The Perils of Geography

Description

60 pages
$11.95
ISBN 0-919626-83-1
DDC C811'.54

Publisher

Year

1995

Contributor

Reviewed by Beryl Baigent

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.

Review

Helen Humphreys cherishes motion. Geography is “perilous” because,
like history, it is static, enshrined in memory and represented by
immobile earth, circumnavigation, shrubbery statuary, postcards, and
aerial photographs. By contrast, the present is a time of action, a
“new world” of water, voyages, garden labyrinths, the restlessness
of rain, and a “molten seam of sheep, / draining out of a / ragged
hole in the sky.”

These oppositions—geography versus experience, memory versus
immediacy, stasis versus animation—are a constant theme in
Humphreys’s third book of poetry. In the 10 wryly humorous poems that
make up the section Singing to the Bees, immobility on a plane journey
is experienced as petrifying fear, while shoes dancing in the closet are
aligned with flowing water. For the poet, it is “[b]etter... / to be
sailing... / than to be standing in / those narrow-necked / old
stories.” Even at a funeral she wants to keep the moment dynamic, as
she and her companions “shake” the dead person’s “name at the
sullen wind.”

In the final section, the poet reveals the reason for her adoration of
flux: “Art and love are made / from movement.” Tosca’s lover (in
Puccini’s opera), “[s]tabbed fatally and still / singing half an
hour later,” provides the final landscape in which art and love
commingle. “Open [your] mouth like / you’re dying like / that,”
instructs the poet, suggesting that the future, like the present, is
also “something / to be waded through triumphant.”

Tags

Citation

Humphreys, Helen., “The Perils of Geography,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed January 13, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/5267.