Coco Collins, Sorry About the Fire

Recently Sheila Heti published Alphabetical Diaries, and now Colleen Coco Collins features an alphabetical array in her debut collection of poetry: Sorry About the Fire, a singeing apologia of inventive sound and sensuousness. Her initial poem, “A Good Child Is Coming,” showcases her musical talents and pays homage to Margaret Avison’s “All Out” or “Oblation.” Collins transforms chalice into a different cupping: “Made for you, some coaxed lost wax.” This early sibilance prepares for the final line and imitates a spluttering candle and ceremony, each hissed monosyllable pausing in mouth and ear. Long o’s open to the next couplet, while hard c’s congeal and contend with melting: “a corner where you / lamp in a smoulder;” These c’s pick up the title’s “Coming,” as well as the poet’s alliterated name, while internal rhymes of more, for, corner, where, and smolder add to spontaneous combustion. Her neo-rococo flourishes continue in the third couplet, which completes the sentence: “the learn to expect / to pour it out.” Lamp as a verb and learn as a noun flint and spark the sentence.

Infinitives carry to the middle section’s focus on the vessel: “How else to face / the empty cup.” Facial features interact with the cup in the next stanza, which develops the cup’s contour: “To make it / lie down / and gulp.” The poem concludes with further embellishment and indentation: “the dead-eyed dappled horses / the milksnake’s rattle // the selkie’s soft slap-backed paddle.” Rhyme and rhythm dapple these lines with onomatopoeia and shape-shifting. Indeed, “slap-backed paddle” resonates at the end of a later poem, “Bluing,”: “What reach[ed], slapped back?” Collins’ sounds reverberate, slip back and forth, and conflagrate in oblated patterns.

Her acoustical alphabet continues in “Allometries” where she punctuates shapes of sight and sound: “No dawnings; / no realizations pricked.” This denial of epiphany is undercut by the poem’s revelatory measuring of otherness: “Dross, inauspice; / limning a pit.” All of her short i sounds, sibilants, and semi-colons clip her vision of “Solitary vertebrates as / seen through slits.” She shutters voice and vision: “Allometries again: stutters, rifts.” A parenthetic couplet just before the middle further shifts gears — “(The chassis is unchanged / but the genesis drifts)” — before the middle question that prepares for all the interrogatives in the second half of the poem. “What is manifested in the / middle distance?” All the earlier short i’s carry through in the questions: “A bird in the window? / A car in the ditch? / A disease of astonishment, come fast and thick?” Each stanza astonishes in Collins’ allometries, epiphanies, and soundscapes. “A shrieking need? / A keening vacuum? / Periphery as / a suggestion?” These rhetorical questions shift middles and peripheries before ending “Opposite me: a telamon. // Inside, oh!: a larch!” Allometric colons and exclamation marks scale anatomy, surface, and substance in Collins’ designs and interconnections.

Her welcoming verb recurs in her first three poems: “A Good Child is Coming,” “come fast and thick,” and “come out.” “April 2020” times the pandemic: “I cough in my hand / I land on my back” — another slap-back. These short a’s carry through the first stanza: “what crackles and / brusques me back / by the collar of my hairshirt.” These vowels interact with Collins’ hard c sounds: cough, crackles, brusques, collar, clamour, crouch, and come. What stands out appears in capital letters: “WHAT WAS THAT.” The poem ends in “doubt.”

The last A poem, “Atti E Moti Mentali,” looks back to Leonardo Da Vinci. Once again, allometries shape the lines:

At the mouth of a hydrothermal vent,

a quagmire current;

a stent

Rhyme and indentation contribute to attitudes and motions of the mind. The initial rhyme of vent, current, and stent reappears in pennant and unspent at the end of the poem, while “I’m sorry, I’m // a bad pennant” echoes the book’s title, Sorry About the Fire. On the cover, a bird’s wingspan hovers above the words as fan and flame.

