A Strange Relief

by Sonnet L'Abbé

Book by Sonnet L'Abbe

Genres: Poetry, Canada

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2001

About the author

Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet and critic.

As a poet, L'Abbé writes about national identity, race, gender and language. She has been shortlisted for the 2010 CBC Literary Award for poetry and has won the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer under 35.

As a critic, she has been a regular reviewer of fiction and poetry for The Globe and Mail and has written scholarly articles on Canadian contemporary poetry. In, 2013 she was the Artist-In-Motion for 2017 Starts Now!, a series of talks that joined Canadians across the country in a conversation about how to celebrate the Canadian sesquicentennial.

Born in Toronto, Ontario, L'Abbé has a PhD in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, a Master's degree in English literature from the University of Guelph and a BFA in film and video from York University. She has been a script reader and has taught English at universities in South Korea and as well as teaching Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. She has also worked as an assistant poetry editor at Canadian Literature, and is an occasional contributor to CBC Radio One and the National Post. She currently teaches creative writing at UBC's Okanagan campus.

Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals and several anthologies including Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010, Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, and Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Woman's Poetry.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Strange Relief is divided into three parts: "Hiatus", "Nomads", and "Cheju Diary".

The poems of "Hiatus" focus on pottery. It is worth mentioning that the poet's father is a potter / ceramic artist. According to the poet, the poems are influenced by Bernard Leach, an influential figure in the studio pottery movement...

Clay is an eternal experiment
in the quiet laboratory
of the ocean. The planet's
every pore still breathes clay, as it has since birth,
long before an electron eye
saw the micronic dimension of porcelain,
not colloidal, but particulate.

The salt sea is proof
of the dissolution of incalculable quantities of rock,
moon-drawn bath of continents.

We ow this raw material
to water's mechanical persuasion,
its abrasive persistence: the temperamental ocean wished
a fresh new floor from earth's
feldspathic crust, and disguised as rain
convinced igneous rock in slow submerged beds,
until a geologic argument, gradual as the fall
out of love, heaved these metamorphic strata
back to land, where they would patiently wait
for a potter's deep desire.

The poetry of pottery is scientific,
hidden in the nomenclature of clay.
Listen to this.
Hydrous silicate of alumina.
- Lesson from the Neolithic Era, pg. 3


In our house, a plate
was more than a simple dish.
We ate
off your hardened hopes,
carried water in the heavy hold
of your conviction
that man could live off earth.

Steps to the cellar
sugared with red clay dust,
hair on your forearm
frosted with slip, our whole home
a showroom, wheel-hum
our lullaby, instead of bread
the brown smell
of canvas tabletops stained with work.

Your jugs and bowls
put food on our table.
For years I thought glaze
was your sweat,
a varnish of toil and love.
[...]
- The Potter's Daughter, pg. 12

The poems of "Nomads" focus on history, both personal and shared. We recognize the poet's personal history when she writes in the first person, as in "Offering". We recognize the poet's representation of shared history when she writes in the second person, or writes we, as in "Horses". The most interesting poem of "Nomads" is the titular poem, in which the poet in the first and second person, recalling history through "I", "you", and "we"...

The vocabulary of desire
is incomplete, a word is missing.

My tongue searches
for your body in language
and finds you in every word.

I though this was a small thing, a stone
in the palm I could offer you,
my body in darkness a simple gift
casual as a pebble.
As if touching were easier than speaking,
as if this poem did not prove you
inside me already, as if asking
meant I still had the power to invite.

But you make me aware of breathing,
of the awesome fact
that each particle of air
has been taken as least once
into every lung.
Suddenly I have no boundaries
and to kiss you seems to drink up the sky,
slip it from my tongue into your mouth.

Our bodies just our hearts' clothing,
and I cam to you so shabbily dressed.
Maybe I thought that for one night
I could wear your beauty through closeness
and for a few hours believe myself
splendidly arrayed.

But you know all the lyrics
to rejection.
My body, your exquisite voice's
shattered glass
- Offering, pg. 21-22


We were the first four-by-fours,
muscular vehicles taming the land.
Flags cracked like ships in the west wind.
We ate out of your hands.

The tanned saddle's origin, the nightmares
og ground hooves kept us blind as motors,
our the eyes of the ridden, your whores
who bridled silent, bucked at our own expense.

Instinct lived beyond your unbuilt fences,
was stampeded into the sea. But still our iron footfall
nailed smiles into the earth, patient
for steam, for sugar to fill our tanks,

and we thanked our flesh, that we could be broken
but not as machinery is broken,
that we would die unengineered, be well spoken
of, as the dead are,

We came to rest on oval courses.
We were driven by all that drives progress.
Forces.
- Horses, pg. 37


[...]
You run your fingers over the corroded shell;
the hull sheds its dull scales of rust.
You stand where I once did,
look back across the bow to naked vessels,
each tilted against a sandy dune
as though tossed on one last wave.
[...]
We have never heard of them;
they have never heard of us.
[...]
I don't remember how I saw the sea off,
the last time I dipped my hand in her waters,
wet my cheek with her salt tears.
[...]
- Nomads, pg.46-48

The poems of "Cheju Diary" don't follow a particular theme. Instead, they are like diary entries, observations... Perhaps observations made during a trip to Cheju. Or perhaps a pretense for calling attention to the American intervention that led to the "April 3rd massacre", during which between 40,000 and 80,000 people were tortured and killed by South Korean troops reporting to American officers. But hte poet does not focus on the violence. Instead, she focuses on the colonial implications of intervention through her exploration of language...

What kind of garden is this?
Piles of rubble, rocks behind glass,
some propped-up dead wood.

Without names, we feel cheated by stone;
helpless in a mute museum.

A word in English changes everything:
this root, the horsedragon's twisted sinew,
suddenly the movement of reincarnation
in the rock's striated muscle.

One man's imagination
translates the ideograms of a frightened island:
he bent close and heard in the petrified shape
of roots the long memory of lava,'
whose crest like a hot blade shaved
the forest to stubble,
razing the thick fur of pines
to a skin of scorched earth. Melted rock
beading between stumps like spilled mercury.
[...]
- Mok Sok Wan, pg. 71


[...]
I write my name
on the arm of the chair by the window,
on flat leaves, on shelves,
on an old mirror discarded
in the empty stairwell:
my reflection in the glass
is the powdered face
of a girl grown into a woman's rules.
[...]
- Settlers, pg. 75

[snott · Rating 3 out of 5]

some stand-outs.

Cheju diaries had it's moments.