To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
poem "A Sound Observation" describes a
populist party, where "Representatives I
Dance to polkas I In public places... [and] At
night they talk /About the new reality" but
the dance is a dream; these poems are
mostly private rather than public meditations,
and the nature of the "new reality"
remains obscure.
The cover of A Staircase for All Souls
depicts a tangled sphere of trees and ladders;
the poems inside seek a difficult balance
between the possibility of poetically
harvesting the sensual fruits of nature as in
themselves valuable, and the perceived
necessity for poetry to be a privileged
means of ascent beyond the realm of the
physical. The volume most often seems to
opt for the latter approach, humanizing the
landscape and moulding it, via a formal
poetic voice, to a variety of conventional
Judeo-Christian and classical mythic patterns:
"Insurgent earth, obedient / As the
platoons of mushrooms to their brown
motto: / We will rise up, we the resurrected."
This mythologizing isn't necessarily a bad
thing, except that the persistent perception
of the sensory world as a metaphor for
metamorphic processes and metaphysical
life-cycles sometimes becomes ponderous
and self-involved. A character in one poem
asks, for example, "Is the soul just a freezedried
drop of sweat?," and while there may
be an ironic slant to this quotation in its
dramatic context, it is exemplary of the volume's
occasional tendency to formulate the
big questions rather tritely.
The use of striking metaphors, similes
and other tropes is clearly one way the
poems in A Staircase for All Souls strive for
poetic concentration; it is a way of enacting
in language the kind of transformation
with which the volume is seriously concerned.
However, some might feel, as I did,
that the poems often miss a rung on the
metaphoric ladder that links sight and
insight. This overly-ingenious example is
taken from a poem called "The Quick:"
Spring! The ground here thistled
And ferned over,
Measled with vine maple, hatching its
sept-
Or octuple tips, like gangrenous claws
In the clean face of April air. The results
of this pleasure
As marked and precise as teenage
Zits.
How they stab their faces with chocolate.
There's a thin poultice
Of pine needles on the twisted wrist
Of the path that reached too far into the
dark
Vulva of the forest.
Don't touch that poppy's green unopened
scrotum,
Ms.
"The Voyeur and the Countess
Wielopolska" is a short autumnal narrative
that offers a perplexing witches broth of
mixed metaphor:
...she heard the heartbeat of apples
Thumping down in the dark, into their
leafy packets
At the tree bottom—demure cidery fermentations
Like good dowagers in rustled chiffon,
On eightieth birthdays. How October
leaves its scum
Around a tub of stars.
The first sub-title of A Staircase for All
Souls suggests that the way the various
components of the poem work are analogous
to a musical suite, or, even more
provocatively, as suggested by the second
sub-title, the masque, a composite form of
dramatic spectacle that blends music, text,
and movement, finally drawing its audience
into the performance in the dance of revels.
One appealing element of the poems in A
Staircase for All Souls is their self-conscious
use of sound, both as a device and as a
theme. Many of the individual poem titles
play on the word "sound" itself, and readers
are implicitly asked to be attentive to
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