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language: English
country: Canada
year: 2013
form: poetry
dates read: 10.9.22
I became aware of Sue Goyette’s poetry collection Ocean while proofreading a friend’s manuscript that talked about it — the quotations from it were delightful, so I decided to check it out.
the collection as a whole — fifty-six numbered poems and an unnumbered “Prologue” — is about as delightful as I had hoped. the poems are loosely linked, the story of a fantastic version of Halifax, Nova Scotia — including fog-makers and shadow-sculptors, lifeguards who commune directly with the sea, teas flavored with condensed laughter, and more — and its relationship with the ocean (above all) and to a lesser extent with the natural world more generally.
Goyette has a way with turns of phrase and more generally with concepts, even in the poems I didn’t love enough to transcribe in full:
We weren’t introduced to bees until someone
overheard them and mistook their dronefor a school board meeting. Naturally she didn’t
bother getting any closer because those daysthe talk at school board meetings may have sounded
grand but it all boiled down to using less artto paint more arithmetic.
(from “Eleven”)
the poems move freely between a mythic-legendary past — the invention of ceremony (“One of the first ceremonies women invented was to yell louder / for someone to bring them more rain”), for example — and a present with “things / like the practical joke. Divorce. And anger management classes”.
the line breaks — always important when dealing with free verse — are mostly pretty good. a lot of them convincingly read as enjambment and make nice little double-meanings. some of them don’t, but the poems were good enough that I didn’t begrudge them.
there were some small things that bugged me — the projection of the colonial settlement of Halifax back into “the medieval fog trade”, for example — but overall I really enjoyed the collection and would definitely recommend it.
moods: inspiring, lighthearted, mysterious