Meditations on Mortality

All three works discussed in this review offer meditations on time and mortality. However, in some ways these works could not be more different. Gillian Sze’s quiet night think is generically diverse in its approach, using prose sections to discuss translation, Chinese poets, personal poetics, and the early stages of motherhood. Sze also offers her own translations of classical Chinese poetry and translations of poems written by her uncle, all interspersed with her own poetry. Anne-Marie Turza’s Fugue includes poems with footnotes, musical notations, and the experiences, language, and subjectivities of snails and plants. On Her Own Terms is something of a love letter to a mother suffering from memory loss, and a celebration and affirmation of the joy of life even at a time when people are passing ableist judgement on a person’s quality of life. This collection is also an important contribution to the forgotten history of women poets and academics, as the mother in this case is the erased co-founder of the important literary journal The Fiddlehead.

Gillian Sze’s titular poem, the first poem in the collection, is part translation, part essay on translation, and may be seen as a major commentary on ways in which Chinese poetry and poetics as well as Chinese language and history have influenced the Canadian poetry scene. Sze gives various translations of Li Bai’s quiet night think, but resolves these in her own translation. The latter is intimately connected to her struggles as a Canadian-born Chinese child trying to understand the “monosyllabic Chinese character” and its relationship to the “English counterpart” (3). Anyone with an interest in translation, in the poet Li Bai, and Tang poetry more generally, will need a quiet night think with “bed front bright moon light” (3) to read and reread this work.

Sze also refers to British, American, and Canadian poetry and poetics from a variety of practitioners in the process of examining her own relationship to poetry and language and her relationship with her mother and father at different stages of her life including the end of life. She details the timeless and sleepless nights of early motherhood, and the loss that is inevitable in parent-child relationships. Sze explains her own relationship to poetry in part through family relationships and the “Chinese tradition of naming through poetry” (18). While Sze notes that in her own family “poetry has lost its grip on my family’s naming practices” (19), she asks her mother about her own family poem. Her mother responds “I have no idea what it even is. I’m sure it’s recorded some-where back in the village. Women were married off, so their poems don’t matter anyway” (19). While “For some, a poem organizes a family” and this practice has been lost in her family, poetry organizes Gillian Sze’s life and this collection of poetry.

Along with motherhood, gardening and weeding also become metaphors for writing. Sze notes “Yes, there was something inherently futile with every weed I pulled, but I did so stubbornly” (29), asking herself all the while why she writes and pondering how even in failure she “stuck to weeding the same way I stuck to writing” (29). Just as she learns about persistence in writing through working in her garden, she learns about poetry through her experience of motherhood. She says of motherhood “I would learn, in the months to come, that both acts of nurturing and writing were equally acts of love” (46). The collection closes with thoughts of her parents, the death of her father (“He’s dead, my mother says, matter-of-factly” [76]) and the death of the poet Emily Dickinson, whose The Letters of Emily Dickinson she is reading to “pass the time” (73). Referred to in the collection as “Em” (81, 84, 87) the final poem begins “When Em died” and concludes as follows: “and I’m relieved // to know that something so large / can still wander” (87).

Anne-Marie Turza’s Fugue with Bedbug: poems explores the loss of meaning and language through transition, time, and an I that slips just out of grasp. The subjectivity of the “I” is at times a snail, at others a plant, and both or all dwell in a darkness, visited through a language of obscurity. While darkness dominates some of the poems, colour is also featured. In “Our Purpose” for example, in echoes perhaps of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red or The Beauty of the Husband, the poem opens with “Our purpose is to husband the colour red. / We are husbands with a pocket in our aprons” and later “Red is the end of the visible range. / Red itself is husband to myth” (6). The next poem in the collection appropriately moves from a discussion of colour to an ekphratic poem titled “Seated Figure with Snail Shell Head,” followed by details of the materials and time of composition “Oil on canvas, c. 2^nd millennium” (11). The poem notes the act of seeing “Certainly we had eyes” to conclude “alone in this and that, so many / billion artifacts. To show our minds / we had to paint such scenes” (11). Seeing and the visual, and the contemplation of the seen and unseen by the viewer move fugue-like through the collection. The snail motif of the first ekphratic poem, recurs later in the collection in “Dues in Arrears” which begins by bringing in sound through “We’re compulsory members/ of the people’s orchestra. / We’ve not been asked” (20). The motif then connects snails to the “We” of the poem with “On meeting a snail or any mollusk, / we think of all snails and mollusks / everywhere, trapped in time just as we are,” (20) joining the time motif to those of sight, sound, and encounters with snails.

“The One Snail Theory of Metaphysical Events” is of particular importance to this collection as musical notations written by the composer D.R. Bennett appear in “Appendix II Fugato.” The poem itself “In the first event” admits that “Across a lawn, I road some mother’s dingy bicycle. / It was me and the snail, and a lot of credible noise” (53). In the stanza that follows, “In the second event, I did not rightly feature. / But the snail was there” (53). The snail is named in the poem as an animal and given “a taxonomic order” where Turza writes that “As much as anyone, / it belongs in public // murals of the highest calibre. / As much as anyone, // it grazes on a life of expectancy” (53). The subjectivity changes from the beginning of the poem where the I is a “gray-wigged general” to the end of the poem where the “I was myself” but also “I was a calf” (53). The poem concludes without a question, but asserts that in spite of the “credible noise” at the beginning of the poem “The snail did not answer me” (53). The first three pages of the Fugato in “Appendix II” repeat “The first event” and the music and words of the poem repeat over the total of seven pages, thus expanding and repeating the poem in the form of the fugato.

Of particular resonance with the other two collections of poetry in this review, “Down the Corridor a Chair With Wheels Rolls” makes a sonic contribution to writing about old age, with “The lobe of this old one’s ear is the most yeared obvious aha / familiar thing I’ve ever gently touched in space-time” (22). Then the poetic persona of the poem asks “What do you love most? I blare, bent forward to discharge myself / through major quakes and decades of mosquitoes / in dissolved parliaments. // Say it clear, so I will know you. / say it. Say it, old self” (22). Later in the collection, the poetic personae and I of “Whales of the ’80s” say “I don’t care about time” and that “The sorry pre-req / for everything I care about is dying” (55) a eulogy perhaps not only to the whales but to every living and non-living being, colour, sound, and nonsense that have come before. The final poem “The Visitor” echoes back to these earlier reflections on mortality with the final lines “One of us before the other, disappears. / I don’t know who” (71).

Carolyn Gammon’s On Her Own Terms: Poems About Memory Loss & Living Life to the Fullest includes quotations from her mother Frances Firth Gammon, co-founder of the University of New Brunswick literary journal, The Fiddlehead. Gammon was a professor, writer, and intellectual worth celebrating and remembering. This collection is important in its contribution to a small number of Canadian works that discuss dementia and memory loss from the perspectives of both the person with dementia and the son, daughter, or partner. John Steffler writes a selection of poems in a sub-section of Lookout titled “Once” about his mother’s dementia. Margaret Atwood’s collection of poetry Dearly mentions that “Cats suffer from dementia too” (4), but also finds ways to speak about her husband’s dementia in poems such as “Walking in the Madman’s Wood” (71) and other poems about the effects of aging generally. Carolyn Gammon’s exploration of her mother’s memory loss shares the most with Susan McMaster’s Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me, a 2009 work of poetry published by Black Moss Press. On Her Own Terms, like McMaster’s work, includes the words of the mother suffering from memory loss and her family, especially her daughter, interacting and talking with her.

Works that record the words, thoughts, experiences, and life of people with dementia are particularly important as they allow the person to speak for themselves in spite of having lost their memories. On Her Own Terms challenges the ideas of loss of worth or identity that people commonly associate with dementia and find the many joys in the relationship and remembering for another person. The poet goes back to earlier moments in her mother’s life and memories from the time before her mother’s memories began to fade. The first poem of the collection “Bright Margin of the Present” begins “My mother can’t recall / what was said two minutes ago” (9) and then urges “Learn to love her / for who she is / now” (10). The poem concludes with the mother’s words of gratefulness for still being alive “I’m glad to know I have two daughters and I’m not in heaven yet” (10). In “Tsunami” the demented mind is described as follows, “as if a tsunami has flooded your brain / then withdrew, leaving wreckage and dead / but also a few bright flowers / struggling up through the swamp / to the sun” (42). The poem concludes with the mother’s words “I feel as confused as a rat in a mouse hole” (42). In the poem “Into Transparency,” the poet writes “The Talmud says / if you save one life / you save the world // I believe if you save the memories of one life / you save the world of the mind” (54). That is just what Carolyn Gammon sets out to do and does in this collection.

As I write this review, I prepare to go visit my father who is in the late stages of dementia and living in long term care. As the daughter of someone who suffers from memory loss, a person who was a writer, runner, and intellectual, now confined to a wheelchair, I took great comfort in reading the words of another daughter finding joy and meaning in the relationship with a parent at this stage of life and suffering from this illness. I am thankful to Gammon for having the courage to write in simple terms about the realities of this relationship with a parent who is suffering memory loss and the challenge she offers to dismissing the lives of people with dementia as not being meaningful. Thank you, Carolyn Gammon, for finding meaning in spite of the loss and sharing the joy in remembering for someone you love. There are many people who need a book like this to help them find ways to have relationships with people in their lives who have been given this diagnosis. I was one of them.