Pause for Breath
by Robyn Sarah
Emeryville, ON: Biblioasis, 2009, ISBN 978-1-897231-59-3, 81 pp., $17.95 paper.

Writing poetry takes time--a Pause for Breath, as it were, as Robyn Sarah has so aptly titled her new book. In the title poem, the pause for breath is for the moment taken when stopping in the middle of the activity of digging:

We are not digging very well.
We have flagged in the digging. (77)

The 'pause for breath' affords a moment of contemplation for the 'why' of it:

--Digging for water, for treasure?
To China? Or digging our own graves? (77)

The conclusion? "It's the digging that saves." (77) And that is what I think Sarah is doing with this poem and the writing of poetry in general--that is, doing the "digging that saves."

The work of writing poetry is a combination of 'that pause for breath' and 'the digging that saves.' Sarah's poems hold that tension in fine balance. In "Messenger," for example, the poet looks to the stone in her shoe and instead of removing it, asks "Little stone in my shoe, / what have you to tell me?" (73) The stone becomes a 'messenger.' In that pause of breath the poet takes to contemplate what the message might be, she 'digs' for its meaning. "What little creeping guilt / accepts it as my lot / that you should harry my sole / the whole way home?" (73)

The guilt of a poet, perhaps? To accept its lot to have a harried sole? (And one cannot ignore the play on the word 'sole' and the obvious 'soul' here, never mind the other meaning of 'sole' which is 'of one' or 'lone.') Sarah often asks rhetorical questions in her poems--gentle, probing ones that attempt to 'dig.' In "In the Middle of the Night," her oblique questioning of what 'fell' leads to the last tentatively worded two lines of the poem that point to the events of 9/11:

Something fell.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
was it our face?
the towers?
an empire? (13)

This line of questioning is a cautious approach to something--an assertion, but not really that, because the sentence remains fundamentally still a question. Normally, I'm not fond of poetry that speaks of contemporary historical events; however, I see Sarah approaching this kind of content with a measure of premeditated hesitation. A reluctance, almost. And yet facts must be faced. In the poem following "In the Middle of the Night," called appropriately enough, "Wake," the poet deals directly with the event in the more tightly structured and restrictive form of a villanelle (14). That Sarah approaches this world event in such a challenging form speaks to me of her consummate skill, commitment and artistry as a poet, above all. She has not traded in her curiosity for certainty and often when she asserts, she uses a restrictive poetic form like the villanelle that, because of its rules, subvert and sublimate the poet's need to make a definitive prosaic statement. "A Prayer for Prayer,"--a pantoum--is an example of that (21). In the first stanza of the poem, she addresses the longing baldly:

God! I am dead empty.
Pour me full again.
I am leaden; lighten me.
My cables are cut. (21)

But in the next stanza, the repetition of the second and fourth lines immediately indicate the presence of 'form' and give the poem a kind of psalm-like musicality. And the threading throughout of the repeated lines (in pantoums, the second and fourth lines are repeated as the first and third lines of the next stanza) make of the poem an extended plea--truly a 'prayer for prayer,' as the title indicates (21.) The repetition reminds me of the liturgical prayers used in churches where congregants are asked to repeat such lines as "In your mercy, hear our prayer."

It is the artfulness and craft exhibited by Sarah that I admire. Hers is a truly inspired and informed sensibility about poetry and poetics. A Pause for Breath is a rewarding read, well worth the pause it takes to read each poem, ingest its words and sounds, and savour above all its 'digging.'

Sally Ito is a Winnipeg writer.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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