Notes from the Chapbook Love Letter Club

Steve McOrmond’s latest—a gorgeous chapbook from Baseline Press titled Jacaranda Trees, Mexico City—isn’t just a pretty, poetic travelogue of a couple on holiday in Mexico. Rather, it considers how humans deal with loss. Sometimes, we try to travel (physically and emotionally) away from grief, but still find ourselves coming around to it again when least expected.

One poem near the middle of the collection begins, “Grief brought us here, grey, featureless/ days and long, fitful nights, a friend’s idea/ that a few days of honeyed sun/ wouldn’t hurt.” Even far from home, the woman in the couple still “bursts/ into tears” and the speaker says that she lifts her “Jackie O’s/ to daub your eyes with a cocktail napkin.” Most readers will relate to this, how waves of grief often ebb and flow without warning, no matter where you are. 

There is a marked contrast between the winters we experience here in Canada—with snow and slush—and the brilliant colours of life in Mexico City. McOrmond has always been good at capturing the essence of a place or event and this is evident in the way he describes the life he sees teeming around him through his use of vivid imagery: “A steady stream of street merchants/ passes by, selling silver jewelry, molcajetes/ made from black volcanic rock, tea towels/ embroidered with Frida Kahlo’s face.” While Cortes is rightly referred to as a colonizer, someone who repaid “the hospitality by burning everything// to the ground” upon his arrival from Europe, McOrmond also acknowledges the ways in which tourists take photos of the inhabitants of Mexico City, desiring “an anecdote to go/ with the snapshot, a souvenir of social realism/ to post on their Instagram.” As Cortes colonized Mexico, tourists do similar things through their travels.  

McOrmond’s craft is evident in the singular image and motif that threads itself through Jacaranda Trees, Mexico City. The blue colouring of the jacaranda blooms is “a drifting psychedelic// snow that clogs gutters, sticks/ to windshields of the omnipresent// pink and white taxicabs.” The trees are “dying of thirst,” so that they “produce an overabundance, excessive flowering” as “a stress response.” The “bent/ blue trumpets” that “stain the concrete” are a constant companion for the reader. There is a “sidewalk sticky, scattered with blue.” A woman who sweeps up the fallen blossoms as part of her job must go home to her apartment to “scrub stubborn streaks” of “the blue” that her son has “tracked in on his boots.” The trees themselves were brought to Mexico by settlers “as seeds” and “refuse to colour// inside the lines—a precocious child unleashing/ boredom on a paint-by-numbers kit.” Returning home in the final poem, the speaker wonders if the plane’s departure means that “a sudden snowsquall of petals” from the jacaranda trees has fallen somewhere in the city the couple is leaving behind. 

McOrmond’s Jacaranda Trees, Mexico City is a tender poetic reflection of how we humans try to right ourselves in ways that may not be possible. Perhaps all we can do is to travel through our loss and grief, managing it all as best we can.

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In the golden age of Toronto’s poetry scene in the early 70s, Penn Kemp made many soon-to-be-lifelong friends: Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, P.K. Page (P.K. Irwin as artist), Robert Creeley, Allan Ginsberg, and letter-friend Diane di Prima. Her longstanding connections to these revered poets inspired her to write the chapbook Lives of Dead Poets.

Kemp’s elegies respond to the styles of the poets whom she memorializes: “A lament for those who have left/ the present, the planet and possibility/ behind, left us bewildered by/ no more/ words.” (Lives of Dead Poets.) For Gwendolyn MacEwan, Penn praises: “Your fingers/ semaphore a complex code/ we cannot read.// A ring of hands/ ready to catch or pull you up” (Not Waving But Drowning). Kemp elegizes with a little wordplay for Robert Creeley: “Reel back the real, back/ to the little wicker// basket carrying trout,/ Creeley.” (Gone Fishing) For Ontario poet Ellen Jaffe, Kemp includes a poignant event: “Ellen   dying in hospice     listens in on/ Zoom     as Voices Israel read    her poems.// How wonderful   to be read to at last.” (Homage for Ellen S. Jaffe, Poet). Kemp honours bpNichol, one of the Four Horsemen, with a high compliment: “our// Rumi, born in all/ their holy,/ poetic fecundity” (For bpNichol), the words lovingly dancing across the page. Phyllis Webb, champion of the anti-ghazal, is portrayed with whimsy: “How can we forget you?   You left/ a whiff of unicorn   in your wake.” (The Poet in Charge). Also magical, John Ashberry, the Rowan Bard, is commemorated thus: “‘Rowan is the tree of power, causing/ life and magic to flower. (Alphabet for Ashberry). A lively anecdote brings P.K. Page to life: “dressed   to the nines … // At the stove’s first growl,   she leapt up and alighted/ for the evening … closest to the door.// An oil stove had exploded on her ….// But she made that perch hers, crossing elegant legs,/ gallantly … “ (The Girl from Sao Paulo).

This is a marvellous paean to influential and mostly Canadian poets, and gives a nod to William Wordsworth’s Ode to Intimations of Immortality: “Only their poetry can still convey/ intimations of immortality ….// Only their poems can transcribe/ mysterium tremendum …// For me.   For you.” (One by One, They Depart,  the Great Ones). For Kemp’s essay sourcing her inspiration, see https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/03/penn-kemp-one-by-one-they-depart-great.html.

