Bren Simmers, The Work

 

OPTIONS

My brother and his
wife have stopped
making long-term
plans. The window
shrunk to months.
A basketball and a
volleyball removed
from her uterus,
her colon gone,
part of her liver,
spots blooming
on her lungs.
Now it’s chemo
every three weeks
until that stops
working. So long
as there’s options,
don’t talk about
dying. She fights
to play with her
daughters each
day, bank enough
memories to outlast
their childhoods.

Thelatest poetry title by Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers is The Work (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), following Night Gears (HamiltonON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2010), Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: NightwoodEditions, 2015) [see my review of such here], Pivot Point (GaspereauPress, 2019) and If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. The Work, as the back cover offers, engages “with the work oflove and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portion ofgrief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of losses—the sudden deathof her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law’sterminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness.”There is an enormous amount of churning, as the book offers, through thiscollection, swirling and surrounding grief and illness and the roiling turmoilof familial health, all of which carry their own considerable and accumulativeweight. “There comes a point / when the losses stack / up and all you want is /a few good years and / cash in your wallet.” Simmers writes, to open the poem “LOADUPON LOAD,” the piece that opens the first of the book’s five sections. Simmers’usual clear narrative lyric provides a tension through its very restraint andstraightforwardness, writing the implications of grief, and the regrets aroundwhat can no longer be said, no longer be repeated, no longer be taken back. “Thelast night I was in an airport I ran / from one empty terminal to the next /looking for a time zone with my father / still in it.” she writes, to open thepoem “ICE FISHING.” Further, to close the short poem, offering: “I could feed avillage with / my grief. These days, / I don’t need a shelter or // an openingto talk to him. / Simply stand on the ice, / let the wind scale / my cheeks.”

“IfI stopped taking airplanes / I’d never see my family again.” the poem “IFSATURDAY, AN EMPTY PARKING LOT” offers. The poems mourn the slow loss of familyand connection, a connection that requires a physicality. “Hello // to puttingon hard pants and still trying / to enter a conversation thinking yes,” endsthe poem “HELLO/YES,” “how a single word sets you up / for connection in a timewhen // people can’t touch.” Focusing different sections on different individualsacross this array of loss and losses, the poems of the penultimate section, “STILLMOM,” offer an erasure of vowels across the narrative, demonstrating adevastating progress of holes in her mother’s language as her minddeteriorates. As the poem “WHEN YOU STARTED HAVING ACCIDENTS” ends: “the skyis beige your food pureed you’ve / started to strike the aides during mrning care their / answer is always m re drugs on your birthday y u / said Ilove you back      it’d been mnths    when / friends ask I tell themthat [.]” The Work is a book that holds these articulations of loss socompletely that, as a reader, one hopes that the process might allow any readera way into their own losses, and perhaps, the author, a way from which to movesomehow beyond. This really is a powerful collection.