Snug Cove a few hours ago, looking over the Queen Charlotte Channel to the east wall of Atl’katsem/Howe Sound.
It’s a bright, warm September, and the light in the sound is softened by water vapour, condensing over the cold water. Humpbacks and seals are eating and resting and the birds are active, eating seeds and insects, preparing for, or stopping over on, their long migrations southward. Orb weavers are busy building their evening webs.
Just Bowen Island things unfolding. This morning I stopped in for a routine blood test at the health centre, and our local technician, Kelly, had a live stream of the Vancouver Aquarium sea otter pool showing in his clinic room. He said it’s been the most successful calming presence he has ever had for his clients undergoing tests. His daughter suggested it two weeks ago. Now nobody can stop talking about it.
I’m reading two books at the moment. In hardcover is Seamus Heaney’s incredible translation of Beowulf. The book itself was sitting in the window of Canterbury Tales Bookstore in East Vancouver. Last Thursday, I was walking past with my friend Ciaran, and I caught sight of it. I went in and said “I would like to buy Beowulf, please.” It’s incredible.
I was reading it in the waiting room when Kelly called me in. I had just read these lines, from Beowulf’s story of a seven day swimming contest against his rival Breca:
Light came from the east,
bright guarantee of God, and the waves
went quiet; I could see headlands
and buffeted cliffs. Often, for undaunted courage,
fate spares the man it has not already marked.
The image of the headlands and buffeted cliffs is so evocative to me. And that line about the light. It landed with me this morning partly because I have also just started Crossing Home Ground, a book by David Pitt-Brooke about a John Muir-inspired walk he took across 1000kms of the central interior of British Columbia, charting the changes of landscape and community. As he describes pitching his tent on the first night, in a meadow high above the Similkameen Valley, he perfectly captures what it looks like to see the night arising in the river country of central BC:
Only six weeks past the solstice but the days are already closing in. The sunset is long gone. The western sky has faded to a pale aquamarine. Glowing twilight still bathes the summit but the night-tide is rising from the east, pooling in the deep gorges far below.
Here is a man who has read Heaney and probably Gerard Manley Hopkins too. As a person whose house faces east, the “night-tide rising” is the most evocative image of the purple darkness of the earths shadow creeping across the sky. I can’t wait to dive into his travelogue.
The 1987 McWhirter translation of Jose Emilio Pacheco’s selected poems is reviewed in the current issue of the Literary Review of Canada. I have been sitting this morning by the ocean with poems from his first book, The Elements of the Night.
You can read these poems at the Internet Archive. Beautiful. Simple language, reflection on very few elements of his world but occasionally drilling deep into an undiscovered image. Poems worth sitting with.
The current issue of the New Yorker has a poem by Adrienne Su called “Lament” which ends with the lines “the reasons to gather/have never been clearer/The dinner is gravy.” Reading the poem sent me down a little rabbit hole of her work and stumbled into her writing about food and culture.
Her website offers me an essay called “The Last Bite: A Culinary Meditation on Arlene Schechet’s “Head on a Plate” Porcelains” which conjures up:
A head on a plate initially evokes a stray Brussels sprout—the last bite, which the diner could not finish. It is not the despised Brussels sprout of yore but the aspirational appetizer or side in a good restaurant: tumbled with bacon, pecans, or blue cheese (or all three), or seared with honey and soy sauce and a sprinkling of white pepper. It remains alone on the plate not because it is unappealing but because the eater took or received too many and now must contemplate throwing it away, which incites guilt. It is too small to justify a take-out container, but stuffing oneself when not hungry is also a form of waste, so the conscientious restaurant patron sits, shooing away the server attempting to clear the table, hoping to feel hunger again before others start talking about dessert or calling for the check.
This piece also contains a recipe,
A search in Libby for her books offers me several samples from recent works including Peach State in which the poem “Substitutions” offers couplets that contrast life in traditional human community with the modernity of an immigrant’s reality in Atlanta: “Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar/Letters ,for a family gathered//A Cuisinart, for many hands/Petty burglars for warring bands//A baby’s room, for tight quarters/Passing cars, for neighbours”
I love her work.
The last line from a prose poem by Grace Yee called “Living Among Trees” From the latest issue of Heat:
…I know that when lightning strikes a giant sequoia and burns out its heart, you can step inside the trunk, look up at the sky and hold it.
I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago.
Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos. He called his characters heteronyms, and they became channels for particular forms of artistic output.
In the current issue of Poetry there are a number of translations of poems by Ricardo Reis, Passoa’s heteronym who writes in a classical style.
Here is one:
I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,
More because I love than because I am,
I love both everything and myself.
They could give me nothing better were they to return,
Those primitive gods,
Who also know nothing.