Series editor Molly Peacock titles her prologue “Poetry is the art that responds to the anxiety of living…” This year’s guest editor Lorna Crozier reminds us that “Word by word a poem is built” and that “Poetry takes us back to the sensory quality of the words themselves.” There is a complementarity to these views which is nicely manifest in the poems of the 2010 anthology.
Zachariah Wells’s sonnet celebrates sound. “To the Superb Lyrebird, that Cover Band of the Australian Bush” was inspired by David Attenborough’s wildlife video (which I sought and enjoyed on YouTube; the inclusion of poets’ comments about their poem is another plus in this series). “Alarm panic, siren wail, chainsaw drone” join “corkpops and glassclinks” as the bird mimics what it hears when we encroach on its habitat, knowledge of that encroachment being our implicit anxiety. In Catherine Owen’s “White Sale” it’s already too late, “the ablation of glaciers was complete.” Paul Tyler’s “Manitoba Maples,” however, describes the forest fighting back: the trees “gone feral loiter in disused lots plotting chaos.”
Our weather and geography also maintain their lyric presence undisturbed. Eleonore Schönmaier gives readers “an empty canoe/ open to the pouring// in of starlight” (“Weightless”). Don Domanski’s “bare trees” are “weighted down with crows/ and another planet’s moonlight” (“Gloria Mundi”). And where Tim Lilburn offers us the muscular “bullfields of mountains” in “Rupert’s Land,” the poem further evidences what Crozier calls “this scrupulous, engaging attention to diction […..] that sets poetry apart” by having linguistics itself as metaphor: “Loons, vowel soaked,/ their language expertly deboned/ of consonant have come to invent the thinnest possible dusk[.]”
Of the 45 magazines that submitted over 150 issues for consideration, 30 are represented in the long list (the 50 poems published plus the 50 runners-up). Half of these 100 poems are from 5 magazines—Descant, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and Prairie Fire—and 3 of these—Fiddlehead, Malahat and TNQ—contributed one third of the 50 poems published.
Some of us can only afford a half a dozen or so subscriptions to literary magazines, so the publication of The Best Canadian Poetry in English, now in its third year, is a welcome event. Readers who missed it in The Malahat Review can read and reread Ross Leckie’s “The Critique of Pure Reason” where “Winter cups its hands into time and freezes/ it into a skim of ice.” Those who don’t subscribe to Riddle Fence can enjoy Mary Dalton’s marvelous “Three Centos.” These lyrical mash-ups, Dalton’s contemporary take on a nearly two-thousand-year-old form, are conceivably the most “experimental” works in the anthology. A snapshot album of Canada’s poets and the aesthetics of its LitMag editors, The Best Canadian Poetry in English will perhaps one day include some of the remarkable non-lyrical poems Canada’s poets also produce. Meanwhile, as Jan Zwicky concludes in “Autobiography,” “Every morning/ the light melts the snow—/ before books, before desks, before windows,/ before pain, before amazement.”
French versions of poems from Maxianne Berger’s last book, Dismantled Secrets (Wolsak and Wynn, 2008) appear in Brèves littéraires 80 and in the trilingual anthology Le Dépanneur Café (Éditions Adage, 2010) for which she did the French-to-English translations.
