More Light

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.

This first collection by Saskatooner Hilary Clark was the 1999 winner of
the Pat Lowther Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. Its
four sections—“The Memory of Words,” “Beloved,” “Ghosts,”
and “More Light”—lead the reader through the spirituality of
everyday life.

“Memory of Words” is a plethora of visual images that contribute to
the “world’s prose.” “Crows strung along a telephone wire,
crickets in the long dry grass,” and “wet brick, a fetish stick /
the dead moist and cool underground” communicate the poet’s love of
nature and Earth’s accoutrements. Clark makes a mentor of the
17th-century Japanese haiku writer Basho, enfolding his words into her
poem “Basho’s Dream.” In the tradition of haiku, she writes
deceptively simple poems in which transient beauty can be found in
things that are not particularly beautiful: “There, under the wall / a
woman was washing potatoes, / skins pale in the dusky light.”

In the midst of the transitory splendor of nature, a “lovely face
consumed by rain” appears, and the section becomes a bevy of love
poems in which nature is metaphor. The protagonist is “a bruised
reed,” and the “wind / [is her] breath.” Part 2, “Beloved,”
continues this theme with “desire open[ing] wide as the sky” as
language and love commingle “in the loving trickery of syllables.”
But this is not an idealized world. Roses still bear thorns, and
“Francis of Assisi wears marks of the elect— / bird droppings,
petals / ... Cracks web his stony skin, nose / blown away by a fatal
wind,” in this “Secret Garden.”

“Ghosts” is composed mainly of prose poems, and the book’s title
makes itself known. “Light slants across ... feet, ... the page glows
... [and] shining waxwings will beat” at the window. In a sensitive
prose sequence titled “Opal,” the ghost is her mother, who appears
when “the baby knocking softly in her belly” reminds the poet of her
own childhood. The mother metamorphoses as “sun, hummingbird/light.”
Part 4 concludes with the fraternizing of light and words: “Vortices /
of words / the folds of the soul / are lined with stars.” Here spirit
is assumed and the life journey (and the book’s contents) come full
circle, for “after paradise, we enter the beginning of memory.”

Clark is a poet’s poet. Her work brings the tried-and-true basics of
immortal poetry—imagery, synesthesia, lyricism, and figurative
language—back into contemporary time with an originality that makes
one gasp.