Time at a Standstill

By John Barton

In “Woman with Wild Flowers,” one of the last poems in Aide-Mémoire, Ruth Roach Pierson’s second collection of poetry, the narrator—she must be female; shall we call her Ruth?—ponders the figure in a painting with the same title by the French post impressionist, Odilon Redon. Ruth tries to meet the unnamed woman’s eyes but this woman won’t return her regard. She compares her almond eyes and oval face to “Natalie’s” and to “Simone’s,” two women never mentioned again in the poem or elsewhere in the book. The equation of an indifferent unfamiliar with two friends or members of her family, however, seems to me to be an attempt to make this stranger less strange, though the women she’s compared to are sketched in such a cursory way that they are even more ephemeral to the reader, the quick gesture drawings students execute in a life-drawing class. We only know something about one’s eyes and the other’s face. They are shadows of a shadow. Yet this woman in the painting, according to Ruth, has “her own look,” her own individuated gaze and poet and painted woman (no pun intended), each with a unique way of seeing, eye each other, or do they?

Ruth presses on in the poem, but does not move on from the painting. Wild flowers she assumes were picked in a meadow are mentioned; the woman’s lips are “thin but pursed.” Then this eighteen-line poem suddenly turns, as if the poet has finally found her legs. She realizes that “the woman [is] star[ing] / at nothing as though unseeing / or witnessing an inner // clair-obscur.” The stanza break after “inner” beautifully enacts this turning, with “clair-obscur” opening into the poem like one of the wild flowers that the woman is holding, the poet has told us five lines earlier, with “an unseen hand.” It’s as if this turning in fact turns on the poet, takes her by surprise, and she too is now witnessing and perhaps even seeing with new eyes her own inner world of shadow and light, and in an instant has been brought face to face by this painting with her own habitual, even painterly tendency towards chiaroscuro when dealing with the details of her own life and mental state.

We don’t get any of those details, however, for they are not the point of this poem; we shall have to look elsewhere in the book for these. Rather it is about the apprehension of her own mind-, body-, and spirit-scapes by this profoundly reflective poet—and by extension our own requirement to apprehend, as her readers, these three sophisticated and remarkably cultivated milieu, for this poet has her own look, and her own way of looking. And, most importantly, the above-mentioned turning in the poem is not an exercise in narcissism, for the poet is looking at a figure in a painting not at herself in a mirror.

The effect of Ruth’s epiphany is profound:

 

… I stand

and stand before it. Time

at a standstill. She sees.

 

Sees. Behind her

deepening and spreading, a splotch

of intense yellow. (75)

 

A key word in these final six lines of the poem, strangely, is “it,” for, though it must refer to the painting, grammatically “it” can also “stand in” for both the “clair-obscur” and time itself—and even in my effort to describe its effect, the word “it” is ubiquitous and ambiguous. Therefore the poet is standing before the unnamed woman’s inner life as well as her own, and, somehow, time is key. It’s as if the process of enlightenment, of moving between darkness and light, is implicated in the transaction between the viewer and the viewed because it must involve time and its passage to be of any import.

Yet, for this enlightenment to be perceived, time must also be made to stand still. And Odilon Redon, who painted this work over 110 years ago, has definitely succeeded in doing so, for he has made at least one of his viewers—in this case Ruth Roach Pierson (behind every good narrator stands a very good poet)—stop before what for her is an entirely beguiling work of art. For the purposes of the poem, the painting has thus become a conduit into the psyche that goes both ways into the viewer and the viewed, with the woman in the painting carried forward in time yet caught in her own small pensive moment of history while Ruth obtains, however briefly, a glimpse into the historic present, which I feel is a method of access to the eternal and the immortal, and therefore into herself and her place in time’s ceaseless, one-way unfurling. The power of this presentiment is signaled to the poet and to her readers by the deepening and spreading yellow—in a stroke suggested by that beautiful, impressionist-sounding word “splotch”—which fills in the painting’s background. It is so immediate to Ruth that the use of the present participles “spreading” and “deepening” makes the paint appear still to be wet, as if Odilon Redon, the painter, were with us as well and sharing in this very moving instance of Ruth’s awareness about the light and darknesses within and of time being made to stand still. It is his presence in the painting and Ruth’s, as well as our own, awareness of this that makes him, I would allege, a great artist, for in my mind, how he encoded himself into his materials that has allowed him to endure when encountered on stretched canvass or, at one remove, on the page. This poem is testament to art’s importance as a springboard or sprung canvass to enlightenment. I will show elsewhere, art has been a touchstone for Ruth in her apprehension of life and self. Like me, who has written one book of poems about Emily Carr and is in the throes of a second involving the American painter Paul Cadmus, Ruth is a poet of ekphrasis. As a fellow visual-art fetishist, I am struck by how Ruth places herself in a clear relationship with the artwork being viewed; I am more distant.

