149. Old Winter by Anne Le Dressay (Chaudiere, 2007)
Le Dressay has been a poet I’ve followed for nearly 2 decades, watching for specks. I like her cadence, her worldview, her development of ideas.
A reread. Funny how the poems I previously marked, I’m not sure why and poems I didn’t bookmark strike me more now. I bookmark different poems. Here, a meditation on the daily takes a deeper significance without feeling forced but like truth found by reflecting backwards inside the poem itself a piece of thought. Sometimes there seems to be too much meat around the nut of the poem but still the nut itself is insightful. For example.
p. 77
the In memorium card
your father hands out to all the staff
after the funeral.
Here you are, your photo, your name,
your age at time of death (18 years
and 5 months
[...] he came back to work brittle
and brave and tearless, as id required of men.
He gave us each a card with your photo.
Here you are, smiling in the sun
over 30 years later, still in the world
in some form. And that, perhaps,
is what your father wanted.
She keeps in these poems the habit of looping back with a finishing stitch to bind the poem’s knot. She persists in ending lines in mid-grammatical phrase to push it forward. It seems well enough done to be a functional choice, even though the line-end type often jars me, it doesn’t where she applies it.
These poems go in a long-reach back and point ahead as well. There’s something of a chronological order but I can’t hold it against them. One of the early poems gets at a larger truthiness. For some reason menstruation is a shame. Half the planet does its bloody business in silence. I remember talking with a male friend who had a poem which he considered violent and shocking because there was a blood in the toilet and I said that’s a quarter of women’s daily life, about as common as soap in a bathroom. I don’t read blood as violence. But maybe I was being obstinate as well. There is a violence to blood in hushed tones. To have a period and shame is the cause of kids who happen to be female quitting school. My aunt was told she had blood on her clothes as a little girl and she had no idea why. In a family of 14, no one gives a head up or explanation. A generation later, I thought a pad and strapping would be worn like a holster and my thigh would split open. My body looking ready a couple years before school got around to mentioning anything lucid.
So, all which is to say her poem, “First Blood” stuck me. She ends it with “First blood” and a matter-of-fact thought:Well, there it is“. Admitting powerfully in the poem, silence as the least safe thing.
