Under Review: The Heart Song of Susan J. Atkinson

If in early May of this year you happened to be at the Ottawa Children’s Festival, an annual celebration of theatre, dance, and music, you might have noticed someone in the milling crowds dressed as a poetry pixie. This was none other than Susan J. Atkinson, poetry promoter and poem maker, author of all things small, her second major collection after the much-praised debut work The Marta Poems in 2020. Over two years in the making, this book does not disappoint; in fact, it dazzles, luminous in its intensity, distinguished by its precise language and imagery.

As a long-time poetry editor for The New Quarterly, I don’t use these words of praise loosely. In its emotional impact and linguistic consistency, her work reminds me of another Ottawa poet, Diana Brebner, a frequent contributor to the magazine and author of three collections of poetry before her death by cancer over two decades ago. Her dedication to poetry was remarkable, but that commitment is clearly shared by Atkinson, who said of herself in a recent online interview that “Poetry is at my core; it is my heart song.”

Where to begin? Let me start as I always do with poetry at the sentence level with the use of words. The same devices that worked so effectively in her first collection are used just as expertly here, especially alliteration and internal rhyme. Lineation and line spacing—even white space— are also varied in ways that reinforce meaning and suggest hesitation or surprise. Am I giving her too much credit when I note a clustering of “k” sounds in “Adultery,” —‘skulks,” “cat,” “crack,” “curves,” “question,” “murk,” “dark”—as a guttural suggestion of distaste? Something new here is the concrete poem “even today,” shaped (I think) like a leaf, in which the poet ironically explains that “even today I cannot find words to form a poem.”

Another element of Atkinson’s craft at work here recurring imagery, the sun, the moon, flowers, and weather, images that in this collection seem to coalesce in the garden, another central image in these poems, reflecting the cycle of the seasons, death and regeneration, richly symbolic territory in reference to the volatility of emotions, the uncertain hope for “a garden of green” to counter a season of loss in ”Pathology of a Garden,” the sad futility of the senile mother searching for her dead spouse in “My Mother Looks for My Father in the Garden,” and the rage of the betrayed poet in “Catharsis,” tearing up tomato plants and tossing them against the wall.

“The poet herself has said that the collection is about ‘love and loss, and all the small things in between.'”

Though the word play and imagery are admirable, the impact of this collection, as is the case with all good poetry, lies in the emotions or sensations evoked. I still like Wordsworth’s reference to “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” or perhaps it is more like the illusion of spontaneity, given some poets’ excessive editing. Whether “recollected in tranquility” or not, the experiences in these poems cover a broad range, as suggested in the book’s subdivisions: “love,” “sorrow,” “memory,” “divorce,” and “all things small.” The poet herself has said that the collection is about “love and loss, and all the small things in between.” Lately I’ve been reading a lot of poems about loss—of identity, voice, culture, faith, trust, etc.—especially poems about failed relationships and all the bitterness and recrimination that linger for years afterward. This collection is no exception; in fact, the section labelled “Divorce” focusses entirely on the caustic consequences of marital infidelity. Let’s just say say that being unfaithful to a spouse is seldom a good thing, but it’s much worse if that spouse is a poet, especially an excellent one. Their words can wound and will.

However, I am happy to say the collection offers two unabashedly positive love poems. “This Love Poem Is for You,” for example, is about her husband, “whose touch is heat/and keeps me young.” “Kiss Me Again Like the Second Time” plays with the traditional first-kiss circumstances in a playful, clever, cliche-wary way somewhat in the fashion of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…”).

Some of the best poems in this collection are the sadly beautiful reflections dealing with the pending and actual deaths of parents in “sorrow” and the heart-breaking loss of mental capacity in “memory.” In “Driving West to Say Goodbye,” the sadness of the mother-in-law’s impending death is almost palpable. As they head home “under a sky mottled with stars/pinpricks of silver dot quiet air/everything feeling smaller than before.” One of the most touching poems in the “memory” section is “Shirt, Brown, Honesty,” which refers to the mother’s failed memory test, whereby even the recall of three words becomes impossible:

My mother will not remember the words

Will not even remember being told

By the time she is asked again the nouns

Will have slipped through the honeycomb of her brain

The final section, “all things small,” is an eclectic mixture in content and form. On offer are a tribute to fellow poet and mentor Deanna Young, an homage to sparrows, two ekphrastic poems, a narrative that is part prose and part poetry, a poem of entreaty, and some poems personification. Might this wild mixture suggest a new direction for the poet? Time will tell. But let me end by offering a personal response to the collection’s final poem, “Breathe.” As someone now trying to recover from congestive heart failure, when the simple act of respiration was a challenge, I found the final lines if the final poem all too appropriate—“Beauty betwixt all the uncertainty of now/ a reminder to breathe/breathe/breathe/breathe.”

Photo by Neven Krcmarek on Unsplash