 Volta
AUTHOR: Susan Gillis ISBN: 0921833865
A pink bathrobe turns into a kingfisher; a kitchen floor displays the stigmata of an oncoming storm; a Stone Age axe-head surfaces in France for someone from Newfoundland to stumble over; the covers of a book vibrate through broken intimacy. Here, friendship hasthe power to transform; love, to disembody. In a series of radical translations of the Earl of Surrey's sixteenth-century sonnets, a garden of plastic delights uproots the pastoral scene; a gallant compliment on social pedigree translates as salacious appreciation for a chef's handling of a ripe tomato. The poems of Volta turn place and time over on themselves, examining how we make what we call home, and what it is to be in relation: to people, to place, to history. A shape-shifting speaker rejects the idea of a singular self, and invites the reader to join a quest for that hypothetical meeting-place where community beckons but is never reached.
REVIEWS: "Intelligent, sophisticated, witty, this is poetry of both technical virtuosity and feeling. Its language is tuned so finely it can move from the mundane to the rhapsodic in a few beats of the line, in the space of a breath." —Mary di Michele "At the literal and figurative heart of Susan Gillis's estimable second book, Volta, is a series of 15 "translations" of the work of the Earl of Surrey, the 16th-century poet. These poems, however, are not exercises in academic hermeticism. Rather, these "permutations" are entirely original turns on a particularly suggestive source, "translations" into distinctively modern and passionate revisions. Throughout the quietly lyrical Volta, Gillis wears her learning both light and well. These poems bespeak a balanced, measured, and unpretentious sensibility that takes love as it principal theme". —Winnipeg Free Press "...Gillis's interpretations of the 16th-century earl of Surrey's poems are the gems of her second book, Volta. Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, was beheaded by King Henry VIII for treason at the age of 30 but established the form of the English sonnet used by Shakespeare and was the first English poet to publish in blank verse. Gillis's curiosity is piqued by his cloaked sonnets whose speaker "refuses to be clearly identified, to take a stand, to be held responsible for some action or inaction." Gillis "take(s) up the stick. wander(s) into the room." Her pokes and prods result in an essay, Gossiping with Cassiopeia why don't more poets include explanations for obscure literary references? - and 15 of her own poems, which she calls "radical translations" or permutations" of Surrey's work - each containing the word "love" in the title. There is a consistent and clever use of language in the permutated poems, and witty twists and turns like this one in Love as Noble Sufferance: From this double lock-up of silence and weather no word will spring me, nor will spring. In Ideal Love, Gillis contemplates life's contradictions: Think of the famous dead you revere, could you lover them so if they were alive? Admit it, are you not yourself more alive (do you not love your life the more) Why then, living, do you long to be so loved? One almost wishes the entire book were devoted to Surrey and Gillis's clever permutations of his works. Or maybe it's the fact that the 15 Surrey-inspired poems are embedded in the middle of 36 others that seems a shame. Luckily - and this shows Gillis's consistency as a poet - the remaining poems are as equally satisfying. The first "poem" of the book is a word-for-word recopying of the dictionary definition of the Beaufort scale (a scale of wind forces classified by numbers 0 through 12). the words weren't chosen by Gillis but he idea that their particular order on a page can be a poem is refreshing. The "real" poem that follow, "9 on the Beaufort Scale" (9 being a strong gale capable of slight structural damage and shingles blowing away), is a fine example of ;how Gillis can intertwine two ideas at once. Crane 1 and Crane1 are perhaps my favourites of the remaining 30 or so. The language is simple, the line are short. But it's the order of this simplicity that creates a crane ready for flight out of "two black slippers/one full, one empty" with seemingly effortless dramatic effect. In Gillis's poetry,
a few strings of words can be moving: Her poems almost never fail to ruffle this place." —Montreal Gazette
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Signature Titles by Susan Gillis: |
WINNER
OF THE 2003 QUEBEC WRITERS FEDERATION A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY
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