Best Canadian Poetry 2020

By Biblioasis

"A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener."

“What is a best poem?” asks Best Canadian Poetry 2020 guest editor Marilyn Dumont, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of four poetry collections. “A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener. The work required to complete a poem takes risk, skill, and practice, and the poems selected for this anthology all exhibit such attributes.” In precise language that exposes the attitudes inherent in English, innovative forms that illuminate their content, and mastery of music akin to a composer’s score, the fifty poems collected here fulfill their promises and, in doing so, demonstrate the country’s rich diversity and talent for invention—and the promises it might fulfill as well.

Featuring introductions by series editor Anita Lahey and advisory editor Amanda Jernigan, and poems by:

Kazim Ali • Amber Dawn • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Brandi Bird • Selina Boan • Margret Bollerup • Rita Bouvier • Tim Bowling • Frances Boyle • Di Brandt • Rob Budde • Mugabi Byenkya • Dell Catherall • Margaret Christakos Ivan Coyote • Barry Dempster • Kyle Flemmer • Susan Haldane • Louise Bernice Halfe–Sky Dancer • Jane Eaton Hamilton • Maureen Scott Harris • Dallas Hunt • Ashley Hynd • Babo Kamel • Conor Kerr • Don Kerr • Fiona Tinwei Lam • Natalie Lim • Tanis MacDonald • Nyla Matuk • Sadie McCarney • Tara McGowan-Ross • Erín Moure • Roger Nash • Samantha Nock • Erin Noteboom • Abby Paige • Geoff Pevlin • Alycia Pirmohamed • Jana Prikryl • Jason Purcell • Armand Garnet Ruffo • Rebecca Salazar • Robyn Sarah • Erin Soros • Kevin Spenst • John Elizabeth Stintzi • Andrea Thompson • Sanna Wani • Adele Wiseman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781771963657

Book preview

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Best Canadian Poetry

2020

Guest Editor: Marilyn Dumont

Series Editor: Anita Lahey

Advisory Editor: Amanda Jernigan

Biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

Contents

Foreword

Weight Lifting

Introduction

Artist’s Statement

Robyn Sarah

As I Pray

Sanna Wani

Avian Circulatory System

Alycia Pirmohamed

Bee Funeral

Sadie McCarney

Blockade

Rob Budde

clumper crackies/Ice Pan Puppies

Geoff Pevlin

The Clean Language List

Don Kerr

Cree Girl Explodes the Necropolis of Ottawa

Billy-Ray Belcourt

deeper than bone

Rita Bouvier

Dementia and common household objects

Margret Bollerup

Directions to the Culture Grounds

Conor Kerr

Feeding Foxes

Tanis MacDonald

Fig Sestina

Dell Catherall

From Cocks to Wings

Barry Dempster

Game Show

Jane Eaton Hamilton

Selected Hoems

Abby Paige

If I Die Bury Me Next To My Father

Mugabi Byenkya

It Will Rain Like Rods on the Hillside in Sweden

Kevin Spenst

It’s Always Winter When Someone Dies

Babo Kamel

Kris Knight, The Flying Monkey, 2014.

Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches.

Jason Purcell

light/cage

Erin Noteboom

louise

Dallas Hunt

Minimal Pairs Are Words Holding Hands

Selina Boan

Never Put a Poem Off

Adele Wiseman

News Today

Nyla Matuk

Ode to the Potato

Fiona Tinwei Lam

Odiama

Erín Moure

Origin Story

Kazim Ali

pahpowin

Samantha Nock

Pegging Out Washing

Frances Boyle

Pink Mints

Armand Garnet Ruffo

Poem for unwilling mothers

Rebecca Salazar

The Process of Growth

Ashley Hynd

Remember When

Louise Bernice Halfe–Sky Dancer

River People

Di Brandt

A Room of My Own

Maureen Scott Harris

Salutations from the Storm

John Elizabeth Stintzi

the science of holding on

Natalie Lim

Selkirk, Manitoba

Brandi Bird

Shame: a love letter.

Ivan Coyote

a simple instruction

Tara McGowan-Ross

the stopped clock

Amber Dawn

Stutters

Roger Nash

Thin-Skinned

Susan Haldane

3:00 a.m.

