Updates & Misunderstandings
~Julie Cameron Gray's interview with me is now available in the current issue of Misunderstandings Magazine
~Three poems forthcoming in "This Magazine"
~Books in Canada reviewed "good meat"
BODIES & APPETITES
a review by Jane Henderson, Books in Canada, March 2007, Volume 36, No. 2
If [Myna] Wallin considers the plastic archetypes of contemporary life,
Dani Couture's first collection Good Meat explores these impulses in a
world of inescapable shared physicality: "unable to tell / what
difference between animal and woman, steel cuts both / with the same
blind instinct."
Couture's observational free verse poems are precise, taut with
meaning, and quietly filled with curiosities of fact and phrase that
may prompt scurrying to reference materials (Really? The whale
exploded? In downtown traffic?). Her symbols reveal owners via their
objects, and consider both owners and objects through the thematic
proscenium of meat. Vignettes of hunting, travel, family, intimacy and
appetite suggest the skills needed to survive them: "if only someone
had cared enough / to teach me how to filet what's offered / to the
size of my hunger."
In Good Meat, flesh is the site of self, a source of nourishment and a
host to disease. It comforts and challenges, grows and decays. .
.Couture speculates on what people are willing to do or have done to
them in order to feel nourished, as in "the chicken carver":
it is art that feeds me
night after night
from her blood-
crusted hand
again and again
she carves out my heart
serves it to me
for twice the asking price.
It is easy to borrow Couture's own words to describe hers: honed,
pared, exactly cut. Her sensory, often simple, language is kept tidy
with meticulous line breaks and punctuation. It's rich with suggestion
and sound play, as in "terminal's" airport scene:
hearts held up by security;
hearts senseless
at horseless carousels
hung up on which black suitcase
looks the most familiar.
The imagery is almost invariably tactile, drawn from "the religion of
small things," as in the racoons' "tiny black garbage bag hearts," or
the reflection that "grocery carts / would not make good long boats: /
too many holes." Couture capably compresses characterisation into
physical symbols, as in the conclusion of "Shrimping: a postcard":
. . .he chats with locals.
he, in search of anything. western
hunger waning into a simple desire—
the capture of a creature
only capable of swimming backwards,
away.
One of Couture's most intriguing accomplishments is how subtly her
tone perpetuates the dualities inherent in her theme. The deceptive
quiet of these poems is constructed with precise language, grounding in
the quotidian, and understated humour. It builds readerly trust. Even
the words look steady and calm, presented entirely in lower case.
Suddenly we discover that Couture has led us quietly into territory
that simultaneously invokes the mystic and the absurd, as in her ode to
e.coli or "fish and chip's" twin voices. Or into the absurd and the
heart-breaking, as in the melon-choly conclusion to "anniversary
recipe" which instructs, charmingly, how to make a honeydew hat.
Indeed, Couture presents frankly gruesome subjects, like a child's
dive into shallow water, with convincing ease and without gore. By the
time we've truly grasped the child's situation, the conventional
implications have already been disabled. Instead, we become persuaded
that children, "sweet rag dolls of flesh and mistake, / [were] not
intended to remain cradled / in the uniforms they were / born into."
rather, they must "swim into deeper water / disappear into silt."
In that situation, tender language and the child-fish conflation keep
the reader safe. In "sweet meat," on the other hand, Couture uses
humour to entice the reader into a differently sickening scene:
sugar-coated pork chops
could never look as sweet
as you in a state
of late monday undress
my eyes
the eyes of a butcher
seeing dollar signs
at every blooming curve.
Couture experiments with closed form in her ghazal, "the ends." The
ghazal, still becoming naturalised (some, please note, would say
bastardised) into English from Indo-Islamic tradition, is a series of
couplets that may be read separately or together. It's conventionally
preoccupied with unrequited or mystic love. "The ends" is a chilly
account of departure, the terminus of a relationship whose nature the
reader can only interpolate from couplets like:
even the ends of sentences cut short. stumble over
implication into the next. i give you winter.
It may or may not have been a love affair. The form suggests it, but
we only know the certainty of the departure and the narrator's single
statement of longing, in the image of "the street with its last breath.
a stop. / a lone sign to make you yield. if only."
Couture's adventurous debut is a rewarding read which re-presents our
daily relationships to bodies and appetites. carnivores and vegetarians
alike can sink their teeth into Good Meat.
posted by algobay @ 5:02 AM
