Nothing You Can Carry
Susan Alexander
Thistledown Press, 2020
Review by Neil Surkan
Comprising five suites that echo and amplify one another, Susan Alexander’s sophomore collection, Nothing You Can Carry, pushes us to the limit of hope. Alongside their imagistic flourishes, sleight-of-hand enjambments, witty turns of phrase, and delectably melodic stanzas, Alexander’s deft lyrics stick out because of their throat-throbbing honesty; she removes the last shell of armour we have against the sucking doom of 2020: sarcasm. The speakers excoriate, bemoan, grieve, and intimate; they engage our shared contemporary terror at the deterioration of the natural world; they reckon with personal loss; they refuse superficial solace; they pray. Mourning becomes a political act. Rather than start afresh, these poems persist amidst devastation.
The first of the book’s five suites, “Vigil,” begins at the end––of our world. In the opening poem, “Anthropocene,” the speaker’s nostalgia for a lost way of life jars against contemporary atrocities:
I miss the old gods, before they slipped into the bunker.
Brace of doves, sifting through ashes. Before Google.
It’s all DIY these days of data mining.
No kneeling fern deep beside the stream, no sprinkled water
before the drink. I don’t remove my shoes.
Like a Burtynsky photograph, the world of “Anthropocene” is too dirty for direct contact, too tainted for shoeless touch. What was strained has now worn out completely––“Unseen structures collapse, / pumped dry”––epitomizing the term coined to articulate a world so mutated, desiccated, and sick that a living landscape becomes indistinguishable from a dead one: the necropastoral. In the necropastoral, each environmental and human catastrophe slides closer to apocalypse. The world appears as an obscene, degraded version of its former self. Such slippage takes centre stage in “Anthropocene” when the speaker asks, “What to do about ghosts if the Styx runs low?” Haunted and haunting, Earth’s surface is portrayed as no different from the shade-cluttered Underworld below; the natural progression from life to death has stalled. The poem ends with a scene reminiscent of Goya’s painting of Saturn eating one of his children: “A sweet boy tumbles toward us on juicy pink legs. / Kiss him with alchemical lips, / swallow him whole.” The young are devoured before they can hope.
And yet, despite its macabre beginnings, the speakers in the rest of the book’s opening suite still do hope, and refuse to succumb to the alienation of our DIY present. Nothing You Can Carry creates a poignant balance between nostalgia for a less-worn world and a tenuous faith in the mystery of the cosmos that appears, throughout, in flashes of insight. Alexander’s speakers persistently hunt. In the poem “Presence” for instance, they hunt for “what is possible beyond / what is”; they search, in “Aletheia,” “in places we are certain / nothing will be found”; they sing, in “Canticle for Sea Lions in Howe Sound,” “both protest and praise, / witness to the living and the dying, / to the present return and the probable destruction.” Thus, these poems accompany us through a dying world by asking, in place of comfort, the question what if? What if there is more to being alive than what can be seen and heard? than what can be touched, described, bought? How might our worldview be renovated to make room for the ineffable?
The middle three suites of Nothing You Can Carry––“Confession,” “Parables,” and “Pilgrimage”––diverge from the ecological devastation of “Vigil.” Each suite serves to widen the aperture of the collection in order to remind us that although our wounded world reels, everyday life––its rhythm and resonance––goes on. One must, the middle suites argue, attend to more (and here more also means less) than geopolitical dynamics: they hone in, catalogue minutiae, and get personal. “Confession” assembles a series of memory poems and intimate self-portraits reminiscent of Sharon Olds’ oeuvre. In the poem “Matryoshka, Nesting Doll,” the speaker’s body “hold[s] all the ancestors / inside” as past and present overlap: who she was as a child; who she was as a teen; who she is as a mother, a partner, a friend.
In stark contrast, the third suite, “Parables,” mobilizes the ambiguities of allegory in Bible passages and children’s stories, interplaying the magical, the imaginary, and the symbolic. These poems seem to take up the assertion in “Anthropocene” (that “it’s all DIY these days of data mining”) and explore to what extent cultivating a belief system in our contemporary moment might also be DIY in the absence of overarching religion. As such, the poems are characterized by elusive, perplexing endings that eschew resolution in favour of suggestive imagery. Take the haunting poem “Winter Rain,” in which the speaker’s unsatiated drive to make meaning in the face of inexplicable loss takes centre stage as she:
covertly…composes
petal words and earth tunes
to quiet the buried ones who push up
through the long dark.
The fourth suite, “Pilgrimage,” widens the scope once more with a series of travel poems. Right near the beginning, in “Anatolia,” however, the stakes of the suite are set when the speaker reminds herself, “what you look for here is nothing you can carry home.” The poems in “Pilgrimage” eddy, relinquishing the material onslaught of the world in favour of the shifting sensations of the present. Returning home, the speaker learns in the poem “Introit,” is:
to shed all the pretty things
that keep me from
the invisible world I am
moving towards.
“Pilgrimage” is an homage to ephemerality; the speakers in the suite savour what’s now and keep nothing for later. Each tender lyric feels at once ravenously alive and, in the face of fleeting sweetness, at peace.
But after bolstering herself, and us, with intimations and parables, and appearing to reconcile with the ultimate loss that awaits us all, Alexander turns back and faces the necropastoral again. “Matins,” the final suite in the book, mimics the achy reckoning that follows a feverish sleep––what the speaker in “Plan B” calls the “zombie dread of being half alive and moving, / but tapped by another intelligence / for an unknown purpose.” No matter the solace that might have bloomed in the preceding suites, the speaker wakes to an uncanny world, where even rhubarb looks like “scarlet / eruptions from the underworld.” Poems like “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One,” “The Environmentalist’s Curse,” and “The Whirlwind Questions Burnco Rock Products Ltd” shed any airs of equanimity and rage against greed and selfish motives. The temptation to give in by giving up and playing along also pangs among the bitterness: the voice of a craven developer in “The Developer’s Curse” wishes outright that we’ll all feed our “dreams…to the chipper,” move to “unsullied subdivisions,” and “end up loving it.”
Such cynicism relents, though, and in the end wonderment at the cyclical flourishes of nature takes hold and grounds the close of Nothing You Can Carry in a prayerful reverence for the Earth. We are called, in “Sword Ferns in Spring,” to “join the chorale, faithful and primordial” and add our own “fretful grace note[s].” The final poem, “Last Morning,” is like a grace note itself, calling us once more to “Listen. / It is still not too late.” Amidst the doom and doubt of a scarred and broken earth, Alexander can’t help but sing.
Neil Surkan is the author of the poetry collections Unbecoming (forthcoming Fall 2021) and On High (2018), both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness (Knife-Fork-Book, 2020) and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017). His most recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Canadian Literature, THIS Magazine, Prairie Fire, The Literary Review of Canada, PRISM international, and Riddle Fence, among others. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.