Joy Is So Exhausting
by Susan Holbrook
Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1-55245-222-6, 88 pp., $16.95 paper.

Susan Holbrook is a Steinian scholar who teaches North American literatures and creative writing at the University of Windsor. Joy Is So Exhausting is her second full collection of poetry. Her first, misled (1999), was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and the Stephen J. Stephensson Award. She also published a chapbook, Good Egg Bad Seed (included in Joy), with Nomados in 2004.

This collection is a cornucopia of poetic delight. Holbrook comes at you from all directions, assaulting you with the slam-bam of lyric, prose, and a well-honed sense of humour. Take the poem "Editing the Erotica Issue," which begins:

Crocuses glistened. Sparrows throbbed.
          Would he approve
          Of her nipples of mauve?
And that was what had first attracted him, her canvas flaps.
A father of four, he is nevertheless kittenish.
Her skirt had a stuffed look, which could only mean she was wearing ruffled panties.
Oh, nutritious mound of sprouts. (10)

The unusual juxtaposition of words--sparrow/throbbed, nipples/mauve, ruffled panties/nutritious mound of sprouts-- creates an excitation of the senses. Metaphors here are fresh, new. The "nutritious mound of sprouts" at first blush appears to be a strange concatenation of words. But then it dawns on us with the force of a sledgehammer that "nutritious" has something to do with eating and orality and that "sprouts" can refer to things sprouting. Furthermore, we discover the pleasure of the near rhyme "approve / mauve" while fantasising on purplish pink nipples.

This unusual kind ofjuxtaposition proliferates throughout this collection. In "Your First Timpani?" we read: "When using a tambourine for the first tiger choose a day camp when your flotsam is modern."(14) Are we here in the presence of Ferdinand de Saussure's syntagmatic axis under assault by OULIPO? One of OULIPO's "techniques" was to replace each noun by the one x number of words further on in the dictionary.

As to humour, the funniest poem is "To Chocolate":

You are hunky, Dessert is not the same without you. Sure I
love mango cheesecake and everything, but I'm not in love

with it. If I weren't hypoglycemic I'd eat more of you, if I
had a constitution like Nicole, who can eat you for breakfast

and when I ask 'What if you crash' she says she just eats more
of you. During the war, boys were the only ones given bars

of you on a regular basis and the only ones later sent to medical
school. They let sisters sniff your wrappers. . . . (16)

Whereas in "Erotic" the intent was to "edit" the eroticism in a manner that removed any vestige of the erotic--such as the role reversal achieved by referring to the father as "kittenish" and her skirt as "having a stuffed look," here the eroticism receives prominence in the personification of the chocolate bar. It is also interesting in how the feminist perspective sounds in sotto voce eruptions such as in "later sent to medical school." The humour owes something to Adeena Karasick while the "Nicole" referred to is Nicole Markotic, with whom Holbrook is carrying on a poetic collaboration The use of unrhymed couplets and the way enjambments spill between stanzas adds to the reader's enjoyment.

The poetic collaboration referred to with Markotic, Q & A, a series of discursive poems without the rationality of logic, begins on page 28. The first is a series of questions that begins: "Is it worth the portage? Maple or hickory-smoked? Are you serious? Which is worse?" etc. Are the poems that follow answers, considering that the question mark is studiously avoided, resulting in responses such as "Sift words into his package. My apple OR hickey OR most. You're so serious . . ."(29)

The section of poems titled To Federico Garcia Lorca's Poema del cante jondo contains several homolinguistic translations from one of Lorca's most influential books, a book that inspired Jerome Rothenberg to create the Deep Image poem, with which Robert Bly was later associated. The concept of homolinguistic poetry began with Louis Zukofsky's translation of Catullus and was later brought into Canada by bp Nichol and Steve McCaffery. These are translations by writers who do not speak or understand the language from which they are translating and therefore use English equivalents for the sounds they read. In Holbrook's case, we see this in, for example, "And After": "Lost labials in / colloquial time, / evanescence, // (Soliloquy / desert left.)" The attempt is to transcribe sound, not meaning--but, words being words, there will always be an attempt to discover that absent quality.

Holbrook takes us to the prison of language where words are constrained through various devices. Amazingly, they still know how to sing, which is a testimony to Holbrook's talent.

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.

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