god of missed connections
by Elizabeth Bachinsky
Nightwood Editions, 2009, ISBN 9780889712263, 80 pp., $17.95 paper.

In this collection with its elliptical theme suggested by the title, Elizabeth Bachinsky writes about her family, her Ukrainian roots, the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, an ancestor who worked in a labour camp in Banff and, within that extended circle of experience, about herself or projections of herself. While black and white prints, prayers set in italics, incantations and spells introduce the three numbered sections, the poems in this slender volume are worth savouring for their almost iconic images and for the speaker's deceptively off-hand observations that shift their reference sometimes more than once in a poem. Here is a spiritual and erotic poetry from a female perspective that elicits and completes in the reader's mind some of the poet's own insights while a sense of discovery inheres in the often ironic displacements.

In the poem "God of Mechanical Accidents," "for the children and workers of the Children Cancer Ward of Minsk, Belarus," the poet invokes an ironic idolatry of the child disfigured by cancer:

Make a Church of the Child, how she suffers.
She is two-headed, tow-headed, mythic, cries
for milk with one mouth, succour with the other. (11)

While the representation of the child in the guise of a primitive god with two mouths follows the natural extension of the metaphor of the "Church of the Child," that "the Child" "cries for milk" with one mouth and "succour" with the other brings the reader back to the disturbing reality of the living situation. With their dual address of the sinister and the naive, these verses flow with a periodic rhythm whose broken music jars the reader with each new realization. Accordingly, a shift to "boxcars stuffed with grain" and "Vancouver smog" in the last stanza aligns the Chernobyl theme with a familiar environmental one in which technology may be seen to endanger the natural landscape of which children form a part.

In "Letter to My Sister," the speaker converses with her sister about their shared childhood memories that reflect an uncanny proximity to death. We hear them reminisce about watching their cousin Jenny practise with the Poltava dancers in the Labour Temple in Regina, the day after their grandmother's ashes were laid beside her grandfather's, about their mother's life-threatening low blood sugar on this memorable occasion. Suggestive of her initiation into love and life, Jenny is reluctant to dance in the presence of the young male dancers: "Man, those boys could jump." But once started, she "could/ spin and spin and spin and spin" (13).

Just as their grandmother's grave is marked with a headstone in the graveyard across town, so the sisters' discovery of their mother's red Ukrainian dancing boots provides reassurance (if not evidence) of their mother's having met and danced with or courted her father:

. . . I mean, I know we know the story
of how our parents met, but didn't you think
it felt like proof, knowing those boots were there? (13)

A black and white print of the dancing boot introduces the section, becoming something of an icon in the reader's mind.

Reminiscent of Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Dark Pines Under Water," Bachinsky's poem "God of Missed Connections" employs changing metaphors to reveal her conception of the nature of the mind and unconscious. Unlike MacEwen's poem, which creates an implicit metaphor in the landscape it describes, Bachinsky likens the mind to a alluvial plain with layers of geological markings, only to depart from this ingenious concept and find another analogy in "split obsidium," whose variant smoothness becomes an image for the mind looking back at itself. This poem should make its way into anthologies, so striking are the transitions and layers of suggestion. (56)

In "Goddess of Chance Encounters," Bachinksy builds on this series based on invented secular or household gods. Here the elegant couplets flow with punctuated smoothness, at every turn uncovering some new way of looking at the subject matter. The focus of the poem shifts from a female speaker who has discovered a human jawbone to "any jogger" who may make such a discovery "in the chop," to the reported case of a " woman who left her husband" "for a man she met in passing at a party." In this way, we are led through the turns in the poem to an ironic confusion of the female speaker with the woman in the anecdote and, by extension, with every-woman.

. . . Poor thing. She can't stop
thinking of the teeth. Whose they were,

whose they weren't. She sees herself, of course,
but also someone else. Someone she doesn't know at all. (59)

Equally expert in its management of ironic shifts is "God of Panic." From the self-conscious, adolescent female speaker who imagines that "the boys" are all watching her, to the revealing digression that the speaker's father has just left her mother for "an even lonelier telemarketer," to the imagined rape scene, the reader is left gasping at the accumulating surreal shifts in setting with their reeling implications:

. . . Twenty
cocks shuttling under the white spot so white it was like
blinding white light as twenty tongues and two hundred
fingers found their pleasure at once she woke beneath the goal
posts. She could feel the close-lipped lawn was cool
beneath her cheek. (63)

With each new created context, the psychological circumstances of the subject are revealed in a new light, adding black comedy to that projected pandemonium.

One of my favourite poems is "Pig Iron," in which implied metaphors rise in the molten lava of the words so unexpectedly that it is like finding Waldo. Rather like the junk heap of a landfill that the poem describes, a "dumbbell" or "an engine block" may be picked out.

. . . Oh well,
for a time you've been out-of-date, corporeal
in the basements of the universities--
forgotten, forgotten, you wait for one big shake
to bring you to a head. (73)

Always fresh, frequently erotic and sometimes alarming, Bachinsky's ironic shifts and careful displacements locate her poetry in a postmodern tradition without ever losing sight of the female speaker with her Ukrainian roots and experience in a Regina or Vancouver setting. This slender collection provides a read by turns funny, exhilarating, macabre, tongue-in-cheek and dolorous.

Gillian Harding-Russell lives, reviews, edits, teaches and writes in Regina. Her latest collection of poetry is I forgot to tell you (Thistledown Press, 2007).

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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