Crying Dress by Cassidy McFadzean

Cassidy McFadzean is a master of poetic form. “Death March Sestina” in her collection Drolleries, and her sublime sonnet sequence Third State of Being are evidence of this. But in Crying Dress, form breaks open.  In the first poem “Chamber Music” she writes “Show me a building with no facing”. Given the lavish style of her previous books this line sets a clear tone for what follows.

There is a spiritual purity in these poems. They are filled with air and light, often enhanced by wide line spacing—they breathe. The ornate furniture of her earlier work is still present, but now it is placed in a modern room from one of the Uno Prii high-rises mentioned throughout. If her earlier books were tours through public galleries filled with historical art, these poems are glimpses through the hallways of her private home and the art on the walls is valued for its personal meaning.

McFadzean has always had a deep interest in writing about art, that makes this collection, so concerned with architecture, a natural development. Her first book, Hacker Packer, had a medieval mood with poems about tapestries, ancient temples, and complex riddles. Her second collection, Drolleries, was a sophisticated bestiary of myths, animals, and art, that also captured the complexities of our digital age. But this book is different, the poems are less dense and more transparent. Each piece in this romantic and disturbing collection is a little room the reader can visit and return to. Although the high concept of urban architecture runs through it, this is not a “concept book,” each poem stands alone as an individual aesthetic experience. I know I will be returning to these surprising poems filled with evocative and heartbreaking lines. 

McFadzean examines how our bodies, our lives, and our spirits unfold in physical “architecture”. The title poem “Crying Dress” (an actual dress gifted to her) presents a metaphor for the physical and emotional spaces we inhabit: 

I said you could trace thought processes
like a series of intersecting bridges
imagining each fragment opening up the text […]

Spoken word as directives 	love as action 
The movement of a body in space 	geometric

And in “Bird People”: 

Over time the edges of my teeth become jagged 
from grinding against themselves in the night
How I injured my spirit pecking at its form
Or was I always of the world and its detritus 

The collection opens with a dedication to her partner Kourosh, who is intimately mentioned by name throughout, and ends with an acknowledgement saying, “Your thinking about architecture, playful turns of phrase, and sustaining love opened up the world of these poems.” Often while reading, my thoughts returned to this beautiful statement, and I found it framing my perception.  These are poems about the world being opened through love and curiosity. I imagined Cassidy and Kourosh’s days together: two intelligent people working, studying, discussing poetry and art, science and architecture. The puns and word play are aesthetic choices that add to the feeling of a rich life, filled with love, wit, and joyful absurdity, as in “Book of Ours” where she writes: 

Reviewing our shared lexicon 
Ours     A propositional architecture […] 
which sings of nothing but its pleasure
in singing for the pleasure 	Purely 

And in “Gilding the Lilly”, “To languish, in language / conquered by all I can’t contain”. Then suddenly amid this pleasure, life brings intrusions of the unbearable, and we are faced with individual lines that rupture the poem and push the reader into the deepest levels of emotional life. In “Poem with No Perspective” she shockingly asserts “I feel at my core alone in the world” […] “Deep down I suspect I deserve this violence / All my life waiting for it to unfold”. 

This is a collection of love poems: curious-intellectual love, romantic love, fearful anxiety-ridden love—the kind that comes from intimately knowing things can be taken from you in a flash. This is a book about clinging to the physical world while you still can, before vanishing into the ether as all things do. Even something as solid as a glorious Uno Prii high-rise will eventually decay. 

Things vanish quickly: 
the bird inside the tree trunk, 
the last text message 
my mother ever sent […] 
Another lightning bolt—there 
now I’m gone (“Veil of Cashmere”)

Drew Lavigne

Drew Lavigneis the Poet Laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick. A member of the editorial board at The Fiddlehead and host of the Attic Owl reading series. Recent work has appeared in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, Tourniquet Magazine, and with Productions Rhizome. He is the editor of Labyrinth Press, and author of the forthcoming collection The Golden Snare.

• Drew Lavigne

  https://miramichireader.ca/author/drew-lavigne/

  

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