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.”

Jun 212010
 

This is the opening of an essay on Alice Munro just published in CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries 79, in a special Short Story Issue to coincide with the biennial convention of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, currently taking place in Toronto.

The Mind of Alice Munro

by Douglas Glover

 

Alice Munro’s constant concern is to correct the reader, to undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the particular, secret experiences of her characters. She does this in two ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex, thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting (somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely revealing (unveiling as in “apocalypse”) an underground current of life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank, and shocking. In her story “Meneseteung,” for example, the truth has something to do with menstruation, bloating, diarrhea and opium. That this truth is called into question at the story’s close is pure Alice Munro whose message may only be that life is never what you think it is.

“Meneseteung” advertises itself as faux amateur biography of a forgotten and forgettable local poet, a spinster named Almeda Joynt Roth, who lived at the end of the 19th century in a small Ontario village just inside the advancing frontier. In 1879, Meda is drifting toward middle age when a salt well entrepreneur named Jarvis Poulter moves into town and half-heartedly begins to court her. One night Meda hears a drunken commotion in the street outside her house. Ignoring the ruckus, she manages to fall back asleep, but in the morning she discovers a woman’s body in her backyard and runs to Jarvis’s house, two doors down the street, for help. Jarvis nudges the body with his toe, pronounces the woman drunk and wipes his hand off on a leaf after shaking her roughly by the hair. Then, apparently aroused by Meda’s nightgown (suddenly seeing her in a sexual light), he invites her to walk with him to church later in the morning (a decisive signal of interest in the world of the story). Meda is in a tizzy. She has taken a sleeping drug the evening before, her period is starting, she has diarrhea, she’s making grape jelly; now she doses herself with nerve medicine (probably laudanum). Just before Jarvis shows up she pins a note to her front door; Jarvis retreats in silence. Meda spends the rest of the day in a drug haze, imagining the townspeople as gravestones toddling down the street. Then life returns to normal; only Jarvis is no longer interested in paying court to Meda. In 1903, village louts chase the eccentric old biddy into a nearby swamp. She catches cold and dies, leaving behind a slim volume of poems entitled Offerings.

That’s the story action, the bare bones. But with Alice Munro the difference between the bare bones of the story and the way she organizes the bones and flesh of her text is…

 

2010 © Douglas Glover