Following the Footlights into the Forest: Mark Grenon Reviews Pearl Pirie’s footlights
footlights. Pearl Pirie. Radiant Press, 2020. $20.00 CDN, 76 pp., ISBN 781-9-89274-32-3
One of my favourite places in the world is my father’s home on Lac la Blanche in Mayo, Québec. At the lake and in the nearby Forêt-la-Blanche Ecological Reserve, even slight seasonal changes can seem like recurrent quotidian miracles.
Sadly, due to pandemic travel restrictions, and to keep my father safe, I’ve been mostly cut off from this beautiful region for a year now. Happily, during this time, I discovered a way to follow the forest’s treasures: Pearl Pirie’s Twitter feed, which led me to her fourth book of poems, footlights, now out with Radiant Press.
Pirie lives not too far away from my father in Wakefield, Québec, and is intensely attuned to where she lives. Her Twitter feed, and her poems in footlights, are imbued with attentiveness. This recent tweet reads like a poem by the revered Tang Dynasty poet recluse, Han Shan, who famously wrote poems on rocks in the mountains:
#FaunaWatch Water strider walking against the current,
Mourning cloak butterfly looping the compost, atv
driver back and forth, back and forth, chickadee on my
window sill looking in, mosquitoes who overwintered
floating tranquilly.
11:47 AM Apr 10, 2021
In an interview with poet David O’Meara, Pirie — who identifies as a queer concussed settler on Anishinaabe land — offers insight into how her concussion changed her writing process. While her earlier works eschewed narrative and lyricism in favour of experimental language-based poetics, the poems in footlights, she says, are composed with simpler grammar, and are shorter and more imagistic, which made it easier for her to work within the parameters of her concussion.
One of footlights’ strengths is its vivid evocation of Pirie’s rural home, as in the tweet above, which has a lot in common with “what is set in motion,” a stand-out poem from the first section:
we paddle the canoe
around the peninsula.
the hill’s far shore, as if
on rollers, slides right.
the ripples of skatebugs
disrupts what isn’t the moon.
aware of my indelicate
predator eyes,
through its reflection,
I watch the loon.
Seeing the loon through its reflection seems like a satori experience, the Zen Buddhist term for awakening, deflected somewhat by the pained awareness of the poem. It’s almost as if just by witnessing the loon’s beauty, the speaker is eating it up. Pirie’s music is deftly handled here, so the rhyme and assonance of canoe / loon / moon contribute to the poem’s construction and impact without undercutting its subtle metaphysical impact. Though the poem has an unmistakably Buddhist energy — in a felicitous coupling of clarity and tension — the speaker remains snared in Western consciousness, an observer aware that she’s observing at a distance — through a reflection — and with “indelicate predator eyes.”
footlights is rich in observational acuity, as in “an ant by lamplight,” which is also marked by lightness and humour:
she has been zipping
her third circuit
of the lampshade’s rim
pausing, head tilted.
we, despite ourselves,
cheer. she’s started down:
antennae flicking,
she veers, pauses
backtracks to the rim
Both O’Meara, in his interview with Pirie, and Gary Barwin (in a blurb on the back cover that acutely references Zen Buddhism) cite Pirie’s attentiveness, and it’s easy to see why. Although Pirie tells O’Meara long-term attention became a challenge for her due to her concussion, this attention to the moment allows Pirie to transmute an ant traversing a lamp — which, if overlooked, is merely tiny and mundane — into the subject of a vivid social poem.
Although Pirie’s attentiveness is woven through the book, she hits this sweet spot of striking lyric probity again in “waiting for menus,” which is short enough to quote in full:
a pigeon collides with the end wall
of Pho Ba Ga King
the rest of the flock veered clear.
a new shape appears
over the red awning.
there’s a mid-air spiral of 4 wings
a blush-breasted hawk
has the klutz in talons.
for minutes the Cooper’s hawk
watches traffic
standing on her chest
feet casually squeezing.
I write item #54 on the order slip,
anticipate a warm, full belly
look up and the awning is empty.
Here, an urban nature scene — or a horror vignette, depending on your point of view — is quietly observed from a restaurant window.
There’s a playfully ambiguous identification with the innocent but klutzy pigeon. In being captivated by this drama, the speaker seems to inhabit both pigeon and hawk, predator and prey, close yet distant, fused with nature, yet separate from it. Sometimes, when in the presence of a majestic animal, such as a loon or a Cooper’s hawk, or even an ant, it feels like a visitation. When this happens, we can almost imagine how it must have felt for the Greeks to have imagined the hawk as a messenger of Apollo, or how the ancient Egyptians had such reverence for their hawk-headed gods. There are no explicit allusions to gods in this poem, but there’s an almost mythical way of reckoning the world in many of Pirie’s poems, the reckoning of a person who peeks in at her own life through some trick of catching hold of something without, and then drawing it back in, as if breathing in the whole world through the poetic line.
Pirie handles both humour and darkness with considerable pathos. “homogenized script,” addressed to “Gladys and Joy & their Watchtowers,” tells of a series of visits by well-meaning Mormons. We learn that the speaker has little use for dogma, and has no intention of following the script of conventionality, as when she scares away some young Mormon men “while on the phone with open bathrobe / giving them a show,” which leads to the re-assignment of Gladys and Joy. The humour lands here, though less so in poems which are imbued with frustration over others’ foibles: a young male poet’s self-involved swagger, flighty clerks, name-dropping, people who overstay their welcome at a New Year’s party. Although we can identify with these irritants, there is a wealth of richer work through footlights’ spectrum of poems.
Throughout the book, and in the poem “claustrophobia” in particular, Pirie has the courage to take on taboo subjects, depicting suicidal ideation and intergenerational violence. Although much of footlights relies on leaps of logic and the kind of obfuscating re-arrangement of material that challenges the reader’s potential expectations, “claustrophobia” is lyrically compelling in its narrative directness.
In this poem, we’re not told who “Cheryl” is, but Cheryl “at ten sees potential where peers see games: the choke-hold / of jump rope, how Dad’s razor has removable blades.” We learn of intergenerational trauma, as in her uncle’s youth: “discipline / meant being pulled out of sleep, harangued in a locked hall closet.” It takes a generous boldness to write of such trauma, whether based on memory or imagination; violence exists not just in nature, as when the Cooper’s hawk traps and consumes the pigeon. It exists in families, and individuals, across generations. Perhaps in writing of predators and the wake of violence we leave behind us, even in micro-aggressions, these patterns can be interrupted. As instinctive as it can be, silence obfuscates such patterns.
In an interview with Amanda Earl, Pirie indicates that she tries to write down observations in the moment. Comparing rural vs urban poetry, she goes on to say that her rural poems are more grounding, centring, and coherent (which I’d agree with), while she also admits that she didn’t use to like nature poetry. My main argument above: she’s really good at it. For my part, as someone who loves poetry, ranging from the highly abstract to more concrete work, I’m grateful for Pirie’s observational candour. She shows us how to move with sensitivity and intelligence through non-neurotypical spaces. She clears space for us, showing us how unanticipated shifts in consciousness can yield rich poetic pathways, if we can follow the footlights into the forest of living language.
Mark Grenon’s poetry and reviews have appeared in Arc, The Antigonish Review, carte blanche, filling Station, the Hamilton Review of Books, PRISM international, The Puritan, and Vallum. Originally from Ottawa, he’s taught ESL in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Chile, and lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.