Babylon: And Other Dreams

Norma Dillon, a poet, lived in Regina.

The artist’s gift of synthesis permits her to shatter an initial picture into intricately related fragments that she can then pull together into a cohesive unit. The initial glimpse of her subject, like this one, quickly shies away from our vision:

It would be a civil remark

to say they moved away with

great speed or even to say

that it moved fast,

nor is it certain whether

it was an it or a they, depending

Clearly, this poem illustrates a lot more than a series of pretty pictures of aquarium fish:

the hand flogs horizontal curses

preceding the pseudopodic extension

into every corner of the tank,

into the walls of eyeful neutrality

And following grey-silver fishness through

the walls of their own concept.

Perhaps it’s the convoluted style of logic and grammatical construction that invest this poetry with such tentatively long-drawn images and concepts. Consequently, the reader has to pay attention, has to exert a renewed intellectual effort (i.e., has to stretch and grow as a philosopher), in order to begin to apprehend the cat’s-cradling interaction of themes and metaphors.

The poems that work best “move” constantly — an ever changing kaleidoscopic frieze of pictures whose controlling image may connect, for instance, in a central icon. In “The Shadow of Fish,” the symbolic fish controls a lot of other thought and action. In fact, the word “fish” itself remains conspicuously absent from the lines, while the concept unifies the meaning of the poem:

Scattered single movement

slivered bits

moving their grey fishness to

another place in the tank

this time shaded where they

hope to avoid the

wafture of the hand whose echo

stretches out as long and grey as

their impotence

Occasionally, the poetic persona ventures to utter a comment that momentarily depicts the artist composing, when all the elements of time and the actors within the poem interplay with predestination and chance:

I, breathless with eye photography

(we talked about the vision later)

I too an outlaw

webbed in my own self-image of innocence

you clothed us both from the beginning

in an unsustainable drama

an unsustainable dream

This flair for recreating a moment of insight, combined with the poet’s knack of incisive expressiveness in developing quick character portraits, allows her to produce enough dramatic space to make her characters complex, giving them the freedom to act and react with the realism, subtlety, spontaneity, and verisimilitude of believable characters drawn from real people.