Wayside: A small boat, one vacant lot, a man by Kathryn MacDonald

Some words, when you string them together, defy their simplicity and create a world of their own. They take on the voice of their writer and that writer’s moment in time. And where mind and matter intersect, a singular world of genuine emotions, the poet’s “objective correlative,” comes to life on the page. Such is the art of Kathryn MacDonald. Hers is a vivid, intimate world, where Nature flourishes and serves as the source of her language, giving us Wayside: A small boat, one vacant lot, a man. Twenty-one poems. Twenty-one facets of a poet’s lyrical “I.”

These poems, both by design and content, are watercolours. Oils, pastels, hard acrylics, are made of edges, rely on borders, illusions based on blocks of space. I generalize, of course, but for me, watercolours blur the lines between what’s real and what is felt. They soften those distinctions between our inner and outer worlds and, in so doing, suggest sensations that intensify the human experience. Each poem in this collection has been rendered that way, with brushstrokes dipped in water, light and words. They evoke a faithfulness to life steeped in love and friendship despite the grief and sorrow of loss. And all of this MacDonald achieves without the gush of sentimentality. 

These are wonderful poems. Literally, full of wonder and acceptance of a poet’s right to rearrange feelings into words. Her images, as one would expect, are exquisite. She paints tableaux that manifest the presence of another in their absence. She writes: “his lips brush mine when we part / leaving my blue bicycle wobbling.” So much is said in those few words: minimum of brushstrokes not only illustrate a fleeting moment but paint a powerful human emotion. Her use of “wobbling” – after a succession of alliterative b’s – is a master stroke of lyricism, its sound and sense depicting a feeling I associate with the thrill of uncertainty and stirrings of physical attraction. A heron “stands on willow-whip legs,” appears as a Modigliani figure that “strolled / along the dock” and becomes “a small grey man – / before taking flight.” I am awe-struck by that compression of a human figure and a giant bird in flight, the two synchronized to evoke the beautiful contradictions of Nature’s work. And MacDonald’s craft.

The skies are sometimes grey in Wayside. There is illness and tragic ultimatums. That “small grey man” who sails the Bliss, a small boat, must also face its loss. As does the painter of these poems who “listens as his cane shatters silence” and is resigned to acknowledge that “[c]ells in his body blossom     multiply.” Loss is tragic and death inevitable, but life goes on and the poet puts that feeling into words:

Air sits heavy, burdened
with coming rain. A tear
breaks in the flock of cumulous
clouds and light slips obliquely
into the river’s mouth, slips
onto moon-round lily leaves
where flowers will one day bloom.

I so admire the cadence and sway of such fluid lines – I can’t say enough about their music, their subtle, almost imperceptible, alliterated syncopations! These lines are a testament to Kathryn MacDonald’s vivid way with words, both pictorially and sonically.

In this chapbook, kayaks resemble “elongated sunrises.” Reflections float “downriver / downriver / to the sea.” Dragonflies are dragons and “soar / in six directions, / hover / like hummingbirds.” A kiss is “as subdued as the gauzy sky, still as the mouth of the river.” Birds and flora, waterfront creatures populate these poems. And turtles. Turtles “especially.” MacDonald writes “I wonder if we were to decipher / the map carried on their backs / what journey might be revealed.” Her metaphors come naturally. They are both the light and brushstrokes of these poems. Here’s a scene she frames to portray dusk at the end of a summer’s day:

Day slips toward July’s long dusk
the quiet hour when mallards and geese
return to their nests, the great blue spreads
his wings and flies to the willow’s shadows,
an osprey circles toward its platform of sticks,
the moon-pale swans glide across the bay.

This scene sets the mood for what transpires between two people when one must leave for good. I’ve never liked the term “pathetic fallacy” to describe the way poets personify their natural environment, it seems demeaning to me. Regardless, MacDonald’s use of this device gives us lines like these: “My sorrow wreaks havoc / with fast-falling snow / as I kick through drifts / that bury the river trail / to him.” She compresses both a narrative (her friend is dying) and an intense feeling (her sorrow) in a tightly woven yarn of diction, voice and theme. As for the dynamics of form and text that structure these poems, they are, in the words of Emily Dickinson, like Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam.

MacDonald’s art comes with a clear sense and understanding of what makes poetry, and how to translate emotion into words. Wayside is evidence of that. Pick up the book, open it to any page, there you’ll find a watercolour of metaphors, imagery and soundscapes that tell a story of a small boat, one vacant lot, a man … and, not to forget how books like these really come to be, of a poet’s working mind.

Antony Di Nardo

Antony Di Nardo lives in Cobourg, Ontario and is the author of seven books of poetry. His most
recent, Forget-Sadness-Grass (Ronsdale Press 2022), was a CBC Books poetry pick. His suite,
“May June July,” won Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize and was nominated for a
National Magazine Award. “Among the Boughs,” first published in The Fiddlehead, will appear
in this year’s Best Canadian Poetry anthology.