Behind the Sunday-painting cover of Carolyn Smart’s Hooked (****, Brick Books, 120 pages, $19.00) is a nervy and rich collection of poems in the voices of women both infamous (Moors murderer Myra Hindley and fascist moll Unity Mitford) and writerly (Carson McCullers, Zelda Fitzgerald, Jane Bowles). At first it seems an odd assortment as, on the face of it, other than both having vulvas, nothing connects Mitford and Bloomsbury hag/painter Dora Carrington. But Smart’s verve mostly brings her subjects’ disparate biographies together with natural, unencumbered lines and perfect wit about female longing. “To be a girl is appalling,” laments Carrington in one poem, while Smart puts this gorgeous — and true — stanza into Jane Bowles’ mouth: “no one thinks of ugly girls in bed: / their rustling, frightful eyeballs rolling in their heads, / I loved them because no one else would.”
In
The Hayflick Limit (****, Coach House, 88 pages, $16.95), Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight, even telling a full story or two. “The day after his wife left him,” Tierney writes, “Charles found a bucket of antimatter / in the basement. He was rummaging for / their wedding album, packed away / in the canvas suitcase, years back.” After explaining the genesis of this very important bucket of antimatter, Tierney concludes: “Charles hugged / the bucket to his chest and wept / a last time. So lucky / to have found it. Coldness / seeping through his ribcage towards / the simple matter of his heart.” Tierney is also capable of seeing the infinite in Spirographs (“Paths to nowhere. The chill comes / at the never-end of forever, tingle.”) and the poetry trapped in Area 51 (“Fence, tire marks, / graffiti bleed. / The rest, those saccadic bits / our rods and cones pass over, are alien ephemera). Call it science fiction for the melancholic.
In Patrick Woodcock’s
Always Die Before Your Mother (****, ECW, 88 pages, $16.95), the peripatetic Canadian writer (he’s currently living in Iraq) collects poems written across the globe during the years after his mother died. Death and mourning give focus to the notoriously tricky subject of travel writing as the poet has crafted a detailed compendium of how death is spoken of around the world. The book’s first section, “13 Executions,” while obviously heartfelt, relies too much on slight repetitions and reportage, though the last lines of “The Final Stand” do bring it all home: “He tore at his fly and pulled out / his penis. No man begs for food / when he can piss on a capitalist’s face.”
Woodcock hits his stride with the suite “Shotguns and Accordions” which updates Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados to the FARC age. “Suicide dogs, Christ, I understand your progression,” he writes. “I’ve imagined coaches / and horse dung and scraggy-headed succession / of order.” As for the question, why mourn through writing, Woodcock answers with the riddle-like “No One Dies Gracefully.” After a series of transformations — a man dies on a sidewalk and becomes a sidewalk — a woman who hid in a tree becomes a tree but when it’s cut down, she’s found laughing, “May I sing of hollowness one last time?”