Jul. 20, 2011 - Issue #822: CASH IN!
Revue
Children of Ararat / Aphelion
While most Canadians know at least the basic facts of the Holocaust, we remain ignorant of the mass murder of an estimated one million Armenians—through starvation, exhaustion, burnings and drownings—by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Unlike Germany, however, as Garebian notes in such fierce poems as "Indoctrination of a Turkish Boy," Turkey has yet to confront its culpability in these century-old deaths and deportations. He notes in his final prose reflection, "Denial—An Afterward," that the Turkish Penal Code "forbids the use of the term 'genocide' to describe the events of 1915."
But, Children of Ararat insists, a genocide can't be ignored, no matter what words aren't used or how much time has passed. Survivors and their descendants remember the trauma. They see the "headless bodies, of unmarked graves, / shreds of scarves hanging in walnut trees." Some, like Garebian, whose father survived, go on to speak eloquently, even poetically, for those who were silenced. As he writes, "This tongue tries a reparation of speech / beyond the reliquary ashes of books. / It licks the caves where the dead / lie in their long hibernation."
Garebian's poetry doesn't always reach such lyricism; at times his very bluntness seems to flatten its music. Perhaps, however, his refusal to wrap that arresting word, "genocide," in any soft notes is necessary for a collection that insists on brutal honesty. For Garebian, the simple truth is that, "Anger burns my face."
Jenna Butler's Aphelion isn't angry but wistful. Hers isn't a world scorched by genocide but dissolved in light: "It's really about / the way light falls in a high room," she writes, "midsummer, the wind picking out / the scent of lemons and beeswax / from old furniture." Butler engages the senses in order to assuage longing, to fill up space in the in-betweens.
Aphelion describes the state of being absent, alienated, caught between two worlds; Butler's rhythms, too, reflect the liminal. She often pauses mid-line, as in "Granville Island, 1997," when she writes: "dusk condensing tenebrous / interstitial sweep of shadows / pockmarking brickwork." Her best poems are buoyant, perhaps reflecting the freedom she unexpectedly finds on the margins, in her case between the borders of North America and Europe, where she leaves, as she writes in "Cutline," "hieroglyphic sparrowtracks."
Unfortunately Butler's poetry is sometimes a touch precious and weighed down by scientific and academic terms, as when she refers to a garden as "vegetative hegemony." These moments detract from a collection that is, for the most part, refreshingly musical and delights in immersing us in worlds that are, for Butler, the outsider, forever new.
Children of Ararat
by Keith Garebian
109 pp, $15.95
Frontenac House
Aphelion
by Jenna Butler
92 pp, $14.95
NeWest Press
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