Culture
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 29, 2010
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The new zoo review Recently released anthology examines everyone’s favourite place through a literary lens Sheehan Moore The McGill Daily
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or many students of the humanities, immersion into the world of academia means disenchantment and the systematic tearing-apart of everything they cherished as children: favourite authors become misogynistic racists, favourite TV shows become half-hour commercials for Pez and Hawaiian Punch, and – worst of all! – you have a crush on your mom that you’ll never get rid of. Held against these, Penned: Zoo Poems, a new anthology from Montreal-based Signal Editions, goes relatively easy on its readers as it looks at the zoo – that last vestige of childhood wonderment – through a dozen different lenses. “This is first a book of good poetry,” explain editors Stephanie Bolster, Katia Grubisic, and Simon Reader in their introduction. Penned isn’t out to ruin zoos. Nor does it aim to celebrate their novelty, praise their beauty, condemn them as depraved, or shove them under the boot of critical theory. It’s a testament to the trio’s editorial acumen, then, that the anthology achieves all of these things while skirting any explicit scholarly agenda. There are almost 100 poems in Penned, with new and emerging talents from Canada and beyond sandwiched between giants like Dickinson, Hughes, Plath, and
Cummings. All of the poems were written after 1828 (the year Regent’s Park in London opened its first zoological garden), with the bulk coming from the 20th century. Why just poetry, and no prose? “Poetry interrogates looking,” the introduction goes on to say. “[It] tugs at the bars, pries open the cage in infinite ways.” Poems, by their very nature, invite interpretation – demand it, even – and are nuanced and veiled in ways that even the most experimental prose will never be. And just as there’s no right way to look at a poem, there’s no right way to look at the zoo: it is simultaneously a reminder of the colonial past, a monument to anthropocentrism, and, for wide-eyed eight-yearolds all over the world, the only opportunity to ever see a real, live elephant. Joanie Mackowki’s poem “The Zoo” opens the anthology. “At the zoo, essence and ornament / meet,” she writes. Her lines are ripe with the awe every zoo-goer knows well, at “the strength it wields to be so self-contained.” But it also introduces a theme echoed to some extent on almost every page of Penned: zoos are, first and foremost, a place where nature is framed and hung on the wall, and three billion years of evolution are reduced to performance art. Some of the poets in Penned delight in this art. Irving Layton catalogues the plants
and animals at the zoo, declaring, “they speak to me of joyous impermanency / and of the ArtistGod who shapes and plays with them.” The majority, though, take a less idealistic tone. Marianne Boruch asks readers to “consider the metal bars. To keep / such wonders in, to keep us – small wonders – out,” and calls zoos “the saddest of worlds.” Jean Garrigue examines the patchwork of the zoo, a “false country... / Where Africa is well represented / By Australia.” At the zoo, a lion, a giraffe, and a gazelle may stand in for the entire savannah, and a glimpse of a single lazy crocodile is enough to convince us we’ve conquered the Amazon. Penned is refreshing for its ability to find middle-ground. It is broad enough in its scope to include the less-than-cheerful voice of Charles Bukowski alongside A.A. Milne’s light-hearted lines; it is discriminating enough to avoid that old anthology trap wherein every poem vaguely animal-related is thrown into a pile and sent to the presses. If anything, Penned is accessible, and the editors’ good-natured tone keeps us from getting too bogged down in the seriousness of the questions raised in its pages. They remind us, borrowing from the poet Lisa Jarnot, that “although there is much to question, to mourn, to fear, and to deplore in zoos, we love things shaped like tigers, and we love the zoo.” Sally Lin | The McGill Daily
Acadian alliteration Harry Thurston’s Animals of My Own Kind is a poetic journey into the Nova Scotian countryside Hillary Amann The McGill Daily
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ith the onset of spring, the average person embarks on a rediscovery of nature, as temperatures rise and the snow disappears. It’s also a good season for discovering the poetry of Nova Scotian Harry Thurston. Thurston has for a long time been considered one of Canada’s best nature poets. Animals of My Own Kind, a 2009 collection of Thurston’s poetry, gathers almost 30 years of his work, with poems dating from 1980 through to brand new material. In its structure and tone, Thurston’s nature poetry differs
greatly from British and American Romantic traditions, embodying distinctly modern and Canadian ideals. Thurston’s affinity for his native landscape is characterized by loving renditions of the green fields, hills, rocks, and seascapes of rural Acadia. Thurston’s portrayal of nature is not so much idyllic as it is raw and moving – qualities that are also found in his poetics. Thurston’s biology degree from the University of Acadia gives him the unbiased perspective of someone who not only understands the human world around him, but also its scientific realities. This unique perspective informs the peculiarities of Thurston’s poetry, which communicates in vivid, unsentimental language the landscape, people, and
animals that inhabit his home. “The Marsh Suite”, a collection of eight short poems in Animals, each exploring a distinctive feature of the Acadian landscape – from its tidal pools to a wood duck – is particularly representative of his relationship to nature. Thurston’s poetry about the present wonders of his home carries with it a certain longing for a mythicized regional past. “A Ship Portrait,” another highlight of the collection, is a novella-in-verse of an imagined conversation between the long-deceased Maritime painter John O’Brien and a contemporary Maritimer. This exploration captures the poet’s fascination with his regional culture and its icons, building a bridge between the past and the present.
In “Atlantic Elegy,” Thurston muses that “perhaps only a poet could love the Atlantic’s sombre palette.” As an Albertan who has only ever seen the Atlantic out of the window of a plane, I can neither agree nor disagree. But I do remember, before coming to Montreal, what it was like to live closer to nature. Thurston has a way of capturing his environment with a matter-of-fact sensibility that speaks out of understanding on an intellectual level, as well as immense pathos for the natural world. In a landscape that is often hostile and unforgiving, Thurston seems to find life and beauty where others might have only found emptiness. There are no divisions between man and
nature in Thurston’s poetry, only a symbiotic and occasionally tragic unity. For an urban reader, Animals of My Own Kind is a window into some of Canada’s finest natural wonders. In a city where the largest swathe of green surrounds a hill onto which humankind has proudly planted its cross, it’s easy to forget the subtle cruelty or overpowering peace of a distant nature. Through his whirlwind tour of Nova Scotia’s cultural and natural landscape, Thurston lets the reader rediscover (or discover) the region, as well as nature in general, reminding us that perhaps the most precious thing about nature is that it is not and cannot be ours.