HCSHR 6:15 - Carole Martignacco, Teasing the Tides
Teasing the Tides by Carole Martignacco. Yarrow Press, 2023, ISBN
9781990657085, 87 pages, $12.
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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