The cover of Maureen Hynes’s sixth collection of poetry distorts a compass, pulls it against any northern direction so that the image resembles a grand piano or a harp, which appears in her first, eponymous poem, “Take the compass,”. The comma in the title measures rhythms and directions of existence, the caesuras and enjambments that march through her poem to arrest and surprise the reader. The cover’s compass is also shaped like a comma in her magnolia tree’s buds and “lifeline caesura.” Hynes’s imperatives track a gentle firmness in accented parallels: “Take the compass, / take the harp, take / the FitBit and the Band-Aid Box.” The physicality of these opening images is matched by a cerebral equivalent of “take” as consideration, so that what’s down to earth reaches higher up: “Fold the whole / grey sheet of sky, lumpy and unalluring / into your rucksack.” In her viscous compass long o’s open to the sky, while other long vowels of a, e, and i in the second line close into the hard consonants of rucksack, the destiny and destination of her take.
Her next sentence opens o’s again in the “song of woe,” while “the itch” fits into the Band-Aid box in search of healing. “No keys or papers / needed for this journey” of musical keys played on harp or compass as an instrument whose needle oscillates near the north. Multiple and’s suggest an adherence of poet to world, and reader to poet in a shared journey: “Pack needle and nail, / thread and wire, fragrant cathedral beeswax, / the air recently flapped under a gull’s wing.” Pack is the instruction of rucksack; needle veers to cathedral and compass, threading meaning and direction; flapped and fold encompass air and sky, and unalluring wing. The impediment of a shoe pebble works through the line “to make you stop and rest and puzzle.” Each sentence accompanies the reader on a journey of sight, sound, and thought: “Carry / curiosity and confusion in your hand, stroke / them with feathers and prick them with thorns / to keep them alive.” Strong alliteration yields to feathers that recall the gull’s wing, while prick returns to the Band-Aid box. More alliteration in face and fog, hands and hopefulness are accompanied by sibilants leading to the final “lost”: “No journey / is completed without yearning and a sustained / mercy for the walkers, the harpists, the injured, / the hatless, and the lost.” This final sentence fans out to include more than one individual in a community of empathy, embraced and encompassed by music’s sustained notes and mercy. The instrument on the cover reaches out as heart and harp take the moral compass of her music and yearning journey.
“Before Nightfall” continues the journey of outreach in iambic steps:
“set out without expectation
without itinerary
as you embark on the nameless
fragmentary journey before sunset”
The repeated “out” jostles with the “in” in itinerary, as does “ex” with “em” – syllabic fragments of Hynes’s voyage. While the poet travels outside of herself in her arrangement of words, the reader gets meaning out of the poem’s expansion from horizontals in the first stanza to verticals in the second:
“first you feel the lift then the chill
of planetary relics departiculating
into stars and comet dust
you are moving fast now”
The second line of this stanza re-enacts the earlier fragmentary journey, which progresses from monosyllables to the polysyllabic departure and disintegration. Cosmic dust returns to an articulation of monosyllables accelerating the pace of life’s quest.
Internal spacing and assonance of long vowels imitate the fragmentary breathing: “you rise hover over enormous grey waves.” Taken and overtaken by her compass, the poet shifts into metaphoric mode: “sand rinsed out of your thought-gears / by the rain the wet laundry of your emotions.” The next stanza continues departiculating in anatomy’s ampersands:
“flaps dry your body lands
close to the cliff edge
arms & legs outstretched
near the ancestors’ graves”
After the rise and fall of cemeteries, “you re-enter the language of high cliffs.” Hynes’s compassing mind is universal, directing her gaze from the commonplace of outskirts to cosmic Perseids, an oculus to the oceanic, a spirit guide to miracles beyond. She quests through the quotidian to the quintessential.
In her musical rucksack a silver flute and pink electric guitar play to the pied piper, while blues pour forth from Miles Davis’s tender trumpet in overtones and undertones. Hynes’s poetry covers a wide variety of subject matter and forms from floral imagery to astronomy. A number of her poems confront the current pandemic. Consider “Kind of Blue” with its two balanced stanzas: the first stanza begins with “Well, we’re all kind of blue now,” while the second ends with “that particular kind / of everywhere sans serif sorrow.” Shades of blue are exhibited in colour, mood, and sound: “Blue poured over the entire world.” Chinese calligraphic characters in the first stanza turn to western fonts in the second. The end of the first stanza (“fluid fingers of paint grabbing / the world from above”) is echoed in Miles Davis’s fingers in the second – “those long / tender trumpet notes.” The ubiquitous virus begins in “a storefront in Chengdu” and spreads to her “neighbour’s front door.” It hinges between fronts and fonts in a sibilance of sadness, smoothness, and “sans serif sorrow.” This final font does more than alliterate: it suggests the contrast between sans serif and serif, which is a supplemental and residual font. The former font highlights the precise nature Hynes’s vision, whereas the latter characterizes her metaphoric resonances and meanings. The dialectic between these two fonts is a measure of the quality of Hynes’s poetry. Accordingly, she achieves “Stability, instability, a new / position on the fulcrum.”
Hynes can be playful in “Hello, Bobbin –” or “Everything’s Hunky-Dory” with her “highbrow / knickknacks.” “My Bedside Table” takes after Eve Joseph’s “The poet keeps a jar of commas”: “I keep a silver pillbox of ampersands / in the drawer & on sleepless / nights I pop a few to reconnect.” Several of her poems deal with sleep, and this one ends with ampersands “stretched out for a whole night / of oddities & uninterrupted / yearnings & surprising reunions.” Hynes’s conjunctions never fail to surprise, as they rise to the occasion through wit and whimsy.
Her musicality is matched by her visual imagination exhibited in ekphrastic poems such as “The Juggler,” which concludes with a look at surrealist artist, Remedios Varo’s painting of the same name. Just as the poet is thrilled and scared by Varo’s twenty-one women cloaked together in grey garment, so the poem cloaks those emotions in two stanzas. The first begins with “Yesterday a great many pellets / of graupel shot out of the low grey sky –,” a greyness that is picked up in the grey garment at the conclusion. The poem then moves into masks, a constant reminder of the pandemic’s identity: “Spring’s thunderous shout muffled by its cloudy facemask.” Through her abundant ampersands Hynes juggles Scarlatti and Varo, masking and unmasking in her collection of poems and recollection of childhood. Whether sonnetizing Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, introducing Lorine Niedecker’s poems, or invocating “Kletic at the Blood Wolf Full Moon,” Hynes instructs and delights. Take this book, and let it guide you from bedside through the psyche of sound and the planetary “calmness of your spirit.”
Maureen Hynes, winner of the Gerald Lampert poetry award and shortlisted for the Petra Kenny, Raymond Souster, and Pat Lowther awards, has published six books of poetry. She lives in Toronto.
- Publisher : McGill-Queen’s University Press (Sept. 15 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 104 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0228018811
- ISBN-13 : 978-0228018810
