The elegiac is the core energy of every essential lyric and Rhea Tregebov is a powerful tear-catcher in Talking to Strangers. A small book of pained songs, this text is the perfect accompaniment to weariness, sighs, to a grief of centuries or hours. I was first drawn by the line, “You wouldn’t think the inanimate would get tired.” This is Neruda-style mystery, an investment in the feelings of the entire universe. And “Metal Fatigue” also ends with the harsh statement, “Nobody wants to know how tired you are,” a truth you begin to understand as you age and realize exhaustion is a near-constant reality and thus annulled as a topic of notice or care. Poetry of older life is necessary. We need our poets to keep writing as they become 70, 80, even 90, to take us to the places in the body and psyche that we require rhythms for, if not to soothe then to reveal hard truths at least. That each death is “the end of a world” (“The end of everything”). After the initial section, the titular part presents us with variant conversations, moments of entrance, everything from “hockey riots” in the Yukon in 2011 to 2022’s deeper concern in Winnipeg for the “masked face” and what it portends. It’s a challenge to transcribe dialogue and make it hold meaning beyond the moment and Tregebov both achieves this aim in the piece “Talk: Scrap” that mainly attends to the silences of a cousin who doesn’t “talk prognosis” but instead allows pieces of food: “honey-coloured onion skins, freckled potato peels” to provide the interchange of the end, and fails to translate in others like “Talk: Detox” that fumbles with the didactic: “Toxic drugs something else that’s/ killing us” before waning into pale admissions: “We care and care and can/only do so much.” I’m not fond of the dwindled close as the most powerful poems often move towards epiphanies of sorts, whether in imagery or sound or awareness.
Tregebov is a list master and her pieces that divulge details of objects are truly potent. Witness the “vacant jewel cases” and the flute’s “lonesome tones” of “Second Generation,” the “pink petunias and orange marigold” then the “moneywort/ invaded by stonecrop inveigled by barrenwort” of “Definition” and the gorgeous banalities surrounding a subtle death in “Sunday”: “Mike came in, an aspirin for her headache,/cup of tea, sugar, no milk.” I also loved the feminist metaphor of yielding berries in “Consent” and the acknowledgment of how everyday tasks can contain the memories of the dead in “Menial”: “Each time I drench the hydrangeas I have/the day Helen gave me their watery/needs and name.” Yes, how traces live on beyond the lost (even in the sketches of “Behold: Notes Towards an Elegy” for Tregebov’s sister at the close, serving as an admission that grief takes tremendous time to coalesce into art) and so many poems in Talking to Strangers hold a tangible Kaddish for them all.
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As for Derek Webster’s National Animal, first off, the title is brilliant as is the crumpled foil beast on the cover. Akin to Tregebov’s book (and the house style at Signal), the small format is delightful, though I’m not a fan of the feel of French sleeves, apart from their use as bookmarks. Anyone who has read my reviews knows I’m also not a supporter of gushy back cover blurbs nor descriptors that call a first book an “acclaimed debut” when it was only nominated for a Gerald Lampert Award (when I held the same funny honour back in 1999, no one gooped up this epithet in an attempt to sell my next book – but then the publishing world was much less product-intent back then 😉 At any rate, I recommend you read this sophomore collection twice as it’s a slow burn assemblage of subtle politicking, sophisticated apocalypse and metered memories. The central three sections feature mostly lyrics attending to the complexities of nationalism, environmental despoliations, and tormented nostalgias. But as always with strong poetry, it’s the images and their auralities that draw the reader into the subject matter. Webster is highly conscious of line lengths and balanced stanzas and this attentiveness pleases both eye and ear.
“The Writing on the Wall” in triadic zags of breath, describes graffiti in assonantal blams: “he scrubbed off fugg it/and baise-moi, stencils of tanks and skulls,/a few fat dicks, one whore,” before the slant rhymes of “disappear” and “there” allow the leap from the observed to the textual in the persistence of the “notwithstanding” clause. While a line such as: “Something like divine justice afflicts us” can seem pointlessly vague in the poem, “Portrait with Stuffed Jackalope” the subsequent specifics of icebergs as “lemmings” and plastic bags becoming “squid-like” elaborate the evident position with harsh accuracy, one even more vividly etched in “Step up Step up” on the future’s Ark where the “brown ocean’s rising, eggy tide” promises little salvation for the menageries on this fractured planet. Powerhouse pieces include: “Naught” with its abacdc etc rhymes in triplets that conclude in a couplet with the nursery giant’s frightening syllables: “Then fee. Then fie. Then foe. Then fum,” “In the Country” whose sextets direct then state, “the world does not seek to harm you,” “Apartment Block” with its discarded “bones of small animals,” the travelogues of “Marina” with a satisfying set of consonantal sounds in “goat-breaks…borscht…baby-pink,” the “splash that travels” in “Photograph of my Parents” and the “fly caroms” in “Mulmur Spring.”
Only a few pieces fall into flatness at their close or take the too-easy route as with the Joni Mitchell poem (yes, commissioned) that flops into, “A song for both sides now.” There there’s the beautiful coup of the final, long, sequential piece called “The Thinker,” one that melds scientific and historical knowledge with sonorous entreaties from the human mouths of “glorified specks of dust and ice.” Inspired by Stevens and reminiscent of Alice Major’s fusion work, nine of the ten parts binarize elements of the universe such as “Entropy/Language” or “Galaxies/Dance” to articulate their enduring relationships across temporalities, changes and perceptions. Then the tenth takes us to Mars before the final poem’s battle between the Cyclops and Nobody. The content may be chaos but Webster’s tenacity with formal precisions gradually enables the reader to deepen towards this core smoulder of problematized and finely-honed song.
Marrow Reviews by Catherine Owen 