These days, a little cleansing rage seems not only justified, but downright de rigueur. Between dead soldiers, greased pelicans, and one’s own everyday grievances, who doesn’t have a few choice words for the powers that be — be they oil barons, politicians, landlords, or ex-lovers? Yet outrage seems strangely rare in most contemporary poetry, perhaps as a consequence of creative caution. “Speak when you are angry,” Ambrose Bierce tartly advised, “and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

Like alcohol and over-inflated self-regard, rage has a delightful loosening effect on the tongue, but, as with booze and ego, the hangover it can leave behind is characterized by the chastening realization that your few choice words could have been chosen more carefully.

Those of us apt to hold our tongues can take vicarious pleasure in For and Against, Sharon McCartney’s new and seventh collection. McCartney’s voice is dark, sharp, and refreshingly fierce. Arguing against everything from skunks to therapy to “my father’s third wife,” she exploits anger for all its energy and bravado, her imagery vivid and her vocabulary expansive, as tends to happen when one is pissed off and on a roll. These poems for the most part trace the dissolution of a marriage, but their outrage is broader, more existential, and endearingly self-aware. Every once in a while a metaphor borders on melodrama — but then, every once in a while, real life does, too, as in “After Little Italy”:

Actually shouting at each other on Bloor — like couples we’ve
always laughed at, trailer park romance. So caught up in it, divorce
the only thing we can agree on, we lose track, forget where we are,
which way to the hotel. We’re on Yonge Street — you stop as if
at a precipice — I hate Yonge Street! And I, out of habit or love,
I don’t know which, pity you. That part of you I know too well, […]

This is deep anger combined with great vulnerability. McCartney’s speakers are not altogether likable, but the reader can identify with their rage because of the poems’ searing honesty. The poet doesn’t play any tricks to make things — or herself — appear prettier than they are or provide the comfy assurance that it all works out in the end.

This is especially true in the poems that refer, often obliquely, to breast cancer, such as “For (Against) Judith,” a diatribe directed at an ungrateful houseguest, which concludes:

… I recycle your malicious missive, left perched on the guest
room pillow like pissed-off cat shit, so calculated to wound, trash
your subsequent self-serving e-mail gasconades, the albino bone
of forgiveness that was in me once gone AWOL, fed up, ducked out
for a pack of smokes while I lay unconscious in the sequestral OR.

It would be easy for the theme of illness to take over, but McCartney astutely channels its force into a quiet fury, a darkness that lies at the centre of the poem almost as a tumour sits hidden within tissue, a dense node of gravity. McCartney is tough. She doesn’t feel the obligation to rise above a heart-wrenching experience, to find a bright side, or to soften her bitterness, and so we believe her when she concedes in one of the book’s final poems, “it’s an adequate life, no snipers, after all.”

A few poems take creative departures from the confessional tone: a romance between Dorothy and the Tin Man; the last thoughts to cross Marie-Antoinette’s mind; an ATM’s late-night soliloquy. And the book does finish off with a few poems that are for rather than against, but you wouldn’t mistake them for feel-good poems. These are poems for feeling bad and liking it; not for regretting the vile things you’ve said and done, but for regretting that you now, alas, know better than to say or do them.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based writer and actor.

Ever since we were kicked out of Eden, we’ve been trying to get back in, and sometimes the zoo seems like the next best thing. There, we can wander amid the animal kingdom from which we’ve been exiled, looking at animals and being looked at by them, seeing between cage bars the frighteningly familiar and the deeply, wildly other. The thought would never have occurred to me before picking up Penned, an anthology of poems about the zoo, that poetry is the perfect form to explore what we see when we look at animals, precisely because language so fundamentally separates us from our animal brethren.

Their lazy armpit scratching, their blank-faced cud-chewing, their clumsy couplings, their cages all remind us of ourselves, but we know that animals belong to a society deeply separate from our own. They don’t put each other into cages as we do, or build and demolish complex civilizations; they don’t wax their eyebrows or wear pajamas; and they certainly don’t struggle to put any of those experiences into words. Lucky them.

