Brenda Schmidt lives in Creighton, a mining town in northern Saskatchewan, where she works as a writer, editor and visual artist and where she imparts her views and plays on her blog, Alone on a Boreal Stage. Her writing has appeared in publications across Canada.
Her first collection of poetry, A Haunting Sun (Thistledown Press, 2001) was a finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Poetry. Her book More Than Three Feet of Ice, winner of the 2003 Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry and runner-up for the 2004 John V. Hicks Manuscript Award, was published by Thistledown Press in April 2005. These poems are from a new manuscript. Her next book will appear in 2008.
An Exercise in Perspective
Wired to eat the web that was spun
over time, spin another
just the same. Wait for vibration.
A spider darts back and forth
through the darkness
just a few feet from our heads, her
silvery path barely visible, quivering
like a lip. Like the first time
I said I hate you.
Hate just slipped. Its silk
stuck to a wall. It sticks to everything.
To the space that grew between
the argument, the war, whatever
it was about, and now
to a silence. A continuum. Later
it will stick to the sheets.
Under the stars
the orb weaver gives us
her daily web, forgives us
for watching. Being caught up. Maybe
she didn't care in the first place.
Fine. Never mind
rules of legitimate construction.
Relative positions. Just think.
Almost 400 million
years of silk draglines. Silk grids.
Vanishing points.
Crying at 8:15 a.m.
Terminal 3, Gate C37. Pre-boarding. A baby is crying.
These forty year old breasts point it out, the nipples
eartips no longer needing the rest of the stethoscope
to separate ambient noise from critical body sounds.
The mother, maybe twenty, eats a bagel. Cream cheese
squeezes through the hole like an egg, Humpty Dumpties
to her lap. Splats on the blue jean tarmac. She scrapes it up,
piles it on the remaining bite. Puts it together again.
The cry takes off, ascends, as the mother licks the cheese
off her fingers, eyes locked on the points my shirt makes
in the artificial light. Terrific. She lifts the bundled screaming
to her breast. Heads turn. Time dilates. A hundred pupils
fix to the sudden silence. A hundred nipples
sense the latch, the wide-eyed sucking, the flow
as the mother smiles my way, the bit of cheese on her lip
a blighted ovum. A bitter curd that keeps on rising.
Inventory
Holy water in a Heinz baby food jar.
I hold it up to the light, see no impurities,
only the barely pink distortion of my coworker's face.
Throw it out, she says, turning back to the locker,
to the job of emptying, pulling out one by one every card,
every envelope, every letter
filed in the shoebox that contained the floral slippers
the patient had unwrapped three days before.
The staff had cooed about their quality
as the patient folded the foil wrap and put it in the drawer.
She'd mumbled about the postage, how it shouldn't cost
so much to send something so light from there to here,
how they should've waited,
brought the gift with them in the spring.
Slippers, ivory robe and family pictures
placed into a bag and labeled.
The squares of Aero and Kit Kat fingers,
wrapped in their respective foils, loose peppermints,
three nearly empty tubes of Vaseline,
a half box of Kleenex all hit the garbage.
My coworker takes the poinsettia to the desk
then returns to strip the bed. I toss out the red
and white carnations, dump out the fowl brown water.
A few leaves and petals stick to the sink.
I unscrew the lid from the jar,
use the blessed water to chase a petal down.
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading