HCSHR 6:15 - Carole Martignacco, Teasing the Tides

 

Teasing the Tides by Carole Martignacco. Yarrow Press, 2023, ISBN 9781990657085, 87 pages, $12. https://shorelinepress.ca/YarrowPress.html

 

Review by Sandra Stephenson

 

“day unfolding/ a blue jay/ fans its feathers” (p. 22)

 

This haiku, from Teasing the Tides by Carole Martignacoco, is a fine poem: fine and simple. It pretends to be nothing but what it is, out of the “ordinary everyday miracle[s].”  Martignacco’s use of single pivot words is exemplary, exquisitely chosen, placed, and unexplained, like lone asparagus ferns on the roadside.

 

For example:  cresting/ in roadside ditches/ purple lupine (p. 17). 

The word “cresting” in such a context is unique, refined.  It speaks of the tendrilled art of putting words alongside nature.  It puts me in mind of “crowning,” the appearance of the (purple) baby’s head at birth.  A single word causes a cascade of images.  Martignacco is good at this: “calving ice shelves” and “a spate of grackles” crop up effortlessly in her verse.  And when the penny drops, the shoe drops.  And “when the other shoe drops/ it’s a boot” (p. 14).

 

The title poem for the first section (p. 11) is a beauty, complex with rags and jags and mending. 

 

dragonflies

their jagged flight

mending the day

 

Examined in etymological context, dragonflies do come out in numbers in the evening, when the mosquitoes descend on those who linger outdoors, and indeed their flight is “jagged” as they dart after their prey.  No haiku is more satisfying than one truer than true to the facts. 

 

There is little in this book that I would rewrite, except “Western fires” (p. 41), and that could be because I don’t want them to be happening.  I feel the second section could be enriched by drawings or photo haiga, for example, of the arcs and angles of daffodils, the egg’s shadows.  Haiga is not (yet?) a Yarrow Press vocation, but broadsides of such poems could be considered. 

 

Not lacking are hints of humour, pairing window cleaning and eye surgery (p. 58), a ceiling fan with a “Higher power”; new thoughts abound, such as “where does silence go?”; and synesthesia deepens colour in “do I hear… the tulip opening…?”

 

There’s a refreshingly light touch for death, not passed over, but not dwelt on: “late afternoon/ on mossy gravestones….”  There’s even piety in,

 

dry leaves

rustle behind me

all the ancestors

 

One poem is a signature of Carole Martignacco’s gift to us (p. 75): 

 

big sky

open mind

a flock of songbirds

 

That it involves a simile bothers me not a whit.  I’ll listen to her songs any day.  I am intimate with Fundy tides myself, and, though we have never met, some of her experiences echo my own, right down to the presence of wolves:

 

Wolf moon                                                     the wild in me

something wild in me                                    nods

howls                          (Carole)                      back to sleep               (Czandra)

 

Still, tidal poems and spiritual and political references take a backseat to those easily recognizable and enjoyable from every Canadian’s life.

                                                                       

Review by Sandra Stephenson, author of Asking for Trouble (Yarrow Press, 2021), under her penname Czandra.

 *****

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