Stormthrower

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Julia McCarthy has waited quite a while to produce her first book, and
it has paid off. Stormthrower mainly avoids the lyric egotism that still
overwhelms so much poetry today. McCarthy has managed this feat in two
ways: she has brought the language of her other art—working in
clay—to bear metaphorically upon the various tales her poems engage,
and she has constructed a new myth out of a mixture of northern
mythology and that art. Stormthrower throws the clay of the world, and
under the mystique of that power, McCarthy’s poems evoke a wild world,
both natural and human.

The volume’s first two sections contain more conventionally lyric
poems of travel, both physical and spiritual, and a sequence of prose
poems. Beginning with “Translating the Ordinary,” McCarthy does just
that, preparing the reader for the powerful metamorphoses to follow in
the two longer sections concerning the titular figure. There “The
elements / rejoice in your naming,” a potter’s mark become “her
face / in clay beneath his palms” (Stormthrower is “an androgynous
god, whose / hunger for wholeness knows / no bounds”), and the poet is
“hung / in a chiasma / where I no longer am.”

Part of the power of these poems is their delight in savage
metamorphosis, the world continually changing in the fire of
Stormthrower’s kiln, but it also has to do with this anti-lyric
recognition that “I” is always changing too. Heraclitus is the
reigning philosopher here, a good one for a poet. Stormthrower is a
strong debut.