“B” poems begin with “Bawaajigan,” an Anishenaabemowen word for dream or vision, as Collins looks forward after her return to the past. “Find me in the future: / the hill is steeper, / the dream is deeper.” Blue water from this poem flows into the next, “Bluing”: “The bluing is from the cold.” Hyper-hyphenation appears in “Bullish House”: “Garbled, map-paucit, non-locum, bit-dropped; / yanked rug-ed, caesura-ed: rootless, hiccupped.” The “poetacademic” who inhabits this bullish house scribbles with a dry pen, “counter-hex-divining founts” adding to an earlier “quincunx.;” his house is gabled, his mouth garbled.

“Caoine,” Irish for beauty, describes Rose making a recording as the sound sings out “fast vibrato in the mouth.” The poem ends with a warning to Rose to “keep back keep back” — a similar ending to slap back in earlier poems. The sounding of the title also points to Colleen Coco Collins’ aural rococoing. “Circulus Vitiosis” recapitulates vicious circles and feedback loops in her geometry of sounds. “Cacophony up the flue – – / I’ve conjured a bird again!” With a play on flew, this phoenix conjures the bird on the book’s cover. The bird hovers over poems indenting and inventing: “Nothing flitted by” with the omni-porous sounds of magic and wit.

A bird flies into “Dehiscence,” a title that sounds its sibilance in the rest of the poem — skidding, suddenly, nuanced, renouncing, colossus, strong, symbol, and seedling. Its meaning also scatters from yawning to the separation of edges in a wound. A bird flies through the middle section: “a bird is born in captivity / too strong a symbol / to be its own.” Without a mind of its own, the captive bird seeks a crack in the window. Scattered stanzas reflect a dehiscent state, as does the subject matter that begins with an elephant before shifting to bird: “what is love in the mind / of the skidding elephant.” The mind binds creatures from elephant to bird after dehiscence, “castellated thinking,” and “brinksmanshipping.” The finale repeats the opening: “love in the mind of the skidding elephant / when the child drops.” Collins’ mind torques language, thesaurusing wings tipped in water colours for shrike and crane; her lexical lick of an enhancing sensibility is evident throughout this collection.

Collins’ mind torques language, thesaurusing wings tipped in water colours for shrike and crane; her lexical lick of an enhancing sensibility is evident throughout this collection.

Her alphabet proceeds to the oxymoronic “Fast Drogues” with its “strange arrangements” and stuffed shapes of “turduckens.” “Haustoria” also plays with shapes and states of mind, as does “Hem”: “this line will draw / around this skirt.” She shares a kind of Metaphysical wit that would fit with John Donne’s “bracelet of bright hair about the bone.” Her “solace in the wrist / of the swaying gondola” matches Donne’s relic. She picks the dictionary not just alphabetically, but also for hidden meanings. Eklusis, Mothaitheacht, and lampada tradum converge in one short poem, “I Learn By Going (There Is A Field),” that borrows from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.” “All day I set to reaping sheaves” — setting the time and preparing for sunset in the rest of the poem. A solitary reaper works until “stutter / dusk / eklusis/ furl without.” The loss of focus or unstrung bow of eklusis highlights the inner-outer exchange in “without,” and also the exclusion of without company. Furl leads to “I am as the ruff of the crow in the wind,” which is followed by the Irish connection of trees — “Mothaitheacht.” Then the exchange of pronouns: “You are as this stooked field.” “Lampada tradum” or pass the torch again refocuses the exchange until “I go by night.”

Coming and going through obstacles, Collins features “Lilia,” pit traps dug by Roman armies. Drawn to rims, arising patterns, nervy and peripheral flow, a hard-won lexicon, oblique echoes of crow, and twist of contrapposto, the Irish-French-Indigenous poet windhovers and burns through words and pages until the nadir of ember and ash.

Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. She’s worked as a gallery director, in forestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. Hailing from Antler River/Deshkan Ziibiing/London, Ontario, Coco has studied at universities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Zealand, and Ireland. She lives litorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.

Publisher: Biblioasis (April 2, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 64 pages
ISBN: 9781771966139

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

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.