Paper Oranges
by Carolyn Marie Souaid
Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2008, ISBN 978-1-89710-931-1, 109 pp., $14.95 paper.

Carolyn Marie Souaid is a poet's poet. Yet, she writes with the raunchy, hardboiled language of a film noir detective. Or under another alias, that of the perennial bad girl--she's a wolverine in a dress gunning for you! ("Skid marks & the wet sound of you, / oozing." [Road Kill, 62]) In these linked poems, Souaid the woman rejects safety and conformity to find the courage to become herself. This makes for dangerous territory for a married woman living in suburia, involving, as it does, upending the roots of the tree yet preserving the tree, transplanted. For a woman cannot live without love. Even as the poet in her needs the air of freedom and to dance with the smoking gun in her hand, the lover writes of Eros and Desire.

Has she created a new genre of poetry: urban femme noir? Or has she written a feminist update to the Song of Songs, Erin Moure rap style:

octopal joy, o jazz

               crow the breeze,

i'm on the rag

pep my signal, o haifa-dad
               spirit me your bandy pip

ax-groom, yaqui-taster
break the dye

               parade as nectar my forest-red tip

                                        (After the Hijab, 89)

According to Souaid, forgetting freedom is a poet's only sin--better to chew off one's leg than remain trapped in captivity, locked behind a chain-link fence without love. Poetry, the "joyous leap/ of the tongue" (Mad River, 56), disses the illusion, battles the solidarity of coffee mugs with slogans and chooses life over ash-certain death.

While the world is napping in front of the TV screen and all-night sports, the poet's mouth is full of pollen; she arouses desire and longing and braves the vertigo of uncoupling to float in chaos. She decimates comfortable fictions and fairy-tale endings to fall through clouds. With a razor eye, her Atwoodian clarity dissects the morning cereal and awakens "greedy as a beet/ in juice" for the enormity of living (Portrait of the Lady, Reclining, in Lingerie, 91).

Outlawed is burying the evidence, hiding behind plain white bread, self-preservation. Enter the unpredictable, the light of dawn, the verve and drive and juice of life, the jolted-awake heart.

Even as the tired world winds down, the enlivened poet newly freed sings an "epilogue" for the "moon straddling a tear," choosing to live outside of prisons of her own making. Because of Love--the mythical sun--she embraces the purity of risk, unflinchingly stares down annihilation and nihilism - as long as the Heart is allowed to jam with the vagrant moon.

Treasure the quelled trees, the dry wharf split in half.
Man has slipped and fallen once or twice,
but still with the birds he rises at dawn.
Think. Where would we be without drive, without verve,
this moored light waiting in the heart?
                                    (Afterword, 93)

Souaid breaks the mould of safe prosaic language so popular in what is published as poetry. There are not too many Canadian poets with this much happening on the page. s.

Jennifer Boire lives and writes in Montreal, where she runs into live poetry on the lam.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.


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