4 new volumes of Canadian poetry reveal a gallery of images

The Hands

By Marty Gervais

Guernica Editions, 96 pages, $20

A mainstay of Windsor’s thriving literary scene, Marty Gervais has published more than a dozen books of poetry and serves as the city’s Poet Laureate Emeritus. He was a reporter and columnist for the Windsor Star for many years, and in part “The Hands” offers a poetic gallery of some of the celebrities he interviewed, including Muhammad Ali, Mother Teresa and Leonard Cohen. “I keep my eyes open, and listen,” he states on his website; the poems bear that out. Gervais has a knack for clarity and an affable narrative voice, particularly when recalling his childhood or writing affectionately of his hometown (“a town that runs to the river/a place elbowing its way into new life”). He also has an eye for revealing images: in a poem about walking down an alleyway, amid “garbage cans and discarded tires,” he writes, “I see someone has suspended a teacup/over a delicate plate and it twirls/silently in the fading day.”

But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves.

By Conyer Clayton

Anvil Press, 96 pages, $18

The title of Conyer Clayton’s second collection jauntily signals the recurring water imagery throughout, but this is no record of lakeside idylls: the Ottawa poet and musician’s surrealistic prose poems (which are based on her dream journal) are harrowing scenarios. In the opening poem, two sisters struggle to escape when their car plunges into a lake. Elsewhere, there are accounts of fleeing from predators, through dreamscapes of menace, and flashes of disturbing memories (“My stepdad crouches in the living room. Light/avoids him”). Clayton expresses the trauma of abuse and its lasting impact in viscerally evocative images (“We were born with ropes around/our heads … On/the other end of every rope, there’s a weapon”). Yet this isn’t a grim book, partly because the scenarios often feature weird, funny details (a hedgehog is served on a tray, like a hamburger, and turns into an iPhone), but also because the speaker in these nightmarish situations actively seeks a way out.

Streams That Lead Somewhere

By Fareh Malik

Mawenzi House, 80 pages, $20.95

In his debut collection, the Hamilton poet Fareh Malik combines social comment with soul-searching, writing candidly about being the target of racism (including being held repeatedly at gunpoint by police, starting with “Sorry, Wrong Guy 1”) and living with mental illness (“these ribs have been cold like jail-cell bars/ for as long as I can remember”). But there’s also hopefulness in the wistful lyricism of his love poems, and pride in claiming his identity as a “coloured boy.” The most affecting poems are both emotionally direct and figuratively evocative, as in the opening poem, where he imagines waking up after a suicide attempt “next to a trickling stream still/coughing up the river Styx onto grass/greener than I first realized.” That stream is a recurrent metaphor for life, and carries through to a poem in which he reflects, “Harsh rapids are easy; I am still/trying to figure out how to keep my boat moving in still waters.”

Surrender & Resistance

By Katie Fewster-Yan

Gaspereau Press, 64 pages, $18.95

Katie Fewster-Yan ponders the forces that shape our lives and how we deal with them in this contemplative first full-length collection. Many of the most resonant poems address the tension between circumstance and the choices we make metaphorically, using observations of the natural world. In “Gull,” the former Scarborough poet, now living in Nova Scotia, depicts a bird battling a strong wind, “the buffeting current pressing back against each wingbeat.” In the end, the gull triumphs, “becoming more/of what she is to ballast it.” Conversely, a pine tree damaged in a storm is unable to adapt to “this sudden shift in circumstance”; the tree, with “not enough strength left … to bend to it,” becomes a poignant symbol of someone brought down by happenstance. Throughout, the poems shift back and forth between expressing a determined agency, as represented by that gull, and a sense of powerlessness: “We are, for now, what is being done to us.”

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