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Not appreciated enough in Canada, the expat Evan Jones has made a name for himself in the U.K., having published his last few books with Carcanet. Described in World Literature Today as a poet who writes “sombre yet lovely” verse, who “offers not only beauty but also a wisdom rooted in time and timelessness,” Jones has made a mark by producing well-esteemed translations. Not the kind that only pass with poets – eg. Stephen Claughton wrote of The Barbarians Arrive Today (Carcanet, 2020) that Jones’s versions of Cavafy “make me feel that I was hearing Cavafy’s own voice” – but a higher bar: translations that pass muster with scholars. For example, Kyriaco Nikias writes in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies that Jones’ work on Cavafy “has begun a process of reimagining the unity of Cavafy’s poems. This might just allow us to know Cavafy, not as the silent pupils of his scholiasts, but as engaged readers in our own right.” Taken in the context of his thoroughness and deep knowledge of Cavafy studies, Nikias’s praise is the kind offered quite rarely to translators of beloved canonical figures.

In Relations, Jones translates Charles Cros (two poems), Robert Desnos (2), Andreas Embiricos (1), Miltos Sachtouris (2), Gisele Prassinos (1), Kiki Dimoula (2), Adrian Naef, Haris Vlavianos (2), and Raoul Schrott (1). To avoid pedantry by attributing nationality and period to each of these poets, I’ll summarize by explaining that it is a French, Greek, Swiss, and Austrian grouping that, save for Cros, was mostly working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The order proceeds according to the birthdate of the poet, a mild surprise in that Jones typically arranges work in a creative, non-chronological fashion. Finally, I should mention to anyone not yet interested in this quite unusual chapbook for Canada that the poems were published in places like Poetry London, PN Review, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and The Dark Horse, making for a pile-up of prestige you just don’t see on these shores.

I confess to being unaware of the group entire, which made the process of discovery extra-exquisite. With such a lack of authority and inability to compare the poems in their original language, I’ll narrate my findings as a broad, spotty, but extensive reader of poetry with (due to space-constraints) two trusty evaluative standards when reading any translation miscellany. 

First, are the poets steamrolled into one style, or are they varied? Cros’s “Liberty” reads like the cross-bred formalist and pre-Symbolist he apparently was, with a voice that solidifies in romance but slips into dream; his “Red Herring” is a humourously strange beast meant “to annoy adults” and “to entertain children”, yet the form of the thing is so very odd – tercets with each line proceeding in a (sense-bearing phrase) em dash (one word repeated three times to sonically hammer home the preceding phrase), the poem enacts its subject, driving a nail. The next poet, Robert Desnos, also uses a conceit in “There was a leaf,” with repetitive phrases enacting the leaf base extending to the apex, but different from Cros in that the form is looser free verse largely lacking enjambment, one (often recursive) thought per line. By the time one arrives at the translation of Andreas Embiricos, one identifies Jones as a particularly sensitive translator, able to ventriloquize. 

Second, did the translator bring forward outstanding work? My favourite poem in the chapbook is Kiki Dimoula’s “The Plural Form”: Though the poem is cumulative in terms of its power, relying on two preceding stanzas to fully appreciate the form, the final stanza reads, “Night,/ substantive noun,/ feminine gender,/ a singular form./ Plural form: the nights. The nights from now on./ 

Dimoula’s a poet’s poet who overtly thinks through language while playing with it. Such a translation must be tricky work, to maintain the form’s chassis whilst also delivering its sense, especially the moments that develop and extend the definitional preambles (“the nights from now on” is a poem about loss). Indeed, taken chapbook-length, Jones’s formal choices seem virtuosic to me, the kind only a poet-translator could provide. 

Everyone, read Evan Jones. And while you’re at it, order some chapbooks from Anstruther Press and see how their offerings are as varied as Jones’s.

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Hand Shadows, by Susan Wismer, Michele Green, and Suzette Sherman, is a book as poetic and profound as its title. It documents a dance and poetry collaboration of the same name, which began as an invitation from Passionate Heart—Women’s Stories through Dance. Dancers Michelle Green and Suzette Sherman invited poet Susan Wismer to come together in performance—to offer stories, transformative experiences, healing, comfort, and peace. The title, like the collaboration, is a reminder that life is, indeed, in our hands and the shadows they create.   

The book interlaces poems with dance images to document their work, both in process and performance. It shows the artists moving intentionally and with desire into their own and one another’s shadows to imagine and create. Wismer’s poems respond to Green and Sherman’s moving bodies, while their moving bodies shift and flicker in response to Wismer’s poems. Their collaboration of dance and poetry enriches the shadows cast by their performed expressions.

Hand Shadows draws from multiple sources of light to tell multiple stories. In the book’s shadows, we learn of fear, peace, light descending from stars, a return to earth, chance, the sacred, circumstances, fragility, and survival. But in these shadows, life is not always obvious—are they hands? Are they ferns unfurling? Are they thrumming measures of time? Are they “silent /  butterflies” taking flight?

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