Busy with his ropes and gears,
tides and currents,
he didn't know and never
will how he came to appear
scowling in our
family snapshot.
We brought him home
by accident
on a film showing
part of a holiday,
children in jerseys on the dock,
grinning, puddled in sun,
and at the edge,
the ferryman's dark image.
Well, that's one way
to survive,
to be captured alive
by someone, caught
by a click and locked
in a box held by an unknown
hand at an unknown hour.
Later to rise from
a chemical bath imprinted on
a glossy three-by-five
to glare
out forever,
unknowing.
The poems in Others,
Intersect, and Coming to Canada are jewels
of economy, a breeze to read, the language wakeful and
precise, and the rhymes so thoroughly enfolded that no
reviewer, Carol once mentioned, ever noticed them. They
are perfect explosions: a glance at a neighbour, a glimpse
of a boy falling asleep, or of the hole in a professor's
sock rapidly questions time, consciousness, frailty, goodness.
In Others and Intersect,
in poems like "Someone Hurrying Home" or "A Professor
We Know Who is a Compulsive Storyteller", snapshots of
friends, family, and strangers in the realistic grip of
sidewalks and clock ticks evolve into portraits of lives
lived; the theory of who we are unfolds from the easiest
idea of what we are.
But don't be fooled: we are the
houses we live in. The politician in "Member of Parliament"
will become a "mere man,/ someone/misspelled on a list"
while a friendship bridged by Christmas cards "cozied
with greetings" is not as it appears: "I loathe her...envy
clusters in her sour/ heart like rhubarb though her anger/is
relentlessly cordial". In these poems, divorce leaves
a man "half perpendicular to death" while good marriages
remember "those days/love made us liquor/ throated, made
us/madhouse fluent" even while "our limbs/trailed silent/like
lumber,/learning the way".
Marriage, children, the amazement
of disliking an old friend or the secret loneliness of
a physicist who has his hands on the entire universe -
Carol's excitement to be thinking and working, in her
late thirties, all her five children at school, livens
every line of Others and Intersect.
Years later, Coming to Canada,
written between novels, returned to childhood with poems
about learning to read, a grandmother dying ("it was hard
to be sad"), girdled aunts with "a Rinso look", and a
mother in 1945 emerging onto the back steps, apron still
on, crying out "unconditional surrender... victory, victory
and hurling/ us into the future." They are equally inquisitive
and word sharp, but also heartachingly delicate; breathed
rather than breathless, they offer the longer story of
how we are made by those around us and all the small mysteries,
such as how the moon follows us each. They include Carol's
marvellous poem about her first moment of self-consciousness,
"I/Myself".
Carol's "New Poems", included in
the Coming to Canada New and Selected, with titles such
as "Relics" and "Remembering" and "Now", are more sober,
more surfaced, shiningly realistic. Aging affords a freedom
not entirely sad, say these poems about school reunions,
a long marriage, and time, which is deftly and playfully
handled in poems about the invention of clocks, a clock
museum, and daylight savings.
Carol's poems brim with her trademark
wry intelligence and quick humour . They are glorious
"toys" as she called them, boisterous with language and
thought, and also perfectly contained - works of exquisite
crafting.
© Copyright 2009, the Carol Shields
Literary Trust
