“We can’t cater to the flimsies” – Julia Child
A few years ago, I attempted to piece together my own New and Selected (or Selective as I called it because each initial title only yielded 5-7 poems to keep the total length under control). I wanted to see the collections I’d published over the course of 25 years honoured that way, or resurrected in part. I thought it would be satisfying. But after awhile, I realized it wouldn’t be a good read. The subjects I’ve covered over the years, from Egon Schiele to extinct species, and from Mattie Gunterman to metal music, amid much else, just don’t hang together well in combo form. A reader who relished one text might loathe another. Most of these books were written as visions of that time and need, like a concept album from the 70s, to be appreciated whole or not at all. So I withdrew the idea and let that yearning go. When do New and Selecteds make sense though? I suppose if many of one’s volumes are out of print or hard to find. And, of course, if you have a name, the likelihood of such a compilation selling is much higher. Still. I just finished reading Les Murray’s New and Selected and frankly I thought at least 70% of it was cuttable. One just doesn’t have that many excellent poems (though his gooders are fantab). And reading them outside their original contexts, with too many poems to a page, left me shaking my head at the way so many poets cease to be self-critical once they’ve been lauded/won those gold stars (thankfully not much of a danger for me 😉
So to Di Brandt’s New and Selected Poems, called The Sweetest Dance on Earth. If you are a die-hard Brandt fan presumably you would have all her prior titles, but the new pieces, and in particular the “Winnipeg Winter Sonnets” that riff off Shakespeare (“Let me not to the extreme beauty of Winnipeg/Winters admit the weeniest of arguments!”), “River People” (“There were the years I lived with the asphalt/and cement people, dedicated to glass and/steel and cars and money and speed”), and the loopy imitation of bird calls that is “Bird Song at Riding Mountain” (what a blast this must be to perform!), are worth getting this collection for. If you are only compelled by the early Mennonite-querying-feminist Brandt of Questions I asked my Mother or Agnes in the Sky and not, say, the environmental-articulations of Now you Care, then, well. As Brandt elaborates in her introduction ( I personally would have preferred a critic to say these things of her), she is both (in Northrop Frye’s writerly designation) a Beethoven who makes “imaginative leaps” and a Mozart who remains, stylistically at least “rich, flowery…romantic…fantastical.” These dichotomies are true, but they are qualities undoubtedly made stronger or weaker according to the treatment of certain subject matters.

For this reader, some of the early poems haven’t worn particularly well with their lower case narrations but others remain a punch of generational conflict between the speaker and her religious parents, the father with the “sharp etched lines of his God ridden book” and the little girl who once thought “heaven was located/in the hayloft.” Overall, Brandt’s central strength in these books is her rhythmic enjambments that work aurally over even very short lines as in the couplet pieces of mother, not mother: “these knees,/these thighbones /with their deep/memory, this nose” and her weakness is the tendency to rely on cliches or empty imagery like “how many thousand/nights lain awake, breathless,” “weaving a/ chain with their singing, through the maze of time” or “you saw yourself/in the dark pool/of your baby’s eyes/shining,/a goddess, the source.” I want more specificity, uniqueness. But then, with Now You Care, Brandt’s 2003 collection, her voice hones, carves, and the power in her seeing is undeniable. I’ve written quite a bit about this book in a prior review and in an essay on eco-poetics in Brandt and Brand versus Domanski and McKay, so needless to say, I’ve been a devotee of this collection. And re-reading it years later, it still stands as one of the most potent texts I’ve ever encountered on our damaged relationship with the planet, especially her sequence called “Zone: le Detroit” on cancer and chemicals (“so this is where they hang out/all those women’s breasts/cut off to keep our lawns green/and dandelion free” and her anti-electric ghazals called “Dog Days in Maribor” (in fact I think Brandt is a master of the Canadian ghazal) where she lunges between horrors and beauties (“Whose grief is this, wild haired,/singing, in the wind?/Chokecherry blossoms, /canker worms, rustling prairie grass”).
The ghazals carry on in her next collection, Walking to Mojacar, and are still as potent in longer lines that leap from a “Tenacious little ash tree, hugging the bank./Archeology of cars. Biology of art. Theology of scars” to “My hands that used to be heartshaped fluttering leaves/have become thick roots, gnarled in soil.” Also powerful is one of her longest pieces, “The Phoenicians,” which critiques gratitude for an abstract saviour over giving thanks to tangible realities such as “our firewood and food.” The title poem is rupturous and especially the end which laments how, “The tourists/have pissed in the wells,/the olive trees are drying up” and asks “across the implacable/Atlantic” for the “dark doves.” Others of these pieces don’t feel earned however, serving as travel accounts that skim reality’s harsher descriptors and conclude, with Homer, that “death is beautiful,” evoking the no-no’s of Pound’s “dim lands of peace” with lines like “fields ripe with sorrow” and “the shadow of the heart.” In the end, although I’m beginning to think that New and Selected collections, in general, have little to do with readability or even sellability and more about the author’s ego-need to see a certain chunk of a life’s work sealed neatly into a pretty package (such as this book is), Di Brandt’s New and Selected remains a worthy entry into this genre, a place of import poets have to, among so much else, continue to fight for.