Songs, Poems, Performance Pieces

Elizabeth Stieg taught English in Toronto.

Maja Bannerman is a poet and performance artist who grew up in Sault Ste. Marie and now lives and works in Toronto. I have not heard her perform, but this, her first book, provides plenty of motivation for me to do so.

The book is divided into three sections: Performance Pieces, Poems, and Songs. Each section possesses a distinctive rhythm and tone, yet throughout, Bannerman’s central concern seems to be with the nature of perception and the difficulty and importance of the attempt to see clearly.

Bannerman opens with an introduction that is both a disarming invitation into the world of the poetry and a statement of her artistic credo: “words unmask us and we see ourselves through them. we use mirrors, the most accurate reflectors to make-up things about ourselves.”

The first of the Performance Pieces, “Close-up on Cancer and Camera,” deals in succession with three mechanisms for perception: the camera, the telescope, and the microscope. Each uses mirrors to reflect light, yet the perceiver finally moves out of the light and into the darkness, which the mirrors cannot explore, and objects: “there’s an error in the mirror. i couldn’t see myself.” Self-definition cannot be achieved through mirrors; identity is not reflected by them. It is only when you “see yourself in light and dark,” “inside” as well as “outside,” that real perception takes place.

Perhaps the most moving piece in the book is the three-part “Future Perfect,” a work dealing with the creation of a new world after a nuclear holocaust. Here again the focus seems to be on perception: “the nighthawk is above my shoulders helping me tear tangles out of my brain.”

The poems seem less like direct discourse than the performance pieces. They have the musing quality of interior monologue. Yet, in their concerns they are closely related. Images that seem solid and concrete yield with a perceptual shift to something fantastically other than they appear. The performers in “Palais Royal” become “skeletons clattering on that slippery floor.” “Fright Flight to Mars” begins:

The book possesses an internal consistency so that each piece seems in a sense a development from, and a further exploration of, the issues dealt with by those which precede it. Thus “Ahoy,” the last of the Songs and the last piece of the book, returns to the imagery and focus of the first: