Emily Osborne, Safety Razor

 

“Sonatorrek”

Hardly can I hoist
my tongue or mount
song’s steelyard, forgeverse
in my mind’s foundry.

My tear-sea swamps
poetry, yet verse flows
like gore from a giant’s
throat onto Hel’s port.

The cruel sea hackedthrough
the fence of my kin.
A gap rots, unfilled,
Where my sons flourished.

I carried one son’scorpse.
I carry word-timber,
leafed in language,
from the speech-shrine.

I’mintrigued by the lyric density of the narratives in Bowen Island, British Columbia-based poet Emily Osborne’s full-length debut, Safety Razor (Guelph ON: GordonHill Press, 2023). “Thunder strums through my earliest memory / of family dinner.”she writes, to open the opening poem, “Infant amnesia,” “Summer in Ontario, //lightning pulses on the table. In the post- / voltaic hush, Dad tunes the radioto sirens, // tornado. We rush to the basement but / I’m leashed to myhighchair so Dad hauls // the hybrid downstairs, my bib scattering / remnantsin the dim.” She offers stories, memories and short scenes that unfold andunfurl with such careful precision, physicality and rootedness, composed withina present that includes moments across time and space to meet correspondingmoments of flesh and bone. As she writes as part of the poem “Diacritics”: “Yousaid my consonants split and replicate / like cells in tumours.” Writing onscrimshaws, dinosaur bones, runes, DNA, relativity, pollution, weather, balladsand folk tales, Osborne’s poems are centred on her narrative self, but also populatedwith different eras and perspectives, and the collection includes a selectionof poems that fold in a handful of her translations of Old Norse-Icelandic skaldicverse from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. I’m curious about her engagementwith such particular histories and old forms, and her author biography offersthat she “completed an MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, in OldEnglish and Old Norse Literature.”

“Verse making”

Goddess of therune-carved mead mug,
I’ve smoothed the prow ofthis song-ship.
Lovely lady, tree whocarries cups,
I deftly ply my tongue,the lathe of poems.

Organizedinto three sections—“FIRST CUTS,” “BARE BONES” and “FLESH MEETS”—the poems of SafetyRazor are infused with a density and a depth, and there is an attentivenessand a precision to Osborne’s lyrics that is quite striking, setting words downwith the deliberateness of letters carved directly into stone. “Art is youngerthan dirt,” the poem “Scrimshaw” ends, “only / as old as petroglyphs coating /earth’s aortas: […]” As well, I’m always intrigued by writers who are theoffspring of other writers [see my recent Touch the Donkey interviewwith Victoria, British Columbia poet Hilary Clark, in which she responds to aquestion around the work of her son, Winnipeg poet Julian Day], and I recentlyfound out that Osborne’s mother, Mary Willis, is the author of the poetrytitles Under this World's Green Arches (1977) and Earth’s Only Light(1981), both of which appeared through the Fiddlehead Poetry Book series. I wouldbe curious to know what echoes might have come through Osborne’s work from hermother, impossible to know for certain without knowing her mother’s work, or ifthere is any overt influence at all. “What else can I give my sons,” shewrites, as part of “Heirlooms,” “from my mother but pale eyes and stories?”

Eitherway, this is a collection that is fully aware of roots that span distances vastand intimate, moving in a myriad of directions, and even further, as thecollection closes with a small cluster of poems on new parenting. “Oh my son,”she writes, as part of “Labour, Eastertime 2019,” “from where did you come? /It’s true I didn’t see you until the curtain / lifted. But other hands are alwaysfirst // to catch, pull, hold you. Alone / I feed you, while the postnatal /room’s analog snips through sleep.” Razor Safety is a collection aware oftethers and tendrils, aware of what holds and where she reaches, seeking out andacknowledging a plethora of connections and connective tissue, no matter thedistances. Or, as she writes to close the poem “20-week scan”:

On these tones yourfather and I coast
through winter, foregoforeign travel,

speak of you. His basscaroms images,
half accurate perhaps. Afterthe first
made-up years, our wordsstatic back

until we’re parent shipsprojecting signals,
hoping you’ll echo. The biggeryou grow,
the less we know you’veheard us

our sonar broken
on open ocean