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Afua Cooper

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Murmurations published by Gaspereau Press

Murmurations, a book of poetry by Annick MacAskill, is about the flora and fauna of love, and the geographies of the heart. The poems conjure up roaring rivers, ecstatic waterfalls, the pounding waves of Nova Scotia’s Atlantic, the frozen lake of Ontario, the cry of the she-wolf lost in the Rockies and formations of birds high above Monet’s bridges. The natural world stands in for human lovers who are lost and then found again.  

The poet is mistress of word economy. She deftly throws away lazy and sluggish words, and those that remain are lean, crisp and clean. So, each word, grateful to be alive, takes up the task of creation and becomes a universe in itself—layered, exacting and wondrous, and a world where opposites meet in joyous union.  

MacAskill is a trickster. When we think she is talking about magpies, we realize she’s conversing more so about her love, her emptiness, her fear. In “Water Hunger,” the humble magpie is elevated to cosmic seer.  

And who cannot fall in love with a poem like “Banff” with a mountain carved personally by the hand of God? “Ninth Floor” shows the poet at her trickiest and playful best. I smiled from ear to ear as I read this poem. “Ornithologists” teaches us the alphabet and vocabulary of birds. It is menacing, seductive and tentative at the same time.  

Birds, with the exception of doves, are everywhere—hawks, herons, ravens and ducks. They are ravenous and craven, brave and brazen, shy and unshaven. In fact, the poet is bird obsessed. We are told that birds are messengers of the soul. If this is so, then MacAskill writes these poems as soul messages to bring us back to love. And by calling on the denizens of the sky, she shows us how to fall in love again and again.  

Annick MacAskill

Winter is also everywhere. Her love stories take place in winter: the beginning, middle and end, and in various topographies. Lake Ontario, Queen St. The Rocky Mountains, and the Canadian Prairies. Sometimes winter’s snow is pristine and playful, other times moody and brooding, sometimes cold, hungry and insolent.  

But through it all, there is always love: fierce, bold, demanding and in perfect surrender. In the poems Eros narrates to us the beauty and joy of sex. Love and passion invoke prayers, as incanted in “Vespers.” 

You are my midnight prayer, that dark-room hymn,
Know this: I’ve waited long enough to make certain demand—               
Collapse the sky and run your body through my veins,
Taste what can be made of us, 

The diverse Canadian landscape is a central motif in this collection. Yet the poems conjure up other temporal periods and geographic spaces. I read about falcons and I go to ancient Egypt, to the mythic story of Horus, the bravest and strongest of all falcons, but with the tender heart of a dove; the turbulent rivers, lakes and oceans sound a verse from the Psalms in my head: “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me”; and chattering birds presents themselves as the Hoopoe bird, the most sageful bird in history, special messenger to King Solomon. The wisdom of the Hoopoe bird is chronicled in the Quran through the love story of the bird-wise King Solomon and the original Queen of Gold Arms, Sheba.   

Though MacAskill is kindred to Sue Goyette, Gwendolyn McEwen and Rosario Castellanos, she is her own woman poet. And she has found her voice. What a voice it is—tender, compassionate, inspiring, wise, warrior-strong and brilliant. This voice sings to us wedding songs worthy of the Shulamite’s love.  

Murmurations is a joy to read and hear!  

Afua Cooper

Dr. Afua Cooper is a multidisciplinary scholar and artist. Her 12 books range across such genres as history, poetry, fiction and children’s literature. Her latest book of poems and photographs by Wilfried Raussert is called Black Matters and is published Roseway. Dr. Cooper served as Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality for the term 2018-2020.  

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Black Matters features interplay between photographer Wilfried Raussert and poet Afua Cooper, where the former presents a picture, the latter responds not with description but with meditative reflection on what the image inspires. A perfectly syncopated appreciation, cherishment, of Blackness results, informed by centuries of marronage, steeped in Nina Simone’s wail, framed by the raised fists of Black Panthers and celebrating all that will be won.

–Chris Benjamin, content manager

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Keeping Count by M Travis Lane

Acclaimed New Brunswick poet M Travis Lane follows up on her 2019 collection A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl (Palimpsest Press) with Keeping Count, a book published late this summer. In clear, witty lyrics, Lane turns her attention to the natural world and to an experience of isolation borne not of a pandemic but of old age. My favourite poem in this collection is “For Ruth,” which brings into soft focus the weight of the everyday: “Days cluster, days clutter – they open, shut, / heap on the bed like feather quilts. / I can nest in them –”

Black Matters by Afua Cooper  

   Outgoing Halifax Poet Laureate Afua Cooper published her sixth poetry collection with Nova Scotia’s Roseway Publishing this fall. Accompanied by photographs by German artist Wilfried Russert, the poems in Black Matters centre the diversity of Black experience, spanning continents and centuries. Cooper’s work as an historian is felt in these pages, with poems like “Jupiter Wise” calling attention to the history of the transatlantic slave trade in Canada, while other pieces centre beauty and joy. My favourite poem, “Live With You in a House by the River,” lays gentle claim to enduring love, pairing a scene of contemporary romance with ancient reference: “I love you like Belqis love Suleyman / My love, come recline with me / round my belly with generations of your children.”

