What’s Marco Melfi Reading?
On a recent trip to Toronto, I picked up Catriona Wright’s latest poetry collection Continuity Errors (Coach House Books). There was a fitting continuity to that, as I had bought Wright’s first book Table Manners (Signal Editions) from the same Queen Books shop years before. As for errors, I spilled coffee all over that copy.
The poems in Continuity Errors are concerned, like many of us, with climate change, techno optimism, sense of self, workplace demands, loss and other topics. There is a sense of repetition, perpetuation; a flawed continuity. But Wright often infuses humour to combat the doom.
In “Notes Towards an Anthropocene Fable at a Russian Sauna in Mississauga”, Rumplestiltskin’s first wife is trying to outrun their recurring daymare, “trying to escape the king’s wealth, / the kind that slashes and slinks though ozone”. A girl, in another poem, with the power to lift her house to change her window’s view from a brick wall gets instead a view to the end of the world (while her brother’s still faces a carnival). In “Date Night”, speakers prepare themselves with “palettes and poisons / for an evening with [their] demons”. Demons, recognizable like mothers, exes, bosses and professors, who will “condescend / and lecture and harangue, activating / shames…”. But the speakers declare “This time will be different”. In “The Number Ten Bus” a woman “stuck, forced / to collaborate on the future” must ward off the advances of a man selling roses or a father looking for help, the expectation that this is “women’s work”. Or as the cryptids in “Cryptid Captive Breeding Program” intimate:
“Even if we wanted to mate,
we fear our lack of parental models has fucked us up,
made us disorganized in our attachments,
needy.”
The concerns above compound when they are considered by an expecting parent:
“When I googled is it wrong to have a baby?
the algorithm told me,
to bear children into this world
is like carrying wood into a burning house.”
Speaking to their unborn child, a mother says:
“My birth plan is no pain
and the glaciers stop melting
I can’t fix the world
before you get here”
In another poem – aptly using couplets again – a mother says: “stay inside a little / while longer // how about / forever”. While post-birth the difficulties of breastfeeding weigh on the speaker: “this drought was evidence I’d flunked another / motherhood test no one had warned me about”.
But a newborn, as described in the sonically rich final poem, offers optimism, even in a flawed present, as a link, a translator “a medium exburently / channeling past and future soundscapes”. Hope can also be found in trees who “know what they have to do / and they get on with it” or chameleons:
“Imagine watching a chameleon turn magenta
then chartreuse without itching to optimize its magic,
augment its pigments. To be content
having changed nothing in the world
except the way they and their kin stumble through it.”
If hope isn’t enough or for the fed up, like the speaker in “Surrender”, perhaps there’s “that radiant saucer” and its tractor beam to lift us from this mess.
For insight, escape or solace, I’ll return to Continuity Errors – similar to Table Manners – for Wright’s ability to render relatable scenes through her rich lines, images and sounds (here’s one more from “Notes Towards an Anthroponcenee… : “He ate / she ate, we all ate the sun’s treats, / licked black seeds from slit vanilla beans, // plucked gold croaks from toad throats”).
Thus far I’ve also kept the pages safe from coffee.
Marco Melfi won The Fiddlehead’s 2021 Ralph Gustafson Prize, was longlisted for the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and has had poems published in Arc Poetry Magazine, EVENT, The Literary Review of Canada, PRISM, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review and Prairie Fire. His debut poetry collection, Routine Maintenance, is forthcoming with Gaspereau Press. He lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 Territory.