind working, leaping, associating, speculating, remembering, yet all somehow adding up to a coherent whole. The chapbook’s first poem, “Invocation,” has a characteristic fractured narrative. The poet spots a deer, claims to have first seen it on Toronto Island, refers to the place of the animal in the poem itself, questions whether she has really seen a deer at all, confesses to having drunk a lot of white wine, and discusses the ramifications of getting divorced by the age of thirty. Here are the last lines in which she returns to the deer:

I’ve looked for him in every

poem since, even this one.

Shh! Don’t! You’ll—

I’ve never been so still, not in love,

not meditating, not even in the kitchen mincing shallots for soup.

The poem has transformed the deer from an actual creature into one that lives within the work itself. Yet poetry, like a real deer, is timid and easy to frighten off (“Shh!”). It (the real dear, the imaginary one?) brings to the poet the gift of finding stillness while the poem itself, with that gorgeous last domestic scene, keeps moving.

“Cancelling the Future” is one of three prose poems, a form that Merpew already handles expertly, with their flow of memories and doubts and questions, their juxtaposition of surprising unlikely moments that nevertheless seem as if they were always meant to follow one after another. “At Kew Gardens” is a memory or perhaps a memorial for a relationship and brims with longing and regret, although the details already seem to be slipping away. “On the Spring Equinox” is both direct and cryptic, ordinary and aphoristic (“Can you stumble on grace uninvited?”), assertive and full of doubt.

I’ll end full circle with the last lines of “Rhizomatic Thinking.” How suffused with sensations, with those vivid yet questionable memories, with a hunger for nostalgia, and most of all with the need to put it all into words:

I tell you, I say, if only I could think

of a deer, see antlers sprout across

the air. Do you remember? From

the trail. After midnight. You weren’t

there. Yes, I should have been asleep.

Everywhere the night smelled

like dandelion fluff, like that pale dust

off Lake Ontario. It was an August

or two ago now. Maybe even three.

What a fine first collection this is. What an exhilarating reading experience. Put the Ghosts Down Between Us is my favourite among the chapbooks that I have read this year.