Hail, The Invisible Watchman

By Alexandra Oliver

A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022

Hail, The Invisible Watchman is haunted poetry—Oliver’s formal schemes are as tidy as a picket-fence and as suggestive; behind the charm of rhyme is a vibrant, dark exploration of domestic and social alienation.

The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence—and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighbourhood. A spectral narrator surveils social gatherings in the town of Sherbet Lake; community members chime in, each revealing their various troubles and hypocrisies; an eerie reimagining of an Ethel Wilson novel follows a young woman into a taboo friendship with an enigmatic divorcée. In taut poetic structures across three succinct sections, Alexandra Oliver’s conflation of the mundane and the phantasmagoric produces a scintillating portrait of the suburban uncanny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771964722

Alexandra Oliver

Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, BC. She is the author of three collections published through Biblioasis: Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (2013; recipient of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Let the Empire Down ( 2016), and Hail, the Invisible Watchman (2022). Her libretto for From the Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, conceived in conjunction with composer Scott Wilson at the University of Birmingham, was performed by Continuum Music in Toronto in December, 2017. Oliver is a past co-editor of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Everyman’s Library/Random House, 2015) as well as of the formalist journal The Rotary Dial. She has performed her work for CBC Radio and NPR, as well as at The National Poetry Slam and numerous festivals and conferences. Oliver holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program and a Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University. She lives in Burlington, Ontario with her husband and son.

Book preview

Contents

The Haunting of Sherbet Lake

Young Politician at a Rotary Club Tea

Pierogis

Seventeen

Bryce McMillan, 38, Futures Trader,

Stuck at the Men’s Retreat

Song of the Doyenne

Schoolteacher Report I (

2016

)

Schoolteacher Report II (

1975 / 2013

)

The Announcer

Talking to a Child about Septicemia, 2010

Hollywood. North.

Bacon

The Last Straw of the Last Duchess

The Lipstick Effect

How to Stop

The Creatures

The Vampire Lovers

Protective

Mrs Beryl Armstrong, 86, Beats

Closing Time at Longo’s

Triptych: American Wives

She Burns the Motel

The Blood of the Jagers

Prologue

Lobby

Hose

The Marine Room

Family Standards

The Proposition

Grass

The Mistake

The Barbarian Invasion

Neighbourhood Watch

Best Practice

Epilogue: Her Mustang

Clever Little Dragon: On Hetty Dorval

Prologue: The Genius of My Home

The Geese

The Claim

A Word of Prayer

Peeping Tom

A Woman of No Reputation

The Freak Show

Sleeping Beauty

Give It to Me, Frank

You Can Take It from Me / The Ship

Reputation, Mistress, Shanghai

Terra Incognita

Any Real Love

Epilogue: Vienna

Notes

Acknowledgements

hail,

the invisible

watchman

alexandra oliver

biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

Copyright © Alexandra Oliver,

2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence visit

www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-

800

-

893

-

5777

.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Hail, the invisible watchman / Alexandra Oliver.

Names: Oliver, Alexandra,

1970

- author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print)

20210317035

| Canadiana (ebook)

20210317051

| ISBN

9781771964715

(softcover) |

ISBN

9781771964722

(ebook)

Classification:

LCC

PS8629

.

L54

H35

2022

|

DDC

C811

/.6—

dc23

Edited by Jason Guriel

Copyedited by John Sweet

Text and cover designed by Vanessa Stauffer

Cover photograph by Stephen Duffy

Canadian Council for the Arts logoOntario Arts Council LogoGovernment of Canada LogoOntario Creates Logo

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested

$153

million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (

OAC

), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded

1,709

individual artists and

1,078

organizations in

204

communities across Ontario, for a total of

$52.1

million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.

For Kim Bridgford

1959–2020

The Haunting

of Sherbet Lake

---

The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world—the strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work—for I was something or other that could