Stealing Mercury

David Anonby is a sessional instructor in the English Department of
Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

In her first collection of poetry, Lori Cayer blends narrative and
lyrical genres to portray with great sensitivity and thoughtfulness a
woman’s roles as daughter, mother, and lover. Her work is
characterized by a compassionate tone and a predominance of body imagery
and themes. “Death’s Early Colours Are All We Know of Spring”
describes the crisis of conscience that a middle-class Winnipeg woman
experiences when she is confronted with “squeegee kids” on her way
to a party. With its latent issues of political and social justice, this
poem is not typical of the collection; it tends rather to focus more
narrowly on the subtle nuances of close, interpersonal relationships.
“Breathing Clouds,” for example, traces a girl’s unsatisfying
relationship with her uninvolved mother, until the roles are reversed
and the adult daughter visits her dying mother, with whom she still
feels an uncomfortable estrangement.

From themes of bodily danger, decay, and death, Cayer moves on to a
somewhat discordant celebration of human sexuality. “The Sky I’ve
Made,” exploring the concept of thwarted love, ranges from topics as
varied as a girl’s curious obsession with a mannequin to the
termination of love in divorce. “Bloodblossom” is the most
erotically pitched section, as the narrator uses sex as an escape from
the complex and fracturing experiences of life. The collection’s
titular poem, “Stealing Mercury,” recounts a teenaged girl’s
confusion about her sexual orientation in strikingly original language:
“desire is persistent matter / a heavy metal moving like an animal /
under the skin.” “Two Solitudes,” an obvious allusion to Hugh
MacLennan’s classic novel of Canadian identity and the relationship
between anglophone and francophone cultures, is translated into a phone
conversation between lovers who have not quite yet exhausted their
partnership. Again, Cayer favours the personal over the political.

The final poem, and the collection as a whole, has a tragicomic ring:
“whether we are the living / or the dying / the point is not loss, it
is / the fellowship loss brings.”