The Litmus Body

Marilyn Orr teaches English at Laurentian University.

The four sections of this book (“Birthmark,” “Purification,”
“A Woman Writes About Fire,” and “Generation”) evoke the
elemental tensions playing off one another in “the litmus body” that
is both the human body and poetry itself. Testing these elements in a
woman’s voice, these finely crafted, thoughtful poems take unflinching
looks at the harsh and ordinary span of our lives and our worlds.

Probing the intimacies of the closest human bonds, the first and final
sections frame and ground the two middle sections, which dramatize
larger social problems; thus, the voice who tells her infant son, “A
Woman / is not just empty space you can tear open / and fill,” can
later speak with knowledge, and without sentimentality, as the child
whose lost mother has been replaced by the “none” of “kind
Christians.” Perhaps the most pressing struggle here is the one
mothering knows best—learning “the skill of letting go,” as
one’s body is “relinquished” by child, mother, lover.

McInnis’s sure persona rises in taut, tightly reasoned analysis
(“All he sees is a litmus body / with no soul”); it clears the air
with the humorous litany of a “purgatory for indifferent fathers”
and the dry opening of “the girl in the reproduction room” (“The
only way I can stay on my feet until five / is to imagine this machine /
makes love to me”).

Body and earth fuse in a dense interweaving of elemental images: blood,
water, ice, window, mirror. Fish and children mouth “MOM, MOM.”
Arresting images abound: “you need to tell her how much it hurts / but
she presses a cloth over your mouth / shh she warns you don’t say
anything / or it will never stop.” But McInnis, “a woman in danger
of the simplest things,” speaks poems as brave comforts, and we
believe them.