Circus Love

Bob Lincoln is Director of Acquisitions at the University of Manitoba
Libraries.

Montreal-born journalist Lake Sagaris has lived and worked in Santiago,
Chile, since 1981. Her poems have appeared in small magazines and
anthologies since the early 1980s. Circus Love, her second collection,
is infused with the same political awareness as earlier poems, and shows
Sagaris’s personal commitment to Chile.

The collection is in four parts: “Circus love,” eight poems with
images and people from a ragtag traveling circus; “Childreams,” ten
poems about childhood impulses and events; “The rat trap,” an
extended poem about the death of dissidents and the government’s bland
responses; and “Gallery,” a mix of poems about love and the Chilean
experience.

Sagaris tries to examine events from multiple viewpoints, and to stamp
her own style on each. She likes to itemize and list, to categorize the
facts and then place them in juxtaposition with contrary images or
statements. She does not work a specific metaphor or image in depth, but
relies on general descriptions. The language of her poems bustles about,
shouting, spilling, galloping, flashing, shifting, and trembling. Like
the circus, they are quick and broad performances. The circus poems
flash and glitter, and occasionally surprise, but they don’t show
significant insight.

What is notable about these poems is that they rarely take a moral
position, except by indirection. Although the historical record is well
supplied with the atrocities of military governments in Latin America
and Chile, the success of this collection does not rise or fall on
history, but on how well Sagaris works the meaning of political
terrorism or love.

As in earlier poems, there are extended conceits and rhetorical
devices. But much of the writing, while dramatic, is commonplace. The
language, which is usually clear and direct, at times becomes cluttered.
Images fall upon each other: “arrested raped pregnant” or “the
loss the shattered crystal balls smashed.” In the poem “Husband,”
the insights are worn; the husband is a “familiar stranger” and the
sexual imagery is “breast to belly.” The reference to orange juice
in this poem is understandable in a Latin context, but is risky in a
Canadian one.

In Circus Love, Sagaris has more than enough raw material for good
poems; she just has to draw it out. Her poems lie in wait much like the
fish in the pond of a person who hasn’t discovered how to fish them
out.