Anthesis: A Memoir,

the seventh poetry book by incoming Halifax Poet Laureate Sue Goyette, was published with Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press this spring. This collection is a re-writing of Goyette’s only novel, Lures (Harper Collins, 2002), which was shortlisted for the 2003 Thomas Head Raddall Award. A book-length poem written in prose sections, Anthesis captures the feeling and movement of its source text while abandoning the narrative structure in favour of a more liberated form. Rhythmic and haunting, this new collection addresses the ineffable horror of childhood trauma and its aftermath in surprising and evocative metaphoric language.

The Knowing Animals by Emily Skov-Nielsen

The blown-out image on the cover of Emily Skov-Nielsen’s The Knowing Animals, designed by Halifax-based artist Emma Allain, mirrors the heat and wildness found within. Tactile, dense and unrelenting, these poems examine sex, gender, ecology, reproduction, disease, decay and violence—and the myriad ways these categories overlap—through the eyes of a central speaker, who fixes her attention on “the ghoulish, / ambient dim of incubation.” Published this fall, The Knowing Animals is the debut collection by the Fredericton-based Skov-Nielsen. I look forward to reading more from her.

Waking Ground by shalan joudry

Storyteller, ecologist and artist shalan joudry launched her second collection of poetry with Gaspereau Press in early October. Anchored in a keen awareness of colonial history and the fragility of our surviving ecosystems, the poems in Waking Ground are layered in their use of sensory details and lyric introspection. joudry incorporates Mi’kmaw into her English-language poetry, sometimes using individual words, sometimes composing entire poems in the Indigenous language alongside English translations. My favourite poem in the book, “Sipu’l” (“Rivers”), responds to an epigraph from acclaimed Mi’kmaw poet Rita Joe, creating the sense of an ongoing conversation across generations.

A House in Memory: Last Poems by David Helwig

“Time; does it demand analysis?” inquires the speaker at the start of A House in Memory, a collection of David Helwig’s unpublished poetry. It’s a fitting question for this contemplative book, which contains a section of work composed in Helwig’s final years. Presented with an introduction by his daughter, Maggie Helwig, who’s also a writer, these poems explore history, memory, and mortality, as well as family life, beauty and the landscape of PEI, Helwig’s adopted province. Musical and rife with literary and artistic reference, A House in Memory is a fitting homage to the late poet’s impressive career.

–Annick MacAskill is a writer, poet and critic based in Halifax. She is the author of Murmurations and No Meeting Without Body, as well as a chapbook, Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos.

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*Peggy Pompadour and her children Amy, Milly, and Jupiter were held as slaves in the household of Peter and Elizabeth Russell of Toronto. Peter was a former administrator of the province of Upper Canada.

Peggy is in the habit of running away
it would be bad enough
if she left by herself
but now she is taking her children with her.
She is a very bad woman
a mean slave
she goes to the outskirts of the city
and roams in the bushes
eating berries
and wading in the Don River
catching salmon
that still travel to these parts

She has erected a hut of sorts
from the brambles of the elderberry tree
she lived there with Amy and Milly for three weeks
until Peter sent the constables to retrieve her
he returned the children to the house
but lodged Peggy in jail

Now he wants to sell her
but neither Joseph Brant
nor Matthew Elliot
wants to buy her
on account of her fugitive career
though they had promised Peter they would buy her.
Because no one wants her
Peter has to keep her in jail
he resents paying the jailer’s fee
If only this mean slave
would behave!

Peggy’s incorrigible son Jupiter
has followed in her fugitive steps
he has Just ran off
someone saw him in the vicinity of the Don River
around Pottery Road
lurking about Mr. Long’s farm
Peter has sent the constables after him.

Peter really wishes to be rid of Peggy
I for one do not want her ever again in this house
I hate the very sight of her
after she smashed the fine China
I crossed the sea with from Ireland

Because the jailer’s fee is mounting
Peter is forced to put a ‘For Sale’ ad in the paper
Matthew Elliot has disappointed us
Joseph Brant the same
perhaps someone else will take pity on Peter
And take the wretch and her son off his hand

I have already gifted my god-daughter Elizabeth Dennison
With Milly and Amy.

Afua Cooper is the James R Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University, the author of The Hanging Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal, and the former Poet Laureate of Halifax.