Now to read the poem in its entirety, so you can observe for yourselves how the poem works:

 

Woman with Wild Flowers

(Odilon Redon, 1890s)

 

I fix my eye on her. Try to catch

her eye, but she won’t return

my gaze. She has Natalie’s

 

almond eyes, Simona’s oval face,

her own look. Across the bottom

of the canvas a band of Mother-

 

of-God blue. In an unseen hand

a clutch of flowers

wild from a meadow. Lips

 

thin but not pursed, the woman stares

at nothing as though unseeing

or witnessing an inner

 

clair-obscur. I stand

and stand before it. Time

at a standstill. She sees.

 

Sees. Behind her,

deepening and spreading, a splotch

of intense yellow. (75)

 

Anyone familiar with Aide-Mémoire may wonder why I chose this poem as indicative of the whole, especially as the impression the book leaves readers with is of time slipping away quickly in the living of a life, slipping immediately into retrospect. However, I suspect that Ruth’s impulse to write has been to pan for gold in the turbulent, fugitive stream of time, full of slow eddies and sudden rapids, attempting to see what the fine mesh of her keen intelligence might catch in its weave. Her process is to follow how the mind recalls the gold and fool’s gold of the past into the present or what I would call the present past. Ruth is living the examined life and is attempting to witness the clair-obscur.

Unalluded-to anywhere in “Woman with Wild Flowers,” of course, is the fact that it must be set in a museum. Where else could it be located unless in the home of a wealthy collector, and yet this poem somehow seems to be about an intensely lived private moment set in public space? It is the word “stand” that helps Ruth to evoke the kind of space a public museum creates, for by implication if she were not standing before Redon’s painting, she would be moving on, and anyone who has ever visited an art gallery knows that this is how the drill goes, viewers stand (or not) or move on (or not) as they train their gaze and apprehend the treasures within (and I intend this “within” to be both self-reflexive and interrogative). And if Ruth is anything, she is a gazer and a looker (no pun intended—or maybe it is, for based on the poems in Aide-Mémoire, Ruth might well have been a bon vivant in her youth). Interestingly, “Woman with Wild Flowers” evokes no sense that there is anyone else with Ruth at the museum while she takes the measure of Redon’s subject. If I were a betting man—and for the purposes of this talk, I am—I’d wager that Ruth did not see this painting in a busy retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, say, where the crowds elbow past you, getting in between us and whatever we’re looking at, where there’s no room to commune with time, our collective mortality, and, however briefly, make time stand still. No, my guess is that Ruth was transfixed by this painting on a quiet weekday afternoon, when no one else was visiting the museum’s permanent collection; she might not be alone, for if she came with a friend, he or she is a few steps away, being transfixed by the masterwork of another artist.

I could be completely off base, for Ruth may have only seen a reproduction in a catalogue, but the word “stand,” suggests otherwise. Who stands and gazes at a colour plate? And certainly other poems in Aide-Mémoire suggest that Ruth is a bit of a culture-vulture, regularly visiting museums and small independent galleries. And it is clear to me that a museum space is a crucial one for her to gaze in, for it is the museum that houses the artifacts of history, whether they are paintings by an enviable number of post-impressionists or rearticulated dinosaur bones or the caps worn by women who fought for Canada in the Second World War, the stories behind which inform her monograph, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1986. It is a book a friend of mine remembers acquiring when he was the librarian for the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa and it stands alongside the many books, scholarly articles, and conference papers on women’s history that she wrote, contributed to, and edited during a thirty-one year career as a historian and feminist scholar. Her other monographs include Canadian Women and the Second World War, Women and Peace: Theoretical, Historical, and Practical Perspectives, Women in Canada 1920s to 1960s, Delivering Motherhood: Maternal Ideologies and Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives, Canadian Women’s Issues in two volumes, Strong Voices and Bold Visions, and Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race.

