Ground-shattering poems.
Axe and rifle with bayonet: these two weapons form the inverted and reversed covers of Into the Continent, Emily McGiffin’s latest collection of poetry. Although she offers two epigraphs from Karl Marx and Robert Louis Stevenson to highlight her political stance, it is Franz Kafka’s remark — “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us” — that also applies to these ground-shattering poems. The “Big Old Axe Isolated on White” on one cover and broken bodies of water in McGiffin’s poetry return to Kafka’s words a century ago. Her serene violence recurs in seams and schisms of axe cuts and bayonet thrusts.
Marx’s comment on the Sutherland Clearances epigraphs the rifle half of the book: “All their villages were destroyed and burnt, / all their fields turned into pasturage.” Marx’s Capital lays the groundwork for McGiffin’s continent, which begins with “we carried endings with us l wreckage of the morning.” Vertical strokes appear as bars and barriers within the lines, not just to arrest the rhythm, but also to bear witness to the destruction of continents in the aim of slanted rifle and axe. To situate “endings” at the beginning underscores the inverted structure of the book. Moreover, the reader pauses within lines’ phrasing where the relative absence of punctuation calls for these vertical bars. These markers also contrast with horizontal hyphens: “detritus of all coal-hearted and eclipsing anguish of the / now-divided life.” These divisions are “spliced” and “stitched” through the sounds of alliteration, internal rhyme, and consonance: “staked slash clothes bend flesh and pin and rend it leave / perdition’s fury.” Axe and bayonet slant the continent in exclamations of “o how! too much of kicking out beneath you!”
These divisions reappear on the next page in the large separation between two lines: “in what proportion written out?” and “in what proportion dreaming.”
This is a poetry of proportions and disproportions in the eco-poetics of continental destruction and linear structures where beginnings and endings form blocks of free verse. The expansiveness of dreaming is picked up in suffixes: “long hours on the tenuous and simple tracks appearing and / receding in the ling I.” The lyrical vision and division appear in long o’s stretched out through bestowed, overburdened, handholds, and openings. Similarly, long e’s extend the lines in appearing, receding, feet, fleetly, and greenery. Between “simple tracks” and “tender whispers trail,” the “truer kindnesses” intervene in a whispered rhapsody absorbed by the floral landscape.
McGiffin’s vertical bars are the equivalent of a measure in a musical score, and her music appears not only within a line, but also across pages and continents. In her two-handed exercise, “we carried endings within us” opens the rifle half of the book, which is met by “the end has come and gone” at the onset of the bayonet half at the opposite end. This early emphasis on endings and beginnings goes hand in hand with the method of reading the two halves of the book in inverted and reversed order. Each half may represent the experiences of entering Africa and North America in a continental drift and shift.
The axe half opens apocalyptically carrying a Scottish background into the Canadian landscape: “the end has come and gone already, charred apocalypse of / steel, cotton, mute legions of the midnight shifts.” The poet evokes the Industrial Revolution through the sounds of short vowels — abrupt a’s in already, charred, apocalypse; i’s in apocalypse, midnight, shifts, and “pigstick,” which ends the midnight shift and enters the heath. This apocalyptic scene continues to the “heaths beyond carbuncle mills, their galling notes of perjury / darken the lacklustre morn l.” L consonants belong to apocalypse rather than any lyrical flow, while hard c, r, and g patterns reinforce the galling notes of poetry and pigstick of perjury. After the first bar: “taken to extremes and flogged, / the moorlands overturn and heave;”. In extremis, the whip accompanies pigstick, axe, and bayonet through eco-apocalypse. Overturn this book to aerate moor and continent. “Heave” moves across the page to reappear as “heaved into the loch” — the heaviness of a smashed past.
Heave pertains to the bleak landscape but also to human anatomy under the burdens of labour from birth to death — the body’s beginning and ending: “they arch their broke, / despoiled backs, flayed thickets given up for rows of sooty / brick l.” These are the backs of people and places under duress — flogged and frayed, broke and brick. These “excesses” of “church bells and nine thousand / voices raised in mourning strain” belong to Marx’s “surplus,” while mourning strain doubles between midnight and afternoon, as well as the sound and pain of strain. “Their canticles of praise / and suffering fitted to the afternoon l.” The rush of f’s halt at the bar before resuming to “fled the utterance, fled the damnable pistons.” Smooth-talking mathematics and machinations conclude in “hearts of titillated dawn.” After an apostrophe “o empire!” the titillated dawn tills the soil and furrows the “furred sorrow of retreat” in eco-metaphors.