One might expect a book of zoo poems to be of the cutesy coffee table variety, complete with glossy photos of basking hippos and adorable, preening chimps. But while this pretty volume would indeed make a good gift for the zoo lover — or hater — in your life, Penned is about poetry as much as it is about the zoo. Juxtaposed against each other in a single volume, these poems become a reminder of how deeply metaphor is embedded within language and how often poetry expresses the longing for a time and place before words. A wide variety of poets and poems are brought together here, and as would any of us on a sunny, Sunday afternoon, each has their own experience of the zoo. To some, the zoo is the Id, moated neatly off within the order of the city; to others it is an oasis of sanity within the insane metropolis. Countee Cullen sees “they in their cruel traps, and we in ours.” For Lisa Jarnot, it is a place of innocence; for Robert Kroetsch, the site of transgression; for Peter Meinke, a little of both. While the editors have chosen to omit children’s verse for the most part, A.A. Milne’s “At the Zoo” is among the few to strike a childlike tone of celebration, rhyming, “There’s sort of a tiny potamus, and a tiny nosserus too— / But I gave buns to the elephant when I went down to the Zoo!”

Some pieces, such as Ted Hughes’ “Jaguar” or Emily Dickinson’s “#1206,” will be familiar, but there are a number of unfamiliar gems. Gertrude Halstead’s brilliant “panther” imagines the capture of a great cat from its own point of view, the words gradually becoming literal bars on the page. Judith Beveridge’s “The Domesticity of Giraffes,” while a work of pure and delicate observation, is easily read a portrait of a couple, suggesting that language itself has something to do with why we so easily anthropomorphize.

More than any other literary form poetry captures our ambivalence toward the very human tool of language. Words set limits even as they open expressive possibilities; they build and unlock cages with equal facility. In a collection that spans different eras and locations, biographical notes or dates for the authors — a kind of taxonomy, perhaps — would have made a nice addition here, but that’s a small complaint about a menagerie that ingeniously reveals as much about us as it does about animals. Penned shines a poignant, unexpected light on what it means to be human.

Abby Paige was a frequent childhood visitor to Quebec’s Granby Zoo where, sometime in the late 1970s, an elephant threw a rock at her mother. Years of therapy followed.

Lisa Robertson’s latest collection, R’s Boat, may be read as a formal experiment, an autobiographical game, an argument about language and gender, or an attempt to put the unsayable on the page — but not, if you please, as a poem. Its author has described the work as neither a book of poems nor a series of poems nor a single long poem of many sections, but as a “unit of composition.” The distinction is worth exploring, because the reader may find that its not-a-poem-ness is a fundamental aspect of the book.

Robertson created R’s Boat in dialogue with her own archives, now housed at Simon Fraser University. From old notebooks, she culled sentences and phrases that were related thematically or, more likely, grammatically: first-person statements, negative statements, statements in the present tense. The resulting compositions are fragmentary, but not without their own logic or music. There is a time-released quality to Robertson’s language, as flat, declarative lines of text are juxtaposed with densely evocative ones, and repetitions sound more like echoes than drumbeats, as she seems to acknowledge when she writes, “I heard two centuries of assonance, and then rhyme.” If most poems are written on the page, this work is composed across a broader span of time and space.

Robertson goes to lengths to resist conventional poetic form. Most of the book is double-spaced, spreading lines across the page so stanzas don’t appear as blocks of text and stanza breaks become almost incidental. The spacing doesn’t merely allow the text to breathe, but breaks down the relationship between utterances, preventing a coherence pointed enough to coalesce into something decidedly poem-ish. Odd enjambments often further aid in the fragmentation:

Between stability and volition
Full-blown in the first moments of waking
The action of the sounds comes clear
It’s like this—the non-identity of servitude
(The part that makes its own use of effacement)
Won’t ever be revealed

After struggling to string these words onto a ribbon of meaning, one might nod a few lines later when the poet writes, “It is both in ruins and still under construction.” Is this language being put together or taken apart?

While some of Robertson’s individual lines are beautifully written, it is the space between them where the poetic work happens. This is not to suggest that Robertson’s work is not poetic — at least not in any pejorative sense — but to emphasize how fundamentally she questions the conventions of both the narrative and the lyric. She looks for a form unfamiliar enough not just to defy expectations, but to sidestep them altogether. If what she’s writing doesn’t look like a poem (or an essay or anything else we’ve ever seen), the reader can approach it without the baggage associated with those forms. While fans of Robertson’s work will likely delight in how this “unit of composition” searches for a way to liberate language from its own limitations, those more ambivalent about innovative poetics may protest that some baggage contains helpful tools.  Interestingly, Robertson seems to acknowledge as much in the final section of the book, which contains couplets separated by stanza breaks, work that looks more poem-ish, suggesting a sort of counter-argument, or a conciliatory suggestion that, on the other hand, poetry might have an answer to language’s problems.