Born in Seattle in 1938, she spent her formative years soaking up the ambience of the Pacific Northwest, spending early years on the west shore of Puget Sound in what would become one of the much-referenced locale in Aide-Mémoire, Phinney Bay, which is close to Bremerton, home of what was, and is less so now, a major American naval base. When I go down to the Dallas Road cliffs in Victoria that overlook the seashore, I can sometimes watch U.S. Navy vessels piloting the Strait of Juan De Fuca on their way to the open Pacific seventy miles away. Standing at the end of the breakwater that I reference in the final poem in Hymn, I can look to the south and imagine Ruth’s early life going on in the not-so-distant past, a young girl in a swing or a nose in a book. As an adolescent, she spent one year as an exchange student in Braunschweig, Germany, before returning to Seattle to finish high school and to begin her post-secondary education at the University of Washington, where she studied history. She completed her post-graduate studies at Yale, with her doctoral thesis on the German Jewish identity in the Weimar Republic. This level of intimate knowledge with German history and the German language explains the occasional use of a German word throughout both Aide-Mémoire and Where No Window Was. Each German word used must be the right word that exactly matches what Ruth is looking for verbal (and written expression), such as die Spuren (or “the traces”) in “Insignia.” Additionally, it seems that she has a familial connection to Germany as well as a preoccupation with the German atrocities of the Second World War and how shame in its aftermath has shaped memory; again take a look at “Insignia.” “Shame” is an essential thread that preoccupies this book, which I will discuss later. Ruth left the United States permanently, if not irrevocably, to join the faculty of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John’s in 1970, a locale she revisits several time in Aide-Mémoire. Ten years later, Ruth moved to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, now a part of the University of Toronto, where she is a professor emerita since retiring in 2001. It is in the decade since that readers of Canadian poetry have come to know her, though based on her level of accomplishment, it is clear that her interest in and composition of poetry far predates her departure from the so-called workaday world.

In 2002, Ruth published her first book of poems with Buschek Books, Where No Window Was, a title strangely in sync with the unseeing/seeing paradigm animating “Woman with Wild Flowers.” She chose as one of her epigraphs the following passage from Aristotle:

The difference [between the historian and the poet] is that the one tells of what has happened, the other of the kinds of the things that might happen. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history …

A perhaps interesting rebuke to the discipline that she pursued for the entirety of her professional life, but the sense of poetry being considered with things that might happen also gives an interesting twist to her obsession with memory as evidenced in her poems. Perhaps it is how we allow ourselves to shape our memories that brings into play possibilities rather than certainties, new ways of seeing our individual pasts that are less about facts than about how we come to see them in ways we did not initially knowingly live them. Unlike the historian, perhaps the poet has the tools to enter into the world of speculation more handily, allowing the retrospective-drifting mind to re-cover the territory the historian has already crossed, cataloguing its contents, or as Ruth says in “Repeat Performances” from Where No Window Was:

Evening my parents sat out here,

watched the sun leave the river.

A kingfisher chatters, sweeping

in low, following the stream’s

curve to his perch in the alder

cantilevered over the water.

There he waits, watches,

dives for his dinner.

 

Two end-of-day riparian rituals:

his, born of instinct or intelligent habit,

utilitarian; mine,

merely chosen repetition,

not unlike the act of collecting—

one more piece of art deco vaseline glass

or another 1920s fishing reel—

 

as though, by this proliferation of the same,

things will be kept as they were. (16)

 

Is the historian the kingfisher, diving for his dinner (I know every job I have ever had has seemed about bringing home the bacon, which I am sure it must sometimes have seemed to be one to Ruth, given the grind of academia). And is the narrator the poet? Of course she is, but, in her pursuit of the poem, she can’t rid herself of the habit of collecting all that glass and all those fishing reels that fill up with and crank her past closer in order to keep everything as they were. In other words, no historian would want to bring time to a standstill, but a poet would.

Before leaving behind Where No Window Was, a book I highly recommend for the same qualities that make Aide-Mémoire such rewarding reading, I want to highlight “Conceit,” a short, compact poem that I believe casts telling light on Ruth’s process:

I don’t know that there always has to be

an “I”—camera’s aperture, mast

to cling to, pole to run a flag up.

Auto for the bio. No

cynosure or paparazzo darkens

a Casper David Friedrich scene,

only the drama of oak, soaring mountain,

sky. Piet Mondrian purged his art

of all but geometry and equilibrium.

And may Saul Bellow rest assured,

the parade of pictures, that play

of light and shadow philosophers call

appearance, will soldier on after

our eyelids are weighted with coins.

What is our fear: that without an “I”

there’d be no “us,” no “you”?

