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    Undone
    Undone
    Undone
    Ebook140 pages1 hour

    Undone

    By Sue Goyette

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the 2005 Atlantic Poetry Prize, the 2005 Dartmouth Book Award and the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry

    Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. "Forgotten" has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; "Kindred" features poems on fellow artists in poetry, music and painting (ranging from Georgia O'Keeffe to Snoopy, beagle-novelist); in "Apprentice," leaving is transformed into celebration, poem after poem about fierce loving of a world that we will have to leave. In these hard-hitting, highly personal poems, lamentation is a key note. Crushing loneliness weighs heavily on the spirit. But Sue Goyette has ways of sharing pain with a compensating lift: wonderful flights of metaphor, language charged with verbal energy. "Isn’t that our job," she asks, "to coax out the light in the story?" It's a job she takes to heart and performs brilliantly.

    The poems in Undone have the amplitude proper to "watching wide" -- a discipline good for seeing shooting stars and, as this book illustrates, all other kinds of light in a darkness palpable but never enveloping, not when probed so truly and sung so beautifully.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateApr 15, 2004
    ISBN9781771311441
    Undone
    Author

    Sue Goyette

    Sue Goyette lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has published three books of poems, The True Names of Birds, Undone and outskirts (Brick Books) and a novel, Lures (HarperCollins, 2002). Her fourth collection of poems, Ocean, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in 2013. She's been nominated for several awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther, the Gerald Lampert, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and the 2011 Bliss Carman Award. Her poetry has appeared on the Toronto subway system, in wedding vows and spray-painted on a sidewalk somewhere in Saint John, New Brunswick. Sue currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University, is faculty for the Banff Wired Writing Studio and works part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

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      Book preview

      Undone - Sue Goyette

      Undone

      Sue Goyette

      Undone

      Sue Goyette

      National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Goyette, Sue

      Undone / Sue Goyette.

      Poems.

      ISBN 1-894078-33-0

      I. Title.

      PS8563.O94U64 2004          C811’.54          C2003-907222-3

      Copyright © Sue Goyette, 2004

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for

      the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book

      Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP),

      and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our

      publishing program.

      The painting on the cover is by

      Carol Hoorn Fraser, Boulevard II

      (1982, watercolour).

      The photograph of the author is by

      Helen Humphreys.

      Brick Books

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      www.brickbooks.ca

      for Ryan

      and

      for Robyn

      CONTENTS

      Forgotten

      The Season of Forgiveness

      For Women Who Cry When They Drive

      Wife

      Back When We’d Try Anything to Fix It

      Jack Gilbert’s Divorce

      Foundation

      Neruda’s Nets

      Alone

      Before Mahler’s 9th

      And After

      A Lesson in Tying or Being Undone

      Full House

      A Version of Courage

      Time

      Lilac

      Kindred

      His Green Age

      A Late Horizon

      The Beginning of Avon

      Here Lies the Water and Here Stands the Man

      Kindred

      Movie

      light

      For The Poem I Read On October 24th

      A New Form

      Meadow

      So Quite New

      Kiss

      Psychic

      Homage

      Issa

      On Hearing Elizabeth Bishop Read Her Crusoe in England

      Her Bangs

      Tattoo

      Apprentice

      Apprentice

      First Attempt

      Second Attempt

      Third

      Refine

      Inspire

      Apology

      Vigil

      Restoration

      Wind Chill and the Absence of Trees in Mexico

      October, an Elegy

      After a Line by Hernández

      Hope

      Tangled

      Beginning with a Line by Nuala O’Faolain

      A Week

      New Year’s Eve 2001

      Lawn

      Patience

      Backwards, or, Returning

      Demystified

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Biography

      Now she is going to learn

      How it is that animals

      Can save time:

      They sleep a whole season

      Of lamentation and snow,

      Without bothering to weep.

      from American Wedding

      by James Wright

      Forgotten

      The Season of Forgiveness

      I’m going to lie down next to you

      As if nothing has happened

      Charles Simic, Chorus For One Voice

      In this weather, wood has warped and doors

      won’t shut the way they should. The mist holds daylight

      close, hoarding. When it escapes, the light doesn’t

      spill, doesn’t slide cross the floor, but creeps

      and hobbles using furniture to hold itself up. It just wants

      to sit. In this weather, light has age, grows rings like a stump

      and can no longer hear. It’s the ancient relative in the corner

      with a change purse and a group of grandchildren at its feet.

      Extension wires, 100 watt bulbs, nothing helps. It’s faint

      and weak and drinks only water. In this weather, not even

      the high tide of starlings rolling onto the lawn gets its attention.

      Leave me alone, it says, having forgotten the way it ranted

      and raved. How it demanded more time and more flowers.

      The garden couldn’t keep up, it touched everything:

      the silver sugar bowl, the glass fish, every mirror, every drop of water.

      And so begins the season of forgiveness, when the birch trees

      bordering the yard turn back to bark and branch and you’re alone

      and I’m alone, the pantry is stocked

      and winter is coming up the driveway.

      For Women Who Cry When They Drive

      Blame it on CBC stereo if anyone asks. Blame it on

      the viola. I did and it worked. I never even had to mention locksmiths

      and lovers, how close the two are. I never had to name

      each white-knuckle grip of his on the steering wheel. I’ll name it here, though,

      for you. Surrender and all its aliases. I feel at home in two places now.

      One’s here, the other in the library surrounded by reference books

      to the stars. Driving doesn’t help. But you already know that. Remember

      when you stopped, pulled over on Cole Harbour Road and wept,

      bowed to the wheel and the long road ahead, the long road behind. I tried

      signalling, pulling over, but the traffic was stubborn. If you are reading this,

      I did try to stop. The passing lanes of loss and love and the speed limit

      to this life. I held you for days in my heart, dear sad woman in the dark green Volvo

      next to the Dairy Queen, next to the Royal Bank, feeling like you have no choice.

      And you don’t. You don’t, except to fasten your seat belt

      and yield.

      Wife

      In the guise of bedtime stories, I might have said

      too much. And in the spirit of adventure

      I think I’ve climbed too high. The living room is littered

      with books about wizards and surely to god

      there is a spell in one of those books for ladders and not just that small,

      slender story of the 12-year-old girl and her bottle of immortality:

      the pages and pages of choice. I shouldn’t let my voice

      bulge when I say the word love. They’ll grow up

      and get it without me. And who needs this headache?

      When Ryan was seven, he’d pick vanilla and with the first taste

      wail for chocolate. A Baskin-Robbins life lesson. Grass,

      I tried explaining, is always greener. But who am I to talk?

      Maybe it’s contagious the way Caitlin Thomas’s life became

      a villanelle. The 3rd, the 9th, 15th, 19th: Rage, dying,

      light.

      Back When We’d Try Anything to Fix It

      One day, neither of us will be around to explain

      the baby bathtub in the attic. It’s the only thing up there.

      Not even an attic, really, just a space

      in the beams between roof and ceiling. We put it up there

      on a day like this. Back then, everything was still intact. It was January

      and snowing the way it does in Nova Scotia,

      foreshadowed

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