 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||||
Away
by Andrea MacPherson
Winnipeg: Signature
Editions, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-897109-23-6, 96 pp., $14.95 paper.
What is it about authors selecting titles that have appeared before? Even Alice Munro did it--with Runaway, no less; a title I'd have thought would be forever associated with Evelyn Lau.And now poet and novelist Andrea MacPherson has used Jane Urquhart's title, Away. Unlike the two Runaways, about as different as books can be, at least the two Aways contain small echoes of each other, in that they share a common setting, Ireland.
MacPherson has compiled a kind of travelogue of poems, the narrator taking the reader from Ireland and Scotland to France and Greece, with short connective "Between" sections joining them together. But of course, the book is much more than travel writing.
The poems begin in Dublin, with a consideration of more troubled times--burial grounds, cathedrals, gaols that were the site of hangings. Then, as in her previous collection, Natural Disasters, MacPherson explores the here-and-now through the lives of forebears and ancestors.
Your grandmother was born in the bed upstairs,
and perhaps that is why we have come here: [17]But right away on the following page, we meet someone else "born in the bed upstairs." Then, just after encountering a "faerie circle" [20], we bump into two more "faerie rings" [22]. From then on, the repetitions accumulate like mushrooms springing up on autumn mornings, layer by layer, one atop the previous. Ireland fills up with wildflowers and more wildflowers, often purple (these also appear in the sections on Scotland and France, as do peonies and an abundance of roses). Maybe the intent is for the poems to be antiphonal, but already in the first section this technique of layered repetitions begins to detract from the work.
The section on Scotland finds much of its focus in MacPherson's side of the family. We learn of a woman who worked in a jute mill where her lungs became "thick with it" [50]. We are given this detail several times, with only slight variations in wording each time. Again, the repetitions feel more heavy-handed than artful.
MacPherson is at her best when she breaks out of her inward journeying, gets out of herself and looks (and listens) to those around her. A hint of her skill comes through in the closing stanza of a poem called "on meeting another Canadian on the bus," a piece about a regret-filled (and homesick) Canadian expat:
We leave her at Grafton with her arm outstretched
pointing down the street, towards the pub
towards the shores of Newfoundland:
her long white arm in a Dublin street. [14]Another piece, "standing in J.M. Barrie's home in Kirriemuir," again sees the narrator stepping outside herself long enough to give us a glimpse of something concretely tragic:
or, perhaps, when you unfolded your brother's brown sweater
expecting, still, to find slivers of ice. [56]The opening poem in the section on Greece, "National Archaeological Museum," is another poem that succeeds in creating strong visual images and building to a powerful end.
Unfortunately, there are just too many places where I find myself annoyed by MacPherson's word choices. Words like "cerulean" and "benign" (which I think shouldn't appear more than once in a collection) seem overused and stand out as if they are in italics. Even a simple edit/find function could have helped rid the manuscript of its many suddens and suddenlys.
But perhaps all the repetitions are based in a theory that forms the basis of MacPherson's poetics. Maybe the stories retold and phrases reused are part of an intricate plan of layering pieces of poems over poems, hand-over-hand, to pull us along on this journey through Europe.
One of the book's most interesting elements may be its cover. The font conjures Dan Brown wordplay. With a bit of squinting, the title letters upside-down could be construed to spell out the word "hymn." Maybe with this as a clue, some of the collection's apparent weaknesses can be explained away and might even become strengths. Without such a premise, it leaves me unconvinced.
Heidi Greco, like Andrea MacPherson, lives and writes in Surrey, BC.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.