“For the straight way was lost”: A Reading

The most recent offering by Toronto’s poet laureate Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (McClelland & Stewart, 2010), is a book-length ekphrastic (from Greek: to speak out) written in 15 “ossuaries” that beautifully incorporate the raw energy conveyed upon the intricate structures of Thelonious Monk, Charles Parker Jr., and Charles Mingus along with the garish hues of Jacob Laurence to shape a poetics of dissent. Building upon the themes in her previous book, Inventory (2006), the poet has refined her form even further to speak publically about grief, the grievable, and the failure of our contemporary world that incarcerates the majority so variously and some more brutally than others.  

In Ossuary I the reader is addressed by a first person voice skirting borders of public and private in a sobering tone reminiscent of a Greek Chorus. Lapidary layers of tercets are a brilliant display case for problematics of gender, class, and racism that play out in ways constitutive, spectral, and spectacle-centred, commenting on a contemporary world marred by inequities that underwrite its modernity. The poem becomes an ossuary. The stanza, ossuary. Yasmine, the protagonist, cannot be read as a Beatrice, yet it is tempting to try. She invites readers underground into the language of devastation, enclosure, and exile and gives voice to ruin.

The poem begins in this fall, echoing and replying to Thelonious Monk’s “Epistorophy” in a performative gesture that also embraces Pascal Blanchard’s spectacle of the grotesque (referenced in the acknowledgements). Ossuary I uses the rhetoric of the Epistrophe to begin from a place utterly lacking in virtue, the moral zero of reader and speaker.

at night, especially at night, it is always at night,

a wall of concrete enclosed me,

it was impossible to open my eyes. (11)

In the first pages, the reader’s compass is set spinning; themes emerge, diverge, and merge: waiting, the violence of measurements, broken gardens, asthma/lungs, blue buttons, numbers, fibres, violence as spectacle/specular/inspection/introspection, blindness coupled with “eye sickness, eye murder” (17), the extreme violence of voyeurism as a form of war.

How to proceed from here? The answer offered both by the speaker and Yasmine is troubling, devastating, framed in art. What comes clearly through in Ossuary II is “she reads later that Mingus said the last movement / suggests the ‘frantic burst of a dying organism’ (43) … the spasms of that. The most haunting image is Yasmine’s personification as explosive: “she flew like shrapnel off the bed / felt her way blind, as fire with slender strands” (25).

All exits are blocked in this book-length poem. Protest and resistance are remade in artistic distances so that the reader feels the productive tension between speaker(s) and maker of stanzas. If nothing else, the poet believes in art.