Alert
to Glory, Sally Ito
2011,
Turnstone Press, Winnipeg MB
$17,
978-0-88801-379-8, 86 pages
reviewed by rob mclennan
To handcuff the world, make it prisoner
to sense and scrutiny.
To apprehend. That is the poet’s task. The
lonely jailer
seizing at the company of things.
Not to possess or own
but rather to perceive the world
like a nerve quickening
to touch, or a flank quivering
to the wind. To apprehend
is surely one of God’s
commandments to the steward, that poet,
who in his hour as policeman
might enjoy the brief moment
of a world in fetters for him.
Catch-and-release—the finny,
slippery silver underneath the
hand—is the currency of joy,
the fine paid for the alertness
and watching which is the poet’s
constant state. He apprehends, and
the world is seized
and God makes wonder of his
heart.
From Winnipeg writer Sally Ito comes a fourth
trade book and third poetry collection, Alert to Glory (Winnipeg MB:
Turnstone Press, 2011), constructed as both acknowledgement of and call to
“alertness and watching which is the poet’s / constant state.” With poems
featured in the anthologies Poets 88 (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1988)
and Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour
Publishing, 1996), Ito is the author of the previous poetry collections Frogs
in the Rain Barrel (Nightwood, 1995) and Season
of Mercy (Nightwood, 1999), as well as a
collection of short fiction, Floating Shore (Toronto ON: The Mercury
Press, 1998). The poems in Alert to Glory work to articulate a space
where poetry and the author’s religious faith meets poetry, in poems that
attempt to articulate the notions of faith and their strengths, including a
sequence of “Poems for Advent: A Series.” In the piece “Poets out of Stones,”
she begins: “God can make poets out of stones. And He has. / Witness this one.”
In meditative stretches, Ito explores meaning throughout, from Bible passages,
pregnancy, literary ambition and mundane day-to-day tasks, including waiting
for her tomatoes to grow, writing “My eyes await their transformation, as God
must / in looking on, pure light affixing to each fruit / as if on a sparrow, a
hair on the head […].”
In Ito’s exploration of the sacred and the
divine, there are some good moments here, but nothing as sharp as the pieces
within, say, the work of the late Margaret Avison.
There is an ease to Ito’s poems, but one that lacks tightness, revealing too
many lines that lack tension, and yet, one of the strongest pieces here,
“Pregnant Again,” writes the divine as a secondary idea to the poem, with tight
lines that meander thoughtfully, with a still and graceful ease. There aren’t
that many writing overtly Christian poems that I’m aware of, although
Vancouver’s Diane Tucker and Waterloo, Ontario’s Erin Noteboom
immediately spring to mind, as well as Margaret Avison,
who is referenced within Alert to Glory. It’s a delicate territory, and
one that often shies away from contemporary writing. What place has personal
religious faith in contemporary North American literature? A larger question
than this review has space for, certainly, and not a question I’d even know how
to begin to approach, let alone answer.
Born
in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives
in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2011, and his most recent
titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious
Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX
[books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks,
2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second
novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs
above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview),
seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com).
He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the
University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and
other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com