Marguerite Pigeon’s poetry collection, Inventory, is a small book – deceptively so. Its fifty-eight short object poems, arranged alphabetically, take readers straight to the heart of those so-called common things of everyday living – from teabags to staplers – only to remind us that nothing is as common as it seems. The book explores a central question: where do objects end and our ways of seeing them, begin?

Inspired by the French essayist and poet Francis Ponge, as well as one of the most influential European poets of the second half of the twentieth century, Zbigniew Herbert, Pigeon meticulously and poetically recreates the world of ordinary objects and, in doing so, takes readers on a compelling journey into the metaphysical realm.

Aldous Huxley also investigated the intersection between ways of being and ways of seeing in The Doors of Perception, concluding, in 1954, that man only accesses the world through “narrow chinks of his cavern” and that only by removing the filters will he ever be able to see.  The reason we cling to the protective mechanism, he argued, is because our capacity to handle every detail in the barrage of images and impressions coming at us every minute of every day is limited—we would be overwhelmed.

Reading Pigeon’s poems in succession one after the other is like having one’s filters removed and one’s perceptions enlarged.  It is an entry into the “is-ness” of the common thing – into its visceral soul – without the need for Huxley’s mind-expanding drugs. Whether showcasing the pancreas or the glacier, Pigeon cultivates an “architecture of whimsy” in each poem, a playfulness that emerges as one line segues into the next— though nothing here is an accident of the pen. Consider how each successive idea builds upon the previous one in “Apartment Block”:

Built like the novel. Drama upon drama,

carefully plotted brick and mortar;

a strange story of strangers in storeys. Babel.

One of Pigeon’s great accomplishments is the way she packs a punch with startling imagery. “Brother” has a “sensitive yellow casing / round the swift soul, which harsh words/could snip.”  Clothespins have “tight copper / smiles as currents pass” and the ants in “Colony” are a number of things:

Ant-princesses abandon their Queen for a blade of grass,

a tiny prince, and paper wings.

Ant Queens and sterile aunts shake their feelers in

disappointment.

Ant Queens and the aunts know life in the colony is long,

and the ghost of love is terrible.

For Pigeon, no subject is taboo. “Cock” was once a “dog’s tongue” whose  “panting / was faithful and false.” And here is an excerpt from “Cunt”:

In chintz and velvet, you receive – nearly

suffocate – your guests with kindness. You’ve tried

minimalism, trimmed the hedges to please the

Joneses, thrown away your dated fur coat.

A serious poet, she is not without a sense of humour: Her elaborate inventory even includes a poem called “Marguerite Pigeon” who “fell in love with her tongue” though it was a “one-sided thing.” Until now, I had never read this Vancouver-based French Canadian writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including subTerrain, The Capilano Review, and Grain. Witty and inventive, Inventory has taken me on a marvelous ride into her psyche.

Carolyn Marie Souaid is the author of six poetry books, most recently Paper Oranges.  She currently serves as poetry editor for the Winnipeg-based press, Signature Editions.