Print Culture

Gettin' Zwicky with it

Christopher Wiebe / printculture@vueweekly.com

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As I get older, I find myself haunted by the places I knew as a child; the youthful hunger for raw experience is joined by a new, perhaps stronger desire to mull over one’s past, and even revisit the landscapes that formed the bedrock of memory and shaped one’s ways of seeing. What a wonder and delight for me, then, that native Albertan Jan Zwicky’s two most recent collections of poems, Robinson’s Crossing (Brick Books)—nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2004—and Thirty-Seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau Press) grapple, in part, with precisely these preoccupations with place, time, and memory. How to rationalize, Zwicky seems to ask, the inextricable connection between place and memory when places change, grow silent, and seem to forget us?

Currently a teacher of environmental philosophy at the University of Victoria, Zwicky’s poetry is often in dialogue with music and philosophical thought, particularly that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. She has also published two non-fiction works, Lyric Philosophy (1992) and Wisdom and Metaphor (2003), both of which combine brief theoretical texts with commentaries in ways that reward both the general and academic reader.

While others have written on the theoretical dimensions of Zwicky’s writing, I want to focus on something simpler, less rarefied—particularly, her ability to vividly convey the boreal forest world of aspen copses and fields, of ragged creeks and hills rounded by glaciers, and play it off against the sadness of broken homestead dreams still visible in abandoned houses and hand-cleared fields.

Born in Calgary in the 1950s, Zwicky spent significant portions of her youth on her grandparents’ land near Sangudo and Mayerthorpe, northwest of Edmonton. She has written about this place in her earlier collections, but with Robinson’s Crossing we find a more sustained, reflective and melancholy exploration that captures the “genius loci,” the spirit of place.

The elegiac poem “Wolf Willow,” for instance, mingles the “long awns” of evening light with the scents of “rose, / bedstraw, poplar, spruce; / and caraganas, road dust, / field dust, clover; / car exhaust and cut grass, / dog hair and manure—and then / the dark viola” of wolf willow. The prairie—with its austerity, vistas, and invitations to the sublime—has found ample voice in writing, but few have captured the beauty and ambivalence of the parklands. In “Shabbiness,” Zwicky locates an apt metaphor for the quiet parkland aesthetic: “Through the wood-frame window, / hayfields, distant sun—the unwordedness / of beauty pressing up / through ordinariness: an elbow / or a knee, the pink skin showing / where the cloth is thin.”

Robinson’s Crossing is a collection about movement and arrest, about how memory erupts into the midst of life and transforms it. It strikes me as a coherent extension of the epigraph by Gaston Bachelard: “Each of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows.” The poems themselves tack between memory and a place revisited, marking the congruence or discord between now and then. Parkland, it strikes me, particularly lends itself to Zwicky’s study of loss and change. Agriculture is erased by the weed-like resurgence of poplars, and, like the past, forests and watercourses are continuously razed and remade by gnawing beavers.

Lyric poetry like this has the power to envelop you, to transport you, such that you forget the writing’s artifice, but Zwicky’s poems repeatedly disrupt this temptation as the poetic voice questions its ability to know or understand definitively. In fact the “memory” poems about place in the book’s central section are repeatedly interrupted by brief “history” poems that respond to classical music: that which is written in another time and performed in the present. It is a structure that generates great thematic energy. (I should also mention in passing that UBC English professor Kevin McNeilly has drawn compelling connections between Zwicky’s poetry and “an anti-colonial poetics challenging the egocentricity of the lyric voice” he sees evident in the work of other Canadian poets like Robert Bringhurst, Roo Borson, and Tim Lilburn.)

In Thirty-Seven Songs and Thirteen Silences, we again encounter the lyric mode in “songs” whimsically inspired by laundry or blue sky, and later, terse poetic invocations framed by the “silence” of the empty page. I found the “Seven Studies” section to be particularly full and rich; here again there was the intersection of loss and place, the irretrievable remoteness of the past. In “Study: August Fields” the sense of distance is subtly reinforced: “Above the fenceline, / drifts of crows, the sky a blue breath / on the glass pane of the afternoon. / In the distance, house and barn, the bronze bell of their silence; / Swather blades, the windrows and the stubble, / the loose combs of the ditch grass, / red-gold, glittering: everything / an echo, everything alight with emptiness.”

At times, I found the poems in both of these collections almost unspeakably moving; they made me forget the cool, evaluating self that serves to distance me from most texts. I think the poems inspire this response by their deft movement between the head and the heart. In each poem, intellect is interrogated by emotion and vice versa, and it is this pendulum swing between the two that helps generate a lovely, exceptional energy. V

Print Culture

Gettin' Zwicky with it

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