Or that beauty’s site of being—

the “I” of the beholder—vanishes

into the eye of a passing cloud? (13)

 

Characteristic of her many fine poems is a seeing of experience through art and literature. As seen through Ruth’s eyes, do not Friedrich’s dramatic oaks and Mondrian’s equilibrium remind us of Redon’s wild flowers and the ability of his unnamed subject to bring time to a stop? Also there is the lovely equation of “I” and “eye” and of “site” (s-i-t-e) and “sight” (s-i-g-h-t)—the latter pairing conflating place with awareness—which again is so reminiscent of the invocation to see in “Woman with Wild Flowers.” Yet, Ruth is an autobiographical poet with a historian’s perspective, wise to the over-focusing upon the self, the self who keeps running up the flag to say “You-who, here I am.” No, Ruth’s poetic self is one aware of the selfhood of the others who comprise “us” of society and “you” of intimacy and friendship. Her I is many I’s or what I might call the representative self, one that does not speak for others as a politician might but presents the details or her own experience so those others may recognize them and feel both kinship and difference. Hers is a self that is modest enough to say that this is what it was like to live, as a woman, in a certain place and time, before the inevitability of vanishing into the “eye (e-y-e) of a passing cloud.” Is this eye also standing for the capital letter I of the numinous? Yet it is “a passing cloud,” suggesting that even the numinous world is transitory. Ruth knows that beauty, for as long as it exists as a concept, will go on without her or any one of us, that she is both merely and importantly a beholder and a conduit (shall we add “pipe to go down the drain through” to her list of epithets for English’s purblind pronoun “I”?). To me the modesty of this poem very much is in sync with her discipline as a historian with its macro view. As a historian she spent three decades telling many women’s stories, as a poet, she has begun to tell one woman’s story, albeit her own; however, I read the details of her life to be posited as representative, as touchstones for others, as agents of empathy—without which no life is worth living. In honour of this wonderful poem, I am shifting through the community of pronouns that English offers us, shifting from “I” to “she” to “you” to “us,” and from “Ruth” to “the poet” and back.

Aide-Mémoire, her second and most recent book of poems was published in 2007 by BuschekBooks, a small press run by John Buschek and Rita Dovovan, two of my closest friends in Ottawa. John Buschek evinces what I would call essential literary-press values and has a genius for selecting good books like Ruth’s. It was nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, a richly deserved tribute.

By her own admission, Ruth came to poetry late. In “Though Not Asked,” the poet wonders,

 

Was it folly to begin writing poems

when already growing old? Poetry is written,

I’ve been told, out of new experience. Well, ageing

is new, goddamit. The newness of skin

falling in folds like a stranger’s clothes. The throes

windedness climbing subway stairs. And then

looked at no longer with desire … (71)

 

She certainly has written some excellent poems about ageing, but given that she is a poet of memory, she would need an (shall I dare say) abattoir of them to be competent as one. Perhaps a younger poet would not be as well outfitted. As a poet of memory, she is nevertheless remembering incidents from her past with fresh insight and presenting them as new reading experiences to her potential readers. Also, even if she wasn’t writing poetry earlier in her life, she was reading it. A line from “The Unclenching” in “La Grande Illusion,” the second section of Aide-Mémoire, affirms that she was reading the poems of John Berryman with her late first husband, which would have been before 1978, when this marriage came to an end. A secondary source confirms this date: Ruth cites it in “Archival Research as Refuge, Penance, and Revenge,” an article she contributed to Queen’s Quarterly’s Winter 2007 issue that links her personal experience of sexual double standards in the aftermath of her breakup with those forced upon women in the Canadian military in the Second World War that concerned the dissemination of information about and treatment of VD.

The collapse of this marriage seems to have been a source of shame, however imposed and socially constructed that shame may have been. As Ruth recounts in the Queen’s Quarterly article,

When I asked what we should tell our friends, he answered “Truth is always the best policy.” And so the story that was told was of my unfaithfulness, my affair with another man. His infidelities were never mentioned. He became the injured party. And many a person in our shared circle of acquaintances and friends, female as well as male, took pity on him as the victim. I began to feel enormous guilt, nourished by the negative judgments of me I projected onto others or that actually reached my ears. (p.492)

This is a kind of guilt that I can identify with, for I too have been accused of bringing a relationship to an end because of an alleged infidelity, one of thought rather than action, where my partner nonetheless intuited into the truth of my greater attraction to someone else and therefore could not live with his feelings of diminishment no matter how much I tried to argue that they were in fact groundless. I know firsthand that the intensity of this kind of guilt “problematizes” one’s sense of self, to use a po-mo-sounding word, and the problem of the self when it comes to the diminishment of others is an undercurrent through Aide-Mémoire, counterbalanced by the search for, and the achievement of, atonement.

Ruth has the admirable discretion not to over-freight her poems with too much information—the Queen’s Quarterly frank article comes as quite a revelation in comparison to the poems, which I read first—her actual “moral lapses” (please note the double quotation marks) are referenced tangentially in both Where No Window Was and Aide-Mémoire. This discretion serves to heighten the sense of shame felt, and the theme comes up immediately in the first stanza of the latter book’s opening poem, “The Marrow”: “How gauche I was last night!” After deflecting into a description of the rain and of a Man Ray photograph, during which she acknowledges that

 

… We see the world

through a mesh of likenesses, one hooking another,

until it’s impossible to sever the linked hoops back

to recover the nub, the marrow of a thing[,] (11)

 

she goes on to say,

 

Everything tends towards aide-mémoire—moaning doves,

a hotel window overlooking a courtyard in ruins, a clock

ticking, the airless still of mothballs and African violets. Opening a book

closed tight for years, I find your inscription, with its precise grace,

a reminder not all was lies and strife. Morning dissolves

 

into afternoon, the rain doesn’t let up and I can’t shake

my discontent with that self of the night before. How could

I so offend? No comfort in the thought I was in disguise,

a mawkish double, self-absorbed. If only

I could cast off that habit of mind, the self,

as in a blast of wind, the bare-limbed tree shudders free of rain. (11)

 

The angst over the undescribed incident is so intense that Ruth imagines its perpetrator almost as another person, another self whose way of thinking and behaving misrepresents her essential self. Understandably, she wishes she could disencumber herself of it, a wish that “if only” suggests she does not feel is possible. Her mood is such that she believes being so freed would leave her true nature as denuded of vitality as a leafless tree in winter. But we all know that trees not killed by the cold regenerate and leaf out. To be in leaf spiritually is a key theme in Aide-Mémoire, and Ruth is absorbed not in the self per se, but in the might have beens and might will bes that are, according to Aristotle, the stuff not of history but of poetry.

One of the most arresting poems to particularize Ruth’s analyses of the self is “Burlap Coat with a Red Velvet Lining” from the second section, “La Grande Illusion.” Inspired by an installation by Luci Dilkus, from the artist’s Old Bag series, it is an arch foreshadowing of “Though Not Asked,” which appears in the book’s fourth section, and cleverly utilizes some of the same imagery. Before quoting from it, I’m pleased to say that I had the pleasure to publish this poem early on in my tenure as the editor of The Malahat Review. Also, I think it is interesting to note that we obtain an even better sense of Ruth visiting a gallery space than we do in “Woman with Wild Flowers”—and unlike in that poem, here she is interrogating herself via a work of contemporary art, an appreciation of which she is particularly adept at:

 

shifting uneasily from foot to foot

you see the sag of your skin

in the burlap coat the artist has draped

over a hanger dangling from the ceiling

 

the jute, coarsely woven

basted with makeshift stitches

is crude cover for the velvet lining

a fire banked yet ardent

 

hummingbird-feeder red

glimmers at the end of each sleeve

and at the gaping, buttonless

unhemmed front

 

frayed thread

pooling at your feet (33)

 

The chord of mortality, so resonant throughout this book, is plucked once more, this time with great pathos, as the narrator studies the sculpture and “allows it to integrate with the self” [allowing it interrogate with the self], noticing both the surface frays of identity betrayed by the coat’s burlap carapace and the more vibrant and “ardent” inner lining—the inner self—it shelters. I can’t help but imagine the absent body that would otherwise wear this garment, a garment of sackcloth doing penance while harbouring, even fomenting the defiance of the heretic’s bright vital flame. The body, even in absentia, shapes this double self, the ageing damaged one who meets the world head-on, suffering rents in its fabric and the ageless, fiery one who can’t help continuing to burn and to engage with experience, a lamp put in the window of the otherwise darkened, burlap house of the self. It’s telling that the front is described as rent and buttonless, implying to a kind of gutting that exposes what’s going on within. The vacuum left by the departed body hints at anguish, even emptiness that amounts to nothing more than thread looping on itself on the floor. The poem is characteristic of what I would call Ruth’s profound aesthetic engagement with visual art drawn from works of the renaissance to those of the present. This burlap dress most reminds me of Jana Sterback’s Vanitas, a meat dress that caused a sensation when it went on display in her retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in the 1990s. A dress entirely composed of salted raw beef over a metal fretwork frame and also suspended from the ceiling, it was worn by a vegetarian at the exhibition’s vernissage.

The suspension of the burlap dress noted in Ruth’s poem also brings to mind The Hanged Man in the tarot pack, a card that symbolizes paradox in our lives. I can imagine the dress turning in drafts coming in through the door of the gallery, and in fact, the poem does turn, bringing a wistful memory to mind for the poet:

 

and you had almost forgotten…

the young woman modelling before the mirror

her mother kneeling on the floor

measuring to mark a full skirt’s

 

hem, the job of daughter to turn

stand still, and holding the pins, turn again

but you loosen your grasp and they spill

rattling into a disordered heap

 

and your mother’s shrill Why can’t you learn

to organize your life! and you look down

at your moving feet but can’t stop

their shifting (33)

 

This kind of turning is characteristic of Ruth’s entrée into memory’s realm, with a present moment allowing her access to the past or what I might call, in addition to the historic present, the past present or the present past.

It’s striking that in the memory the skirt is full in contrast to the burlap coat, which no one could imagine twirling in to get a sense of its amplitude (one has to notice the red lining to get a sense of that). In fact one can imagine the young woman wanting to do that rather than standing still, which strikes me as an ironic presaging of how time comes to a standstill in “Woman with Wild Flowers.” The memory triggered in “Burlap Coast with a Red Velvet Lining,” perhaps gives us an insight into the poet’s younger self, a familiar stranger recollected by an older one who wonders if she might not now feel as rendered into tatters had she been more able to organize her life better by maintaining a firmer grasp on the slippery pins that keep its diverse cut pieces of fabric in place and neatly hemmed. Perhaps the act of writing these poems is a making of amends with life by basting together its remnants.

One of the finest ekphrastic poems in Aide-Mémoire is perhaps one of the simplest, “Farm Wife, Western Quebec, 1940:”

 

Malak, plying the back roads

in search of country folk,

has leapt from his jalopy and asked

her to pose. But she refuses

to smile. Spine strained back,

eyes locked against the sub,

she rises above the camera,

a sapling against the sky.

 

From under a man’s worn cap,

its tweed bill twisted to the side,

her hair, all marcelling spent, hangs

in slack waves around a face grim

with impatience at this uncustomary

standing still. She wears, not trousers,

 

but a dress, its sleeves deflated,

paisley pattern sun-effaced,

a rent at the waist and an isosceles tear

below the bodice’s last button. Meagre

sheath for a body sharp as a ploughshare

and gaunt. See the jut of hipbones

and the ache of veins tunneled

beneath her arms’ bare skin.

 

She grips the handles of the plough. (52)

 

What strikes me immediately is that, here, we have the body whose presence is only implied in “Burlap Coat with Red Velvet Lining.” This poem emphasizes how powerful this woman’s flesh is, however battered it may be, how, as an expression of who she is, it has been formed by a hard life of poverty, “a body sharp as a ploughshare,” who has a firm grip on the plough: she’s saying “Don’t mess with me. I am in control; I am prepared to harvest what I must and what I am to from life. This has made her tough, not pliant to the wishes of the photographer, who stands in as the artist—or the poet—in this poem. With the eye rather than the camera lens, Ruth notes the deflated sleeves, the faded paisley design. The last button calls forth the buttonless state of the burlap coat.

Incidentally, Malak is the brother of Yusof Karsh, the famous Ottawa photographer who made a name for himself as a portraitist to notables from the 40s to his death. Malak Karsh, who was known by his first name, no doubt to help distinguish himself from his more famous brother, was equally accomplished and remained in the Ottawa area, often doing commercial work for government departments, including the National Aviation Museum where I used to work. In 1940, when this photograph was taken, Malak would have been a young man, at the beginning of his career and perhaps then more interested in pursuing “artistic” rather than the commercial work for which he is better known today. As a reader, I can almost feel Ruth’s identification with this powerful, seemingly embittered woman, the photograph like memory linking them across time. And I find myself asking, is Ruth’s pursuit of remembering a counterbalance to the woman’s bitterness? Is it by remembering that we can come to terms with the harsh parts of the past and then move beyond it?

The need to make amends or find atonement is perhaps most indicatively expressed in a poem with the telling title, “The Unclenching,” also from “La Grande Illusion.” Its narrator returns to an unnamed city that to anyone who knows it would recognize as St. John’s:

 

I traipse the crooked streets

heuristically, more sleuth,

I tell myself, than tourist,

climb the steep rise from the harbour,

the hills barnacled with Paul Klee houses

like children’s wooden blocks brightly

 

coloured and askew, but braced

against gale-driven rains and snows

and the ropes of fog that spool in

from the sea over Cape Spear

and through the Narrows. (36)

 

Her “hooded/ self, body clenched,” after “lurch[ing] into the blizzard’s fury,” she decides to visit the widow of her first husband, who graciously serves her “peppermint tea. And photos, / dusty, discoloured.” After leaving (and returning to the storm), she:

 

regret[s] not having asked if he’d still liked

heist movies, the Meerschaum pipe

we bought together in London,

John Berryman poems. (36)

 

The poem, in a sense, is a visitation into memory, one of the purest forays in the book for it is set in the past—or the present past—in its entirety, the necessary retrospective turn having occurred prior to its first line. “The Unclenching” unflinchingly documents the poet’s present journey to one of memory’s most difficult, paradox-ridden banlieues, one I might also call a suburb of regret—or a gale-battered outpost in the case of St. John’s. The poem’s turn is instead one towards quietude:

 

By nightfall the wind has quieted,

and stars shine through pinholes

in the cleansed curve of the sky,

a few cloud wisps loitering

past the white of the moon. (37)

 

It is fortuitous for the case made by this talk that the stars shine through pinholes, as if the pins in “Burlap Coat” have left their traces in “The Unclenching,” with the light of the stars shining through them. The sky’s scoured curve could be an arc of the earlier poem’s full skirt, an arc the star’s pinpricks hold in place, waiting for the poet to sew everything together. I find it very moving that the cloud wisps are “loitering”; the poet, in finding peace about a failed marriage, is now a flâneur, strolling the broad Haussmann-like, formerly crooked avenues of her past. For a moment, time’s relentless transit towards death, brought to mind by visiting the widow of a deceased first husband has momentarily been brought to a standstill.

Ruth’s achievement of stasis can be simply found or happened upon unlooked-for in the present day and often in her garden or even by looking out from her house, as in the poem “Leafing Out”:

 

Outside my window, Aspen

in an ecstasy of photosynthesis:

leaves in the early stages of unfurling

breathe in sunlight,

exhale it back to me,

transmuted into a fresh green, a callow green,

a green so new it still contains

the yellow of the sun. (76)

 

While the stases that arise from coming to terms with the past have their own kind of beauty, those that crop up with spontaneous rapprochements with the natural supply the book with its most delectable “ecstasies.” The poem’s movement, however, parallels how those of memory often work, with an encounter with a stimulus of some sort that causes a delicate transmutation within the narrator, a variety of emotional leafings out, whether melancholy, nostalgic or grief-marked. I also find the poem’s placement in the book telling, for it falls immediately after that “time at a standstill” poem, “Woman with Wild Flowers.” It occurs to me now that those wild flowers might, in the iconography of the book, express the poet’s desire to connect with her inner wildness, that enfant sauvage who can’t organize her life, who wants to twirl, the skirt of her horizons and starlit skies spinning full.

For Ruth, remembering is active and equal to the living in the physical present, a kind of doing, as she argues in the book’s closing poem, with “Doing” as its title:

 

What to live for, if not

to do? Everyone does.

As in the old song,

even the birds.

 

But I don’t mean

falling in love. No, I’m talking about

labour. Homo faber. Meaning-

ful busyness. Even the vita

 

contemplativa is a doing

of sorts, like mulling over,

wool-gathering. However still

the body. And meditation,

 

cousin to emptying, gleaning,

draining—pail of water,

harvested field, wound.

And remembering, thinking

 

back. Not merely lively,

but constructive. Look

how we amend and

recast our pasts. (83)

 

In a sense, we have come full circle to the book’s opening poem, “The Marrow,” which aches in its woundedness. The entire backward direction of the book from beginning to end answers one of the quotes that Ruth chose as an epigraph, “Why is backward the most beautiful direction?,” which is taken from a poem by the New Brunswick poet, Anne Compton.

Retrospect is beautiful because it constructively involves “emptying, gleaning, and draining” —and the writing of poems as a form of spiritual meditation, poetry as investigatory tool, as luminous transcript. And it is telling that the turn in “Doing” takes Ruth back to an early childhood memory of her bedroom in the house on Phinney Bay in rural Washington state, where through the use of the imperative tense she invokes us, her readers, and herself into “doing”:

 

Form a half-circle of diminutive chairs,

plop onto each a Raggedy Ann

 

or Andy, teddy bear, Dumbo,

or ringlet-crowned china doll.