This paragraph’s progression from midnight until dawn leads to the brief domestic stanzas in the following poem:
what beginnings? even the quern
work of my grandmother’s hands
outlawed smashed
heaved into the loch
so magnus carried corn
to the laird’s mill grubbed up
specie to bring home the meal
The first and third stanzas imitate the actions of her grandmother’s quern grinding corn in exchange for the coin of specie. Similarly, the interchange between monosyllables clashes against disyllables to crush the grain that is part of societal grinding under empire and industrialization.
“Ing” suffixes crosshatch the book with participles advancing the narrative and lyrical arcs across continents. Consider page 4 of the axe half: “then down the weald and flickering the gone archdeacon / sky, the ruddy hawk spins upwards, that inkling of preyed upon.” Vertical directions, rotating syntax, and hyphenated adjectives course through morning, wing, pillowing, drifting, circling, freewheeling, unravelling, twisting, and striving in sounds of James Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The “lines” in this paragraph refer to the landscape but also to the verse. Page 4 of the bayonet-rifle half of the book mirrors its counterpart: “then down the glade and trembling the tall grey-flecked sky / a goshawk wheels and here that inkling of the preyed-upon.” In McGiffin’s doubling the homonym of “here” comes into play in her virtuosic blade of sound’s wheel and visual ink. Her inkling of meaning is understatement, despite the violence of bayonet, axe, lance, razor, spear, undercut, and unwanted. A bifocal lens on both halves of her book yields an inkling of understanding.
“Axing out the trees, we turned the forest into white spaces” — a trope that links with “receding in the ling.” Ink from “inkling” responds to the question “in what proportion written out?” While a preposition is featured in the title, Into the Continent, another lowly preposition hinges transitions into continents by way of violent instruments: “breakers through the curtained sleet.” Her transatlantic passage navigates a “steering through another dark” — the heart of continental darkness in a “vessel piloted through squalls.” Seas are thoroughfares for imperial spread of axes and bayonets slicing through texts and territories — “gladiators, bestiarii, trench-diggers of history.” These in-between states — “through the curtained sleet,” “through another dark // passage,” “through squalls,” “through this stricken league,” and “looping through the air” — thread their way through the poems until they reach a climax (sexual, environmental, continental) in “he wants to carve his way upriver … through thorns and biting insects.” With “bayonet raised he fights hard into / his continent.”
Likewise, the axe section situates this preposition to accompany metaphors: “arrival is a knife pulled through a fruity rind” and “beauty / threaded through their mouths.” The knife may be double edged: on the one hand, it signals domestic duty and lyrical beauty; on the other hand, it has the potential for violence. In addition to vertical bars, end brackets appear as barriers to jolt the cadences of settling. The “i” in the poem appears in lower case to signify a diminutive status of a struggling woman. The most experimental typography may be found in a poem beginning with “soft green shifts through its shades” where beauty declines to inner turmoil: “my skin a sack that hopelessness made gaunt > \ what claim had i to / ? i knocked back and ] [“ The poet’s axe hacks away at brackets of experience in Canada and South Africa.
In a recent essay on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Jan Zwicky illustrates her argument with Gestalt figures of the “Rubin vase” and “Necker cube.” The double vision of these figures applies to the twin series in the two halves of Into the Countinent. McGiffin’s twofold vision in axe and bayoneted rifle slices the settling and unsettling entries and cadences to past and future continents, as she blades the thickets of land and language.
Emily McGiffin was born on Tla-o-qui-aht territory and raised on the lands of the Ts’uubaa-asatx and Quw’utsun Nations. She’s the author of Between Dusk and Night, shortlisted for the CAA Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award, Subduction Zone, winner of the ASLE Creative Book Award, and Of Land, Bones and Money, a book of literary criticism, and the winner of the 2008 RBC Bronwyn Wallace Award for Emerging Writers for poetry. Currently, she is a Research Fellow at University College London.
Publisher: University of Regina Press (March 30, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 80 pages
ISBN: 9780889779891
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.