Feb 082013
 

SwanJohn Haney, Weidendammer Bridge, Berlin, November 2004

Amanda Jernigan and her husband John Haney collaborate here on a gorgeous photograph and poem combination, the photograph providing the inspiration or focal point for the poem which is an irregular sonnet, a gorgeous thing, that builds its power through a series of contrasts, contradictions, and denials: delivered/abandoned, surreptitious/scandalously bright, dying swans sing sweetest/swans aren’t known to sing, never spoken/never taken back, (white — note: a word not used in the poem)/black. Read this way, you can see how achingly poignant each of the contrasts or denials is, sad, beautiful reversals. Even the poet reverses herself and seems to begin to disappear in that amazing double negative “we could hardly feign not having seen it,”  or near double negative. In the middle, the poem offers a dense run of literary references, other poems and books, swans, sirens, all concentrated in the moment when the vision of the glowing swan (see the photo; the swan has an aura) disappears under the dark bridge. Note also the rhymes leading to the end: Brewer/truer and sirens/silent and the gorgeous back/black that bookends the last line.

Amanda Jernigan earlier contributed five poems to Numéro Cinq that went into her collection Groundwork which NPR picked as one of the top five poetry books of  2011.

dg

§

Reflection

The swan slipped under the bridge — a palmed card,
a dropped coin, a swaddled child, delivered
or abandoned — a surreptitious movement,
but scandalously bright, and we could hardly
feign not having seen it. I thought about
Macpherson’s swan, white habited; and Baudelaire’s,
an exile from its lac natal; the snow-
white somnatational swans of Outram’s
‘Ms Cassie by Tarnished Water’: dying
swans sing sweetest, Brecht maintained. But Brewer
tells us swans aren’t known to sing. The sirens,
too, were silent, according to Kafka. Truer
words were never spoken, never taken
back. In your negative the swan is black.

—Amanda Jernigan

——————–

Pearl Street South 2

Amanda Jernigan is a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor. Her first book, Groundwork: poems, was published by Biblioasis in 2011; her second book, All the Daylight Hours, is forthcoming from Cormorant, this spring. She is the editor of The Essential Richard Outram (Porcupine’s Quill, 2011), and is currently at work on a critical edition of Outram’s collected poems.

John Haney is a photographer, sculptor, and wood engraver. His work has been exhibited in public and private galleries in Canada and abroad. He is represented by the Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and in Europe by Emerson Gallery Berlin. He is currently at work on a series of black-and-white contact prints entitled Common Prayer (http://johnhaney.ca/common_prayer/), for exhibition at the Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in Newfoundland, in the spring.

Amanda and John are sometime, amateur letterpress printers. Since 2000, they have collaborated annually on a hand-printed pamphlet or broadside, featuring one of Amanda’s poems and one of John’s photographs, issued in a small edition under their imprint Daubers Press. ‘Reflection’/Weidendammer Bridge … is in that tradition — the first of their collaborations to make its debut in digital form!

Amanda and John live in Hamilton, Ontario, with their young son Anson, and their loyal dog Ruby, of previous Numéro-Cinq fame: (http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/01/21/five-poems-from-the-sequence-first-principals-by-amanda-jernigan/).

 

Dec 192012
 

 

Numéro Cinq is delighted to announce that Amanda Jernigan’s poem “Aubade” was selected for the 2012 edition of the annual The Best Canadian Poetry in English. The guest editor for this edition is Carmine Starnino. The continuing advisory editor for the whole series is Molly Peacock.

Amanda’s book Groundwork, from which the poem was excerpted, was named one of the top five poetry books of 2011 by NPR.

Congratulations all around but especially to Amanda. NC readers are advised that this is one of those occasions when it is appropriate to raise a glass of Talisker or two or three.

dg

Jan 212011
 

Editor’s Note (Jan 13, 2012): Amanda Jernigan’s book Groundwork, from which these poems were excerpted, was named one of the top five poetry books of 2011 by NPR.

Amanda Jernigan writes poems that make your brain fizz with their rhetorical flourish, the chops and changes of her lines, their dense, active language, their allusiveness, and their brawny intelligence. She writes out of what she calls a scholarly aesthetic, a formal and referential rootedness in tradition and wide-reading. Besides poems, she writes essays and plays. She is a contributing editor at The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes & Queries. With her partner, the artist John Haney, she has produced limited-edition books and broadsides under the imprint Daubers Press. Her work has been published and performed in Canada, the United States, and Germany, and is featured in the online archive of the Poetry Foundation. The dog’s name is Ruby. The photos are by John Haney.

These  five poems are from Amanda’s first collection Groundwork: poems, published by the exciting Canadian literary press Biblioasis in fall, 2011.

Groundwork comprises three poetic sequences, the first situated on and around an archaeological dig in modern-day Tunisia, the second situated in and out of a distinctly heterodox Garden of Eden, the third testing the waters of Homer’s Odyssey as a medium for the working-out of the relationship between artist and traveller. Written over a period of eight years, alongside other, unconnected lyrics, these poems represent stages in the development of a poet’s thinking about language and place; at the same time, they form a series of parallel meditations on past, present, and the mythological constructs with which we seek to join them. —Amanda Jernigan

 

 

Five poems from the sequence “First Principals”

From Groundwork

By Amanda Jernigan

 

Aubade

The time, if time it was, would ripen
in its own sweet time. One thought of dawn.
One felt that things were shaping up,
somehow, that it was getting on.

Day broke. Upon the waters broke
in waves on waves unbreaking and
night fell, unveiling in its wake
one perfect whitened rib of land.

I slept, and while I slept I dreamed,
a breaking wave, a flowering tree,
and all of one accord I seemed.
I woke, and you divided me.
.

§

.

The Birds of Paradise

Adam and Eve and Pinchme
went down to the river to bathe.
Adam and Eve were drowned.
Who do you think was saved?

Between her pills, his poisons,
the water in which we bathe
is less than pure: I rather doubt
that even I’ll be saved.

My pet canary, William, died.
But, I am reassured,
there is a factory upstream
to replicate the bird

in polyvinyl chloride: moving
parts, a voice-box cheep —
with proven nightengalish means
of putting one to sleep.

Do I wake or sleep? Indeed,
the answer is the same.
Ask Finnegan. In fact, ask me,
if you can guess my name.

.

§

.


Adam at the Altar

The name shall answer to the beast
………………………..without a moment’s staying:
fish and fowl — and flesh, not least —
………………………..all honour-and-obeying.
But save your ‘wilt thou’, parish priest:
………………………..for she goes without saying.
.

§
.

Soliloquy

All make-believe amounting to pretending
to the throne, I banished Eve, and Adam,
loath to go it on his own, went after.
That year the grapes fermented on the vine,
the fields lay fallow. I thought I’d take a stab
at beekeeping, but years have passed: you almost
wouldn’t know there was a garden here. The streams,
uninterrupted, flow from Eden as they always did.
The apple trees, untended, go to crab.
.

§
.

Refrain

Imagine it, Adam: old woman and grey,
I found myself walking again in the garden,
the trees in full fruit as they were on that day.
Therein lies the question: again, did I eat?
Again. It was as we remembered. More sweet.
.




—Amanda Jernigan


See also “Adam’s Prayer,” “Bats,” and “Lullaby.”