Abby Paige lives, reads, and writes in Montreal and at http://www.abbypaige.com/

Multilingualism begets a mental dexterity and a comfort with ambiguity that is difficult to acquire through other means. In learning a new language, we discover how words shape our thoughts and how flexible our conception of the world can be when transferred to a new grammar. Consider where different languages place direct and indirect objects within a sentence; the strangeness of reflexive verbs; how time is ordered by various verb tenses — perhaps not the sexiest considerations, but polyglots and translators understand that language is sly, flexible, and ambidextrous. Poets understand this, too, and perhaps no one has explored the relationship between poetry and multilingualism to greater effect than Montreal poet Erín Moure.

Her new book, O Resplandor, follows a series of collections that have questioned notions of authorship and definitions of translation, and smudged the boundaries between languages. One of the pleasures of reading Moure is that, although her work is often challenging, she almost always creates a foothold for the reader, finding creative and often humorous ways to open what can be opaque and deeply strange poems. The current volume employs a loose narrative frame (even calling it “narrative” is taking a bit of a liberty) to gird the poems’ leaps and dives. The result is lyrical and engaging, and captures the intimacy, romance, and loneliness of the collaborative acts of writing, translating, and reading.

The first section of the book consists of English translations of the Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu by Elisa Sampedrín, who by her own admission cannot read Romanian and, more complicated still, may not actually exist. (Readers may recognize Moure’s literary heteronym from previous works.) The second section consists of translations by Moure, who doesn’t read Romanian either, of a group of poems in Romanian by Paul Celan. In creating their translations, both Sampedrín and Moure refer to earlier English translations of Stănescu and Celan by Oana Avasilichioaei. Writes Sampedrín, “When I first picked up O.A.’s book of Stănescu’s poetry, I realized that not only did it give me access to the poems in my second language, English, it gave me access to the original, Romanian. At this point I ceased to understand any language. I had to translate it, in order to read again.” The relationships between the three women are left unclear, but they write to and about each other in prose sections that are interspersed among the poems. Letters, diary entries, and notebook jottings link their work. What results reads like a mystery that takes place across two continents and in flagrant violation of linear time, fitting for poetry that doesn’t give itself up too easily to the reader. Freed from the danger of being too literal by the fact that neither translator speaks the source language, these translations clatter with a syntactical complexity and musicality that seem at once post-modern and timeless. The prose sections invite the reader to wonder, Who wrote this? Does this writer even exist? What language am I reading? What are these words trying to do? — questions we should perhaps ask of poems more often.

The book’s slim, final section contains “documents for further inquiry…from possibly unreliable sources.” Here Moure provides the most obvious foothold for her reader, coming close to defining her poetics, which is deeply tied to the experience of speaking, reading, and wrestling with more than one language. “Casi nadie sabe leer,” reads the epigram at the opening of O Resplandor, “Almost no one knows how to read.” But the more languages you have under your belt, Moure argues, the better prepared you will be for the task.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based writer and performer. She speaks three languages, none fluently.

In a writing workshop, the American poet Ed Ochester once bellowed over one of my poems, “There is no philosophy in poetry.” Generally, I find such grand pronouncements about poetry perplexing and not very helpful, but I made a note of this one. Then I mostly forgot about it until, reading Kate Hall’s debut collection, The Certainty Dream, I wondered whether poems are written for the mind alone.

Like Wallace Stevens, Hall often blends rigorous philosophical thought with playful, creative nonsense. The book’s longest poem, “Suspended in the Space of Reason: A Short Thesis,” for example, uses the structure of an academic thesis (abstract, introduction, literature review, and so on) to explore the lengths to which we go to “assuage epistemic hunger,” but the poem is also packed with wacky imagery, including echo-locating bats, celebrity suicide notes, and the Mars rovers poetically named Spirit and Opportunity. Hall invokes great thinkers (Hume, Descartes, and Pascal, for example) to address some grand philosophical questions: What is real? Where does the past go? Does God exist? How can I know for sure? Many of the poems enact a desire to build a structure of logic around a world that refuses to adhere to logic’s laws, a project that sometimes seems philosophical first and poetic second.