Tim Bowling

Three for One

Margaret Christakos

To Whyt/Anthology/Editors

Andrea Thompson

12 Rules for Gatekeeping

Kyle Flemmer

Waves

Jana Prikryl

Weight

Erin Soros

Contributors’ Commentary and Biographies

Notable Poems of 2019

Magazines Consulted

Index to Poets

Acknowledgements

Editor Biographies

Copyright

Foreword

I leave my bird-tracks

in fresh-fallen snow,

and fly away.

— Robyn Sarah, Artist’s Statement

Each year, as we piece together this anthology, lining up the glories within like specimens of beach glass retrieved from our greedily stuffed pockets, I’m struck anew by the gifts and possibilities poems offer up. I have written in these pages, in past years, of the poem as a home, a safe place to crawl inside; of the poet as investigative journalist with a blessedly creative (and often subversive) twist; of the poem as a wilderness caught, into which a reader tumbles, ready or not. Best Canadian Poetry’s founding series editor, Molly Peacock, has defined and redefined poetry’s essential tasks for BCP readers over the years. She once told us, in especially memorable phrasing, that a poem’s job is to articulate the ineffable.

To take the stuff of human existence, intrinsically unsayable, and translate it, score it. Give it words. Now there’s a gift.

*

The dark, cold weeks of late winter 2020 were brightened (for me) by several hearty, long-distance consultations with Marilyn Dumont, this edition’s guest editor, and BCP’s advisory editor Amanda Jernigan, during which we three narrowed down Dumont’s longlist of poems. The list began as an impressively tottering heap drawn from Dumont’s reading of hundreds of poems, writtsen by Canadian authors, that were published in dozens of print and online journals in 2019. As we read and listened, whittled and mulled, and at last settled those final tough choices, our world veered into pandemic lockdown. April dawned, poetry month, and Biblioasis, Best Canadian Poetry’s indomitable publisher (and Windsor, ON’s beloved local bookstore), launched an online book club, inviting readers to delve into what, at that time, was the latest BCP: the 2019 edition guest-edited by Rob Taylor. I joined in the first week as a guest, signing into the online platform and seeing my own talking head in a square on the screen amid a dozen or so others. It was my first foray into what has become the meeting norm for countless clubs, businesses and organizations during COVID times, and I found it a strange, oddly giddy-making experience, sharing literary chat over this Hollywood-Square-like video grid.

The novelty of the format aside, the poetry commanded our attention. It did its essential work. We delved into poem after poem, our discussion turning, as if inevitably, to the ways each piece spoke to the isolation, uncertainty, fear, and restlessness—and also to the glimmers of hope and joy—that book club members were experiencing. It was a matter of instinct to chart our paths through the poems by the routes that meant most to us on that ordinary Wednesday afternoon, amid what we have all now come habitually to call these extraordinary times.

I emphasize: we didn’t reinvent those poems to suit our states of mind. Though they’d first appeared in journals in 2019, and had therefore been completed long before COVID-19, their language, music, and metaphor contained some basic recognition of our plight. Solace was there for the taking. There’s no mystery to this. These were poems: real, handmade (and handheld) forms built to hold, and simultaneously express, universal truths about the human experience. The wordless things we feel or sense which, in the saying a poem provides, briefly become a something we can see, hold, hear, and maybe—for a blink or a flicker—comprehend. Solace was there because the poets who’d written these verses had, by their artful making, worked it in.

*

Dumont’s selection is marked by her generosity and warmth, and by her rigour as a reader, and is thereby notably rich in clearly pitched voices, in simple humanity. The gift that comes at me full throttle as I read through these pieces once more, A-to-W by title, is the permission they offer. As we lead lives hemmed in by a host of new rules and public health directives, as permission to engage in so many of the ordinary pleasures and activities of daily life has been rescinded or restricted, it’s poetry’s nature to permit that has me rapt.

Its permissions are vast and ranging. I offer here a few.

To take note.

