Volta

Lynn R. Szabo is a chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

In Susan Gillis’s Volta, the narrative voice takes up the triple
rhythms of the unrequited lover, the deserter, and the landscapes of the
mythic and earthly creatures who reflect the human drama that ensues.
With a largesse of allusions to ancient Greece, the near and middle
East, and the poetic traditions of the last 400 years of English poesy,
Gillis engages the haunting and complicated relationality of love gone
wrong and otherwise. In spite of the wise cynicism of the narrator’s
embrace of her own emotional geography, she attempts, rather bravely, to
converse with (or to “translate,” as she describes it in her
verse-essay “Gossiping with Cassiopeia” at the end of the volume)
the language of love’s emotions, with all the promise of a fledgling
poet.

Gillis’s technique, calling to mind Adrienne Rich, employs incisive
and elevated diction, fecund and literate contexts, and the acuity of an
artist’s observations of her inner environment. At times, the narrator
does not avoid closure and interpretation assertively enough, robbing
readers of their part in the dialogue of engagement that poetry demands.
Elsewhere the clichés of female neediness overpower the pleasure of
entering the narrator’s private experience: “The one constant is my
love for you, which is refused. Therefore I say / life teaches me not /
To love you not, but through you, to love.”

Gillis’s “translations” of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s
sonnets, seem a grasp that exceeds their reach, although one cannot help
but admire the labour and intensity that such a project would entail.
(Her endnotes provide a fascinating explanation of the process,
suggesting that prose is a stronger suit than poetry in her writerly
gifts). At other points, her narrator’s accounts of the peculiarities
of distant travels and nearby encounters often create a bullet-like
series of ricochets from the non-negotiable spaces of the geography of
human experience, as in “Du(e)rer in the New World: Venetian
Outpost/Highway 1.”

The strengths of Gillis’s collection reside in her highly intelligent
eye and ear, which render an inviting promise of images and metaphor.
The range of her experiments in poetic form compels the reading, from
found poetry to haiku. Her speaker’s voice is temperamental and
exhausting but also magnetic and enriching.