feria: a poempark
byOana Avasilichioaei
Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn 2008, ISBN 978-1-894987-29-5, 104 pp., $17.00 paper.

Who is this poet with the unpronounceable name? According to poets.ca, she "has translated Nichita Stanescu from Romanian, published as Occupational Sickness (Buschek Books, 2006), Louise Cotnoir and Genevi�ve Desrosiers from French, created visual textworks for galleries in Montreal and Vancouver, and has performed her work in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe. From 2004 to 2009 she was the coordinator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series in Montreal." Wolsak & Wynn published her first collection, Abandon, in 2005. A collaborative work with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug), involving authorial and translational impossibilities, may already have appeared by the time this review is published.

This is a book of humorous surprises that befuddle the mind of the reviewer. The first several untitled poems sit on unnumbered pages, raising the expectation that all will be written that way when suddenly, out of nowhere, appears a page, again unnumbered, headed "some streams," on which are numbers and words such as "15 Origins or The Book of Questions." You turn the page arriving at (just before your mind goes numb) a numbered page "15" together with a titled poem "Origins or The Book of Questions." Then you realize that "some streams" is just that--some streams, but not all of them. Your mind goes into orbit once again as you realize you have entered the poempark--an unstable land of fissures and fractures shaken periodically by poemquakes--on a feria, a weekday in the Roman Catholic Church that is not a feast day. Yet, you will be feted by Avasilichioaei, who has prepared a sumptuous feast.

But let's return to the beginning which, according to this comic diva, is not, in fact, such. As she says in the introductory poem:

origin is unoriginal
not a beginning
                            simply a point
in space crossed
               and recrossed with stories

We then cross that recrossed space of the poempark proper where the next several poems describe this terrain. We read a few pages on that:

The architect considers the poempark. In the mind's eye
this lasts seconds      or a century.
Then, in a sudden furious burst      always unexpected
the architect draws the poem. A schema
of geese, word-drops and birches. Into a park.
Writes the park. Into a poem.

Branch, footpath and stanza model its nature.

A void bordered.

Avasilichioaei demonstrates a total lack of respect for convention. Sentences dissolve into fragments. Punctuation is combined with spacing. Words become the excreta of geese. Certainly the reader is challenged to consider carefully the elements of grammar and poetic convention which, to the poet, is a three-ring circus with her as ringmaster. Shriners, beware! As she says, on in the poem "Origins or The Book of Questions" (15): "In this book there are no keys."

The lines in this park are tight as a winch. Don't flinch when the words strike your mind. They will only hurt for a moment--and be embedded. Like those of this poem:

Is the slaughterhouse a confession?
The fire pit out back a mouth left open?
The pulley and hook the ghost of a word? The word of a ghost. (20)

Avasilichioaei claims influence from Lisa Robertson and Erín Moure. Can you hear it in her poetic voice? Can there be any better poets to be influenced by? She strides in good company.

"Sprit of the West" begins on page 32 and creeps over the next ten pages in found fragments, the words on each page contained in a cage of quotations. At the bottom of each, we find a reference: "Vancouver Daily News--Advertiser, August 16, 1910" on the first; "J.K. Matheson to Dr. Duncan Scott, December 13, 1927" on page 36; "Muriel Fujiwara Kitagawa to Wesley Kitagawa, April 20, 1942" on the next. The text is shorn, riveted by vacancies that words (so we surmise) once occupied, doors left open to let in light. This is a gapped history, a smile missing teeth but finding others in a rapacious grin, a groan from the past.

In "The 'Gayway,'" Avasilichioaei presents contrasting grammars:

feria     ripe     open
   lies exposed
                              the park's red heart
beating on the muddy earth

Through this door, ladies and gents,
the petrified woman awaits.
Are you a doctor sir? A scientist perhaps?
Step this way and see the wonders of the universe. (42)

Is this the burlesque house of Grandma's day, the place in the back of the midway so children can't see (which is, of course, the first place they look)?

Or is this a burlesque pantomime? Words--twisted, tortured--reveal themselves upon the page in strange garb. They dance throughout this work to strange choreography. In "Momiji Garden," a long intertwined sequence of short dispatches, they fly "easted from this / western pond, east- / ed past the stones" (81). In part 4 of "Haunted House," they become barnstormers cartwheeling in air:

Because we can speak of love in this dark place
               we are elucidate

   figured, found in the river fabricated
out of wantonness, out
of a limb's hawk (94)

In feria, Avasilichioaei brings out her trained fleas to mesmerize us with their lascivious dreams and schemes of pyramids and sphinxes. What fun!

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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