Of, say, something lost (or never found): The problem, Alycia Pirmohamed writes in Avian Circulatory System, isn’t that I don’t know my grandmother’s first name. The problem, she writes, is night—.

Of one of the faces of death: as Babo Kamel writes in It’s Always Winter When Someone Dies, In the coffin / she looks betrayed, as if caught / doing something she is ashamed of.

Of faint hope: as Nyla Matuk writes in News Today, From this fluttering betrayal comes / the weak shadow of a dancing poplar.

To practice devotion: to the divine, to a lover, to home.

& there are / dreams here under my knees, writes Sanna Wani in As I pray.

He searches the garden / for a gift to excite his wife, / and picks a single fig, writes Dell Catherall in Fig Sestina (perhaps the sweetest, funniest, sexiest sestina ever composed).

here on the turtle’s back— / on the land of the long white cloud— / home, down under in an endless time of dreaming—, writes Rita Bouvier in deeper than bone.

To revel—in sound, for starters. See Tanis MacDonald’s Feeding Foxes: The first listed / ingredient in a bag of pretzels / is puff. So you feed the fox the clever / stuff. Or Kevin Spenst’s It Will Rain Like Rods on the Hillside in Sweden: It will rain married men in Spain, / and intermittent toads’ beards Saturday.

To reinvent (or find?) ourselves: When I woke up that day I was my grandmother, writes Erín Moure in Odiama.

To heal, as Rebecca Salazar does (while raging!) in Poem for unwilling mothers: Wrap knots of bloodroot / in this page. Steep this pessary / in swamp water to staunch / newly scraped wombs.

To desire. As Jane Eaton Hamilton tells us in Game Show, The Earth is lust after all.

To recast—

a place, such as Brandi Bird’s in Selkirk, Manitoba: The body / of the town a rose bush, a dry thicket

insomnia, as in Tim Bowling’s 3:00 a.m.: Python swallow. Trying to put / a face to the name of a / truth. One cloud / dissolved by another

gravity, as in Roger Nash’s Stutters: For stutterers, Newton got it all wrong. / Unsupported words don’t fall / into silence, they just hold their place

To steal in. My mother had no room of her own / except the one inside her, writes Maureen Scott Harris in A Room of My Own.

To zero in, as Jason Purcell does, on Only the outline of desire around the eye—.

To give in—

to worry, say, like Margaret Christakos in Three for One: Do birds / sleep inside tree trunks? Ball up under / leaf clusters? Tremble in a flock of dark

to wind, alongside Jana Prikryl in Waves: To walk up the street was to be rinsed

To note—always and ever, to note. But not to solve, or absolve. I’m out here circling with the birds drawn to the searchlights in Erin Noteboom’s light / cage: as if to the moon on water.

Those birds. once inside our loss / they exhaust themselves in turning.

We—me; the brave Marilyn Dumont; our devoted and profoundly astute advisory editor, Amanda Jernigan; our dedicated team of editors-at-large; and the hard-working crew at Biblioasis, which adapted so swiftly and surely to bookmaking in pandemic times—extend deep gratitude to these poems and their authors, for the permissions they extend.

We offer those permissions to you.

Anita Lahey

Ottawa, ON

unceded Algonquin, Anishinabek territory

Weight Lifting

It is February 6th, 2020, and my marriage is falling apart.

I think about tense, as I write this, months later. Is falling? Has fallen. Yes, I think by that time it had certainly fallen, so the present perfect is appropriate, here.

But how about that has fallen construction which, if not quite in the passive voice, is certainly passive. Yes, it has a worrying passivity, of the sort against which—avoiding the dangling preposition—I would caution my students.

It is the sort of construction that looks and feels—no, is—evasive.

All right.

It is February 6th, 2020, and I have torn my marriage apart.

I have torn my marriage apart, and it is evening in K’jipuktuk (Halifax) in Mi’kma’ki, and although it is not late in the evening, it is dark. In Ottawa, Algonquin territory, from whence BCP series editor Anita Lahey calls me by computer, it is also evening, though perhaps not yet entirely dark. In Amiskwaciy Waskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), where this year’s guest editor, Marilyn Dumont, receives Lahey’s phone call, it is early afternoon—as it is also in