Much of the book captures that vague state of consciousness between sleep and waking when dreams still seem real and the laws of language, narrative, and logic are still loose. Hall’s subconscious is busy with wild animals, odd machines, and lots and lots of birds, and her penchant for startling imagery helps to transport us to a dreamlike state: God hides inside a pepper grinder, a herd of antelope eat the siding off of a house, dump trucks file out of a suitcase, and someone (George Herbert?) has left an orange tree at Lost and Found.

These deeply weird visions are balanced by straightforward, declarative diction; there is no airy dream-talk here. Hall’s speakers sound knowing, but their knowing is a kind of order futilely imposed onto the chaos of the mind. “There is art, / unless there is so much missing, / we cannot build a structure around it,” she writes in “Water Tower, 1998-2000,” an hommage to sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s translucent Soho water towers. Whiteread’s sculptures, which played on ideas of fullness and emptiness, are a fitting parallel for Hall’s poems, which push the limits of lack. There is so much stream-of-consciousness here, so many imaginative leaps taken by the writer and required of the reader, it is often difficult to discern what, if anything, holds a poem together.

It’s only appropriate that a collection so fundamentally concerned with the workings of the mind would inspire a hunger for logic and certainty, but I sometimes hungered, too, for a more sensual approach. These poems sometimes veer too far into academic territory — self-consciously and playfully, but frequently enough that they work mostly from the neck up. I’m not sure I agree with Ochester’s dictum, but this might be among the perils that arise when philosophy and poetry overlap.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based writer and performer. You can visit her on-line at http://www.abbypaige.com/.

Susan Holbrook is funny, sometimes enough to make one laugh out loud. In Joy Is So Exhausting, her second collection, she employs a variety of poetic constraints to create poems that surprise and delight without being too cute or comfortable. Constraint-based poems often read as though they must have been much more fun for the writer than they are for the reader, but Holbrook’s sense of humour and preoccupation with the element of surprise help to make her procedural poems seductive.

Although some poems get lost in their own improvisation, the poet’s willingness to borrow from unexpected places (the insert in a box of tampons, the inspector’s report on her house) and to acknowledge the difficulty of her own poetic project (“Is it worth the portage?” she asks in “Q&A”) make these experimental poems unusually approachable.

In “POETSMART Training for Your Poet,” she perverts text from PetSmart’s website by substituting “poets” for “pets,” and promises, “Using positive reinforcement methods, you’ll learn how to prevent unwanted behaviour and establish a bond with your poet.” In “Memoirs of a Canada Council Visiting Writers Hostess,” the fatigued speaker remembers a long line of high-maintenance guests, including “the one who kept calling me Sharon” and “the one who always read final lines as if our lives / depended / on / them.” In “Good Egg Bad Seed,” she plays with the adage that there are two kinds of people by devising a litany of often hilarious dichotomies: “You have a way with animals or squirrels smell your fear and attack”; “You think Modigliani painted nipples too small or you think Emily Carr painted trees too big”; “No pulp or extra pulp.” “Nursing,” the long poem that ends the book, is most notable for the luminous simplicity with which it captures a new mother’s most intimate routine, but it has moments of humour, too, including its closing line, from which the collection takes its title.

The purpose of a joke can sometimes be to create social affinity — to put a stranger at ease or invite an outsider in. This is often the function of Holbrook’s humour: to establish rapport with the reader and make fragmented language less opaque. In poems created from a Sudoku puzzle or a creative transliteration of Garcia Lorca, the lyric epiphany favoured in more mainstream poetry is supplanted by formal and syntactical shocks. Although the poet asserts that either “you like an epiphany or you like a surprise,” her surprises are in a sense epiphanic. A good joke contains a flash of insight so sudden and unpredictable, we can’t help but respond, usually with laughter. While this species of epiphany may not be as cloying as its lyric counterpart, it is familiar enough to make Holbrook’s experimental jolts more palatable. Humour invites us into these poems and makes us want to stay even when we’re startled, a poetic strategy that makes Holbrook’s work especially innovative.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based poet, playwright, and actor. Her one-person show “Piecework: When We Were French” will tour in New England in 2010. (No pulp.)