Persistence, peril bind women’s voices

DANI Spinosa’s latest book, Whispering Gallery (Assembly, 84 pages, $23), pulses and thrums with barely suppressed rage. In alternating prose and visual poems, Spinosa gathers the voices of contemporary women as well as those from Greek mythology.

These voices are held together by peril and persistence. “Some of us don’t have to imagine. In fact, most of us have stories, small moments of jeopardy. Pond Road and Sentinel. Some f--king blogspot page, I think. The back of the 501. Upstairs there’s no door.”

Locating these moments of peril in the streets, buildings and websites rather than in the actions or threats that cause them amplifies the effect of “small moments of jeopardy” by implying the limitations on women’s physical and conceptual movements.

The everyday perils and constraints on women’s existence is reinforced in the visual poems. In Alkmene, Spinosa encapsulates what it means to be a woman in mythology — that is, what it means to be subject to men’s actions and the stories they tell. Against a background of type that reads “which is to say,” Alkmene says, “but they agree on/ the important bits/ which is to say/ my ankles, neat/ my girding, well/ my father, slain/ my husband, honoured/ my height, tall/ my rape, a technicality/ my labour, vain.”

As Laurie D. Graham’s Calling It Back to Me (McClelland & Stewart, 96 pages, $25) opens, the speaker is faced with the artifacts of her family’s history and its silences: “The photos sorted/ by who’s in them,// boxes with big labels/ she can no longer read.// what might be heirlooms.”

The four long poems herein are animated by curiosity and propelled by Graham’s striking, spare line, which probes “The town history’s broken spine.” This phrasing’s sparseness characteristically unfolds multiple meanings, from the book to women’s exclusion from the historical record to their centrality to community-forming and cohesion. The formal minimalism in Graham’s hand is especially effective at accommodating not only the past and its gaps, but the relation of the past to the present.

The speaker’s family history and her great-grandmothers’ migrations are entwined with the history of colonialism. “Under Russia’s boot,/ under England’s boot,// they sailed off/ to become the boot/ of the plains,” she writes to open the third of four long poems in the collection. Here, the speaker’s contention with her family’s silences, her questions met with “Why do you/ want to know?” and the consequences of those extend to her relation to her history and the world itself. “I return and return,// recall even more poorly// the stubble, low poplars yellowing,// as the heat and fires// alter them irrevocably.”

Carolyn Smart’s Breath Taking (Book*hug, 84 pages, $23) chronicles the speaker’s experience of her husband’s sudden illness and death, which begins “six weeks into the pandemic.”

The poems do just as the title says, arrest the breath and heartbeat, hold the reader on the verge of grief’s abyss. They bring the love between the speaker and her husband alive, particularly with humour, and simultaneously hold the tension between the speaker’s present grief and her anticipation of greater loss.

In Metastasis, Smart writes of the speaker’s husband’s radiation helmet. “Once he modelled it for fun, took photos of himself,” a playful scene she follows almost immediately with an image of loss: “Now I find no refuge from the grief, am hollowed, aimless,// weeping at the sight of one lone bird, a goose that circles/ overhead, calling out in vain. Geese mate for life,/ I tell the woods around me, I tell the thinning sky.”

The poems in Breath Taking turn on the way the fractures in the speaker’s knowledge and observations unsettle herself and the very world she sees.

Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River is forthcoming in spring 2027 with At Bay Press.