Rapids, The
catalogue copy GillisUrgent and precarious, the poems in The Rapids, Susan Gillis’ third collection, take us to places lost and reclaimed: a balcony high over the St. Lawrence River in downtown Montreal, upstream to the Lachine Rapids, and beyond, to landscapes as far apart as Greece and the B.C. coast. In the same way that Hokusai depicted the s …
Swimming Among the Ruins
These poems imagine the reconciliation of material reality with the spirit's longing, through travel, the physical displacement of time and space, through contemplation, and through the unsettling of language. The submerged foundations of a ruined city, place names that recall the past, ancient statuary, a drop of water echoing in an empty tomb, pe …
Blackberries, BramblesAkhmatova wrote, "O look!—that fresh dark elderberry branchis like a letter from Marina..." And she was right, branches criss-cross, words sharpen. We lop them down, fit theminto envelopes. But I forget: you don't do letters:Too much tangled in thickets and desperation.Did I say envelopes? I meant elevators.See, I've snagged favourite sweatersin high rises, snarled hair in hedges, given upskin scrapings for blackberries, tongueburst, the sweetstain, explosion under light canine pressure.Don't you just wish you were a dog sometimes?No panic. Romping through brambles.Even in delirium, near death, Akhmatova remembered.Her bitter friend had been dead a long time.Love. Don't think I'm thinking about you.Anything but you. EelThe lake is still, after the flash rain.A water spider crosses from shore to dockpropelled by snapping legs fine as a strand of hair.I lie on my stomach on rough cedar,watch through one of the gapsa green wedge of this strange world.The sun wraps me in a warm skin,dries the damp behind my kneesand in the small of my back,brushes the hair on my neck.Heat passes through me.I am cooled in stripesby the fresh water under me.A young eel writhes into the green,spirals between minnows like a lost necklacefalling through time into obscuring grass.I miss you.My fingers slipinto the crack beside my eyes.
Volta
A pink bathrobe turns into a kingfisher; a kitchen floor displays the stigmata of an oncoming storm; a Stone Age axe-head surfaces in France for someone from Newfoundland to stumble over; the covers of a book vibrate through broken intimacy. Here, friendship has the power to transform; love, to disembody. In a series of radical translations of the …
Love poses a QuestionOnce there were answers: things corresponded,the planets in motion struckheavenly chords, all wasas it should be. If the humoursgot out of sorts, the gods laughedand fetched healing elementsfrom the four corners; if Pan, sprung,made pandemonium, itwas answered. The worldis noisier now, and depletedof explanations. Who can sayhow we are nourishedby land-mines or car-bombs?What is a bomb? Tell me,because my heart trembles.Brothers and sisters, the earth is a questionthat swallows sense. Walking with youin the Alberta hoodoos, laying a handon the bark of a lodgepole pine, lettingthe long flowering grasses wash cleanthe crowded mind; world-as-it-is.You asked, I listened;this much was given.Mornings, the sun risesand traffic intensifies for a time;oceans flood, then recede;modulations without end.The world, with you in it; thenkingfishers, rattling over the plain. This is not a loss exactlyI buried the cat in the hill I look at every morning over coffee.Dug the hole, laid it in, tamped the clod over.It used to purr when you played your tapes of Oum Khalthoum,Empress, Nightingale, Star of the Nile. You sang alongswirling the offbeats and drones I never couldwrap my tongue around. I spoke like the catyou said. I couldn't look as I buried itbut now most days I can look at the hillwithout thinking of it, and this is not a loss exactly.But something spins when I look away;at the edge of hearing, a voice warms up.
