no one we know

Sharon Goodier was a poet in Toronto.

Tregebov’s poetry is brilliant in that it makes ordinary things shine brilliantly, thereby revealing the connections between them. In “The orderliness of chance,” the pattern of repetition mimics the kind of orderliness that underlies chance, the pattern of reality perceived in the connections between olive groves, the birth of a friend’s baby, the recovery of the poet’s mother and the relationship between Tregebov and her father.

In these poems time is one axis of a square dance in which past and present dos-a-dos each other. The poet takes us over the line “To locate the heartland.”

Here the opposites unite to challenge false politics. True politics for Tregebov is like fire, like the half-life of red peppers. Real politics is “the fire in the heart” connecting everything to everything.

No one we know isa monument to poetic praxis. The raw materials of perception are transformed and become meaningful through their relationship to each other. Tregebov employs a kind of extrospection, introspection applied to the outer world. She has found herself by cracking the shell (“For the edge”). “Empty of everything but herself,” she embraces reality and materiality, thus overcoming alienation by embracing the world of relationships and being embraced by it as it is.

Inner and outer form the second axis. The poet fills the world and is filled by it.