Their eyes, ball-and-socketed glass

or cross-stitched stars of thick black thread,

 

attend, more acutely than anyone

ever will again, to the child

at the blackboard easel, chalk in hand,

writing words and more words. (84)

 

Here we have the prototype of the poet, who finds her way through language. She’s had to live a full life of joy and sorrow in order to learn the words and the tricks of mind and spirit to be able to look this far back with such clarity, a painful, but cloying nostalgia.

Ruth ‘s use of the word “stealthily” in this poem and the word “sleuth” in “The Unclenching” bring to mind “Pandora’s Briefcase,” a review article by Malcohm Gladwell in the May 10, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. About Ben MacIntyre’s “brilliant and almost absurdly absorbing book”, Operation Mincemeat, it discusses a British intelligence operation of the same name that threw off Hitler in 1943, concerning the Allied invasion of Italy. In the article, Gladwell makes a link between espionage or intelligence work and poetry and how both create double-crossing labyrinths of meaning and deception, intentionally leading the good guys and the bad guys as well as poets and readers astray. Gladwell makes special mention of an American intelligence officer, James Jesus Angleton, whose code name was “The Poet,” who happened to correspond with the great names of modern poetry, Pound, Eliot, Cummings, and Williams:

What he brought to spycraft [according to Gladwell] was the intellectual model of New Criticism, which, as one contributor to Furioso [a literary journal Angleton co-founded at Yale] put it, was propelled by “the discovery that it is possible and proper for a poet to mean two differing or even opposing things at the same time.” Angleton saw twists and turns where others saw only straight lines. To him, the spy game was not a story that marched to a predetermined conclusion. It was, a phrase of Eliot’s that he loved to use, “a wilderness of mirrors.”

The cosmos of poetry is metaphor rather than rational argument jerry-rigged from rhetoric; double meanings and apparent miscues are essential to unpack them, for they force the reader to think, which often leads to illuminations and perceptions that the poet did not know were there, and yet they are. Poet and reader, spy and spy, invoke reflections caught in two mirrors that face each other; the permutations are beautifully and perhaps dangerously endless. Certainly, the degree of contemplation and consideration Ruth’s poems merit has drawn me in to a thought provoking hall of mirrors. It is certainly amusing to consider the half rhyme linking “mirror” and the “mémoire” in Ruth’s title.

In closing, a definition of “aide-mémoire,” which I am sure you were expecting me to provide at the beginning of this talk, and how apt it is for Ruth’s book. “The Marrow,” stands in for a title poem, given that it contains the sole use of this term: “Everything tends towards aide-mémoire.” According to www.phrases.org.uk:

“Aide-mémoire' has become absorbed into English, although it isn't especially old. The term is used to refer to notes, or memoranda, that are taken in order to jog one's memory later. The name was used particularly in the U.K. diplomatic service. The first known use of it for an English audience was in 1846, in G. Lewis's book - Aide-Mémoire to the Military Sciences. The term had been in use in France for some years by then. Le catalogue des livres de la bibliotheque de feu M. le duc de La Valliere, 1784, has a reference to: Aide-mémoire ou Chronologie abrégée. Nancy, 1766.

… In recent years the term has also been used as an alternative to the term 'mnemonic aid'. An example of this is the rhyme 'Richard of York gave battle in vain' - the initial letters of which are the same as those of the colours of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.”

This latter rhyme reminds me of a limerick by James Marshall that Ruth uses as one of the epigraphs in her first book of poems, Where No Window Was:

A sinister spider named Ruth

set up a photography booth.

In clever disguise

she’d lure juicy flies

who too late discover the truth.

 

What better way to characterize how the poet baits the language in order to snag poems—and readers! Or maybe, in Ruth’s case, it is always to capture memories.

Going back to the definition of “aide-mémoire,” Ruth’s book is a compendium of memories to induce retrospect, to make the past present or to invoke a present past, including ours and definitely her own. It is also a book written against forgetting not too different from those black hardcover books many of us use to note what must be done—otherwise everything of even the most minor import might fall into oblivion. To make my quoting of the limerick not entirely frivolous, for Ruth the language has to be such that it leads to a turn in some contemporary moment that in “turn” allows her access to the amplitude of the past. Metaphoric language, finely honed and arresting, as it is for all poets worthy of our engagement, is always a part of her thoughtful, emotive doing.