Paper Reunion: Eye catching poetry and come-on cars!

Berg, Sharon. (Ed.) (2016). Paper Reunion: an anthology of Phoenix a poet’s workshop (1976-1986). Sarnia: Big Pond Rumours Press. ISBN 978-0-9780201-6-3

Paper Reunion is a rich eye-catching anthology of poems and narratives from Ontario’s seasoned writers, and well-worth a trip down Ontario’s literary lane.

Big Pond Rumours Press editor, Sharon Berg, of Sarnia, has assembled a cast of writers out of the well-known Phoenix Workshop. Berg’s own glittery lines and sexual graveyard of automobiles evoke Ontario’s James Reaney’s ‘cars with ruby red behinds’:

“But starlight gathered like silver

across those wasted bodies in the yard.

The cars were our fathers’ dreams,

a harem of submissive curves

in midnight blue or a red dangerous as

putting it all into a woman they wanted

on the tarmac, foot to the floor.” (Berg, p. 14)

Envisioning the 1960s men using their unrequited energy to fuel the reconstruction of a ‘midnight blue’ or red car with ‘submissive’ curves, so eloquently captures the trapped lives of the husbands in her lines. Their physical exhaustion used for the re-capture of lost love:

“We have both stepped in and out of our bodies

with our arms crooked for love.” (Berg, p. 15)

Similarly, Marja Jacobs’ ‘Fifty-five socks’ (p.24) is one of several working narratives, and this one, I thought, was particularly appropriate at Christmas, and in this world of global migration. It captures beautifully the incredible resilience of newcomers over poverty. Set in rural war-time Ontario, the ballad details a mother re-knitting, and then selling, her bridal bedspread into 55 socks to sell for wheat and eggs, all that her family must live off of for the Winter months in her new country. This poem alone could be Ontario’s, “Gift of the Magi”.

As writers, we go to other worlds, and make connections with the smallest of fields, to produce our craft. Julie McNeill’s ‘The Paper Flag of the Poet’ provides a marvellous metaphor for the poem, and its “first line/an invisible passport/ into the country of our loyalties.” (McNeill, p.31) Writers like the Phoenix group in Paper Reunion are the cruise ships to foreign borders. No, you don’t need a passport to travel there, but isn’t it wonderful that, in this world of super-speed headlines:

“Some languages are never foreign

linked by subtle rhythms

the long lines dancing with the short,

stanza break and pause.” (McNeill, p.31) ?