Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt.

Stephanie McKenzie is a visiting assistant professor of English at Sir
Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is
the editor and co-publisher of However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of
Poetry and Song from Newfoundland & Labrado

In his introduction to Brandt’s Speaking of Power, Laurier Poetry Series general editor Neil Besner claims “poetry is becoming a vulnerable art” and hopes the series will make Canadian poets “better known at home.” What Speaking of Power ironically demonstrates is that the particular field of Canadian poetic scholarship has been enriched.

In her superb foreword, Tanis MacDonald equates Di Brandt’s “assertion that poetry must be, at its core, concerned with the political power of language” with Brandt the pioneer whose “stylistic and formal innovations distinguish her as part of a group of women writers that began working with feminist poetics in the 1980s.” She sketches Brandt’s voice from questions i asked my mother (1987) until Now You Care (2003), determining “Brandt’s work is best read as a lyrical arc rather than individual poems.”

And what a selection. These poems are beautiful, sometimes haunting. The book begins with “when i was five i thought heaven was located,” reminding readers that Di Brandt is ultimately moved by language and rhythm.

Speaking of Power is a gorgeous miscellany and retrospective. One feels the development of a voice from the first poem—where the narrator fears she “might land / on the horns of a cow”—through the narrator of “what de Englische,” who admits “how deeply the body carries / its violence,” to “poem for a guy who’s”: “there’s holocaust / between us.”

How brave and honest Brandt has been, and how terribly beautiful. MacDonald has chosen well. “Truly, in this age, / why should not all women be mad?” questions the narrator of “Dog days in Maribo: Anti (electric) ghazals.” “The golden rule,” she later intones—“self sacrifice or suicide.”