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Could Be

by Heather Cadsby

Could Be is an excellent title for Toronto-based poet Heather Cadsby’s fourth book of poems.

Driven by the vocabulary of dreams and the sleep-sense of a somnambulist, Cadsby walks the reader through looming tragedies, misunderstandings, and embarrassments. “I need to / mind the hidden / seeing with a touch of sense,” she writes, and often her linguistic synesthesia delights, especially when she glosses the macabre with humour. (Of a rural upbringing she writes: “No one succeeded at farming and every story was terrible.”)

But so many of these poems could be better. Almost exclusively free-verse, they’re often marred by the pioneer mysticism Canadian poets have succumbed to for generations, leaning hard on the stock poetic pillars of light, darkness, silence, stillness, etc.

Especially unfortunate is the series “Aubade,” which peddles such groaners as: “We are within the grasp of a birdsong enigma / without weather or mortalities. / Our pilgrim stance is lulled.” Elsewhere, there is the plodding breathlessness of “September 11, 2001”: “and I was lost and you were found / and you found me and I was cold / and we were cold and we were cruel / and I was here and you were there.”

Even at 88 pages, the book feels swollen: many of the poems read like linguistic exercises or a tepid first draft. Cadsby’s line-breaks often seem arbitrary, and many of the poems are centreless and lack the formal rigor of, say, Jeramy Dodds, who works in a similar vein, albeit much more successfully.

Could Be could have been much better, had its author awoken from that all-too-Canadian modesty that anaesthetizes so many writers. Cadsby writes, “If you’ve got the high notes / you might as well show them off.” Hear hear, we applaud, until we encounter the line that follows: “Well, in a provisional way.”

 

Reviewer: Michael Lista

Publisher: Brick Books

DETAILS

Price: $19

Page Count: 88 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-89407-873-3

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2009-12

Categories: Poetry