poet

A piece of her name

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Lucy Yang, Ju. Vernon, B.C.: Broke Press, 2024, 100 copies.

https://www.brokepress.ca/

Just like the larger indie houses, chapbook publishers seem to be better known in their regions.  I’ve recently become aware of how much more familiar I am with Ontario micro-presses than those in other parts of the country. That’s a limitation I’m working to rectify.

Based in Vernon, B.C., Broke Press has only been around since 2020 but already it has a list of twenty titles. They are small, carefully produced and attractive without being precious. I’ve not reviewed any of their publications before, despite having read and very much liked Cole Mash’s What You Did is All it Ever Means. Well, it’s time to catch up.

Lucy Yang (so the biography tells me) came to Canada at the age of 9 and now lives in Vancouver. The poems in Ju are written in the voice of a young girl. There’s no adult retrospective view, no thoughtful analysis; these poems are strictly intended to be the impressions of a child.  They are simple and direct and they dwell on the things that matter—family, food, worry, and comfort. 

Here is “Killarney Market”:

  

Taken together, the poems remind me most of certain middle-grade novels written in free verse, books such as Heather Smith’s Ebb and Flow. Yang’s work needs less narrative and is satisfied with very small effects. In “December” it’s the crunching snow, fogging glasses, shrimp skin soup.  In “Spilled Water” it’s learning how to shape pork bao. Almost all the poems are in part about food and I couldn’t help recall the saying that “food is love.” And they’re about family. Mostly they are about the security that comes from being surrounded by one’s own but there is also “In the Sun” in which the child must process the death of Nainai, her paternal grandmother, back in China, by remembering a crucial family story:

At my birth, she gave me a piece of her name.

Written, it is a tree–

white-barked and wide-leafed in the spring.

Spoken, it is the sun.

Yet there is also something a little mysterious in the poems, at least to me, something that I can’t always put my finger on. In “Yeye” (meaning paternal grandfather) a melon is cut “for your journey” but what is the journey?  An actual trip?  Death? The poems seem content not to explain everything.  But what they always do is give us a quiet sense of this child and her growing awareness of the immediate world around her.

Beautiful, beautifully

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Dag T. Straumsvåg, But in the Stillness.  Ottawa, Ontario: Apt.9 Press, 2024, 80 copies.

apt9press.com

What do I mean when I say that Dag T. Straumsvåg’s poems are simple?  I mean that they are not “deceptively” but rather deliberately simple.  They wish for clarity and directness—to be what they appear to be, to say what they appear to say. 

Straumsvåg is a Norwegian poet who writes in English.  And this simplicity makes “But in the Stillness” a fine manuscript for Apt. 9 Press, whose editor and publisher, Cameron Anstee, has made a specialty of publishing poems that are direct, imagistic, and accessible.  But it is even a more perfect fit because the occasion for these poems is Straumsvåg’s learning of the death of Nelson Ball.  Ball, whose own brief, haiku-like works began to receive more attention in the later years of his life, has been a guiding light for the press.

Here is a joy-filled poem that reveals to us a world of poets connected to one another by interest and by friendship:

A box of eight

beautiful, beautifully

signed books

from Nelson Ball

landed

in my mailbox

on April 14, 2017

with a thump!

That day I felt good

about everything

in my life.

Don’t you find that “thump” so pleasing?  An earlier poem has informed us that Nelson Ball is terminally ill and so perhaps that knowledge also informs our reading of this poem, without diminishing the joy.

Not all the poems here refer to Ball; some are just about mosquitoes and insomnia and sitting down to pee.  There is an abundance of humour, that most human of responses to bad news, which seems to colour this two-line poem:

The houses don’t move. The cold doesn’t move. Silence

goes from door to door like a vacuum salesman.

In a later poem Straumsvåg learns that Ball’s assisted death has been scheduled and that another poet (Stuart Ross), the one who introduced Straumsvåg and Ball by email, would be attending.  Here the circle of poets seems to be lovingly drawing around the dying friend.  Meanwhile, Staumsvåg wonders how people in a room near him can be laughing, and writes a poem called “Accuracy” dedicated to Nelson Ball whose opening is a fine distillation of Ball’s own approach:

landing

A

universe

on

the

tip

of a leaf

While many of the poems are this brief and slim (much like Nelson Ball’s work), there are a good number of prose poems here that have more of a solid dailiness, a sense of larger life to them.  A nice example, “August 15, 2019” has the poet getting up at five a.m., making coffee, sitting at his kitchen table, watching people go by while remembering the night’s downpour, etc.  I like these poems very much, perhaps more than some of the lyrics that feel occasionally like attenuated haiku.  It’s in one of the prose poems permeated with sadness that we learn of Nelson Ball’s death.  But how lovely that he immediately follows it one day later with “The Morning Poet (August 17, 2019) in which the poet tells of how he loves reading Nelson Ball’s work morning, noon and night.  Friendship, love, joy, sadness are all emotions evoked with simplicity and depth in this touching tribute.