Splitting Off

Thomas M.F. Gerry is chair of the English Department at Laurentian
University and the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s
bilingual interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Finlay’s first collection of poems articulates her contemporary
woman’s sensibility while quoting, paraphrasing, and alluding to
literary works of the past. Finlay’s incorporation of literary
forebears structurally and thematically gives depth to the poems and yet
is occasionally excessive.

The volume’s five sections and many of the poems themselves display
epigraphs that quote various works. Much ingenious graduate student
interpretive stretching might establish the thematic necessity for these
quotations. I find the poems sturdy enough without. “The Shape of Your
Tongue” uses the first four lines of an e.e. cummings poem as an
epigraph, then proceeds to drum up line endings to rhyme with each of
the four stanza’s last lines, which turn out, disappointingly, to be
the lines from cummings. This laborious procedure creates the odd effect
of making the reader wonder why she bothered.

Finlay’s own writing makes the cummings material seem lightweight in
comparison. Both structurally and thematically, she establishes a sense
of the potential for traditions to become straitjackets. At a fitting
for her wedding dress, for instance, the poet writes that “the old
Greek seamstress … pressed / my scant cleavage down beneath / the
crisp fabric. She eyed my tattooed ankle, / straight pins clamped
between dry, dour lips” (“Fancy Dress”). What a superbly precise
way to emblematize and transcend feelings of entrapment.

Splitting Off is the title of the book’s third section, a series of
self-portraits. “Self-Portrait as the Gooderham Flatiron Building”
further explores this matter of fitting. This poem upends assumptions
about the poet by inventing another genesis for the wedge-shaped
building in Toronto. Not simply the product of “stalwart men” who
skilfully made do with an oddly shaped city lot, instead, the
building/poet is where she is “because / of the way the lake met the
map, because / of that conflict between the ego and the land.” She
goes on to say that she can be used as a tourist attraction, even
“[a]n object of worship.” She succinctly undercuts this asymmetrical
power relationship—in her words, she “splits off”: “Everyone
wants their own slice / of the pie. I prefer the making,” the poem
concludes. Finlay’s “making,” her poetry in Splitting Off, is
already brilliantly accomplished.