Under Review: Might Only Be A Flutter— On Carolyn Smart’s Breath Taking

John Berger once described death as a cart driver who outpaces everyone—even the fleet-footed amongst us. Berger—whose Way of Seeing is more existential than prognostic—is—was—modernity’s most perceptive philosopher. More specifically, he saw how today’s world—teeming, astir, ebullient—keeps trying to outstrip the carter. In response, Berger took a stethoscope and listened to the pulses that echoed beneath the din. One imagines him attenuating an age-old maxim: We have reached rock bottom and there is still knocking from below.

I was reminded of time’s arrow and Berger’s somber anecdote while reading Carolyn Smart’s impressing Breath Taking. The solemn collection—which reflects on the passing of Smart’s late partner—does what it says on the tin: I was, on several occasions, dumbstruck by its poignancy. The term—dumbstruck—may seem unabashed, but Smart does not blush. Rather, she presents, in unflinching detail, the one-sided exit at the end of hall. 

Breath Taking begins near the very end of the hallway’s neck—albeit in “in a rich green field” filled with donkeys “shining like chocolate” and “sniffing fragments of summer air.” The poem—plainly titled “For the Two Donkeys that Live on Road 38”—details the titular duo as they custodian a flock of nearby sheep. Yet within the span of two short verses the scene’s meadowed grass turns brown and the summery air torrid: “All that summer of your dying/They had no idea of the other work they did.” 

Humidity then gives way to a “thin electric scream” of cicadas. Smart, struck by the news of her husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis, thinks to join them—if only “to be a shrieking thing / in the heat / of the present.” After a few months, the extreme heat is only dampened by bouts of spring rain: in “Two Aprils” Smart wonders “why do raindrops appear / to pain the pond?”

Smart—who is a fêted author of seven volumes of poetry—reflects on the enormity of pain through the intimacy of her poetics. Breath Taking—a pocket-sized, no-frills collection—is a stirring and absorbing experience rife with epigrammatic, albeit emotionally charged, verse. Moreover, Smart is an expert craftsperson: she excavates the cavernous depths that were produced by her husband’s death without embellishing them with sidetracking pyrotechnics. The result is a book awash with affect and feeling, acuity and weight: “the technician put a bed together in the living room / it was the bed my husband would die in.” 

This bed—which faces a view birds, red acer, and sunlight—is tucked away in Smart’s humble living-room located somewhere in Verona, Ontario. The small community, which lies at the Southern edge of the Canadian Shield, serves as the leafy backdrop for most of the book. The frequent juxtaposition between “the gentle swaying of maple trees” and an impending death is both melancholic and difficult to swallow. Indeed, Smart incisively blends tragedy with beauty and mortality with life. At one point Smart describes watching dark horses in a neighbour’s nearby yard, noticing they “turn their heads, expectant.” The adjective feels especially tinged: Can the grazing herd intuit an ending? A movement from one plain to another? 

 “A Late Afternoon Walk” is the poem that eventually concludes Breath Taking. In it, Smart makes a reflection that begins her adieu:  “I had a life before you / What could have been?” The line is an emblematic window, encapsulating both her husband’s passing and the life—or lives—that she has experienced pass by her. Nonetheless, Smart takes an existential approach: for her, the only possibility is to make peace with the pale. In the last moments of the book, she acknowledges the previous throng of horses turning towards a fading strip of light that is flitting through a gate at sundown. The scene reverberates within me: “Their lashes catch the light / before it fades.” In devastation there is honesty—life might only be a flutter, but it still, somehow, manages to radiate against the expected arrival of dusk.