Bread and Salt

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

The title of this volume evokes what the poet sees as “the sustenance
and spice of life”: bread, which feeds the body, and salt, which is
the symbol of purification and rebirth. Rodin calls her collection
“prosaics,” an apt word for these matter-of-fact pieces, which
sometimes resemble poems but generally read like amusing anecdotes of
the poet’s life.

Rodin’s opening piece, “Jeu d’esprit,” describes a reading at
which Mavis Gallant “cut right through the crap” of her introduction
by an intellectual creative-writing teacher. A black-and-white
photograph prefaces a section of lyrical pieces written for the poet’s
friends and inspired by her new relationship: “I’m in love with my
computer.” She draws upon The Ed Sullivan Show and “Madame
Benoоt’s cooking classes” to evoke childhood memories of life in
Montreal.

Growing up Jewish in Montreal, Rodin was forced to participate in
“school pageantry ... / [in] a festivity not for [her].” Later, she
observes “all the high holidays / be it Rosh Hashanan or Thanksgiving
/ with pizza.” As the owner of R2B2 bookstore in Vancouver, she
encounters a misogynist taxi-driver who self-published a book on the
Montreal Massacre, and a “wheelchair couple” who were searching for
The Joy of Disabled Sex.

Rodin sees red when a wife murderer is acquitted, when she hears about
the atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda, and when a panhandler is
“arrested [because he] had committed the crime / of being found asleep
on a pile of bags / in the doorway of a snazzy store.” For Rodin, the
U.S. military’s “name is Hydra,” the many-headed monster, who is
destined “forever to multiply / until we learn how to stop.”

Read this eminently readable book when you are in the mood to confront
the things in life that irritate you; it may give you some ideas about
how to progress beyond the irritation.