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Rue the Day
In Rue The Day, Tanis Macdonald torques time and consciousness to scrutinize "what plagues us/what snaps our heads to/rights and won't let us look/at look over look alive." Written in the voices of a demanding "speaking subject" -- a fury with a harpy's vision and a muse's asperity -- and the woman writer whom the Fury takes under her terrible wing, Rue the Day is an elegy, an argument about the knowledge, and a conversation about contemporary femininity that shuttles between the frame of form and the long declarative line.
- GenresPoetry
70 pages, Paperback
First published January 4, 2008
3 people want to read
About the author
Tanis MacDonald
19 books16 followersTanis MacDonald is the author of two books of poetry: Fortune (2003) and Holding Ground (2000), and is the winner of the 2003 Bliss Carman Poetry Prize. She has published articles on the poetry of P.K. Page, Lorna Crozier, and Anne Carson. She teaches English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 23, 2022
Chaotic
fleshy entity.
Form inseparable
from content.
Rhythm?
* * *
The weak he died the cold raked
me no matter how many cups of tea
I gripped. That week I bore the weight
of detail and absence, a forward ache,
paper and antimatter. I forgot how
to follow the frostline of words into
a sentence, into plot and complication,
to the final turn of a phrase or a vow.
That week with my pen I tendered
my signature on papers that sent him
where he was already gone, I cooked
and did not eat. I found a needle to mend
his wool socks. A chance to extend
the life of the foot. World, end, amen.
* * *
A boy with whom I sat stirring
at a lab table balances a scar
that crawled the length of his left arm,
radius embraced by the static legs of
a centipede while he and I measured salt
grain by grain into the beaker until
the solution changed to saturate. Salt
thickened into snow, a build-up of cells,
like scar tissue, the lowly
worm on his arm recording data
and hypothesis, our method, the conclusion
we could not predict until we saw it forms,
like the slice bisecting your eyebrow
where no hair will grow after the downhill flight
that landed you on your skull. You recall
the concussed crack that scared your rescuers,
who were sure you had knocked yourself
brainless. The scar red as a misplaced comma
above your eye when we argue about words or
other surprises. Meet me now in the kitchen
to measure all that accumulates between us,
the saturate of our life together, to watch the way our
heads break open, and the worm beneath
the skin rises to the surface
fleshy entity.
Form inseparable
from content.
Rhythm?
- In which the Poem looks into the Winter, pg. 23
* * *
The weak he died the cold raked
me no matter how many cups of tea
I gripped. That week I bore the weight
of detail and absence, a forward ache,
paper and antimatter. I forgot how
to follow the frostline of words into
a sentence, into plot and complication,
to the final turn of a phrase or a vow.
That week with my pen I tendered
my signature on papers that sent him
where he was already gone, I cooked
and did not eat. I found a needle to mend
his wool socks. A chance to extend
the life of the foot. World, end, amen.
- Signature, pg. 37
* * *
A boy with whom I sat stirring
at a lab table balances a scar
that crawled the length of his left arm,
radius embraced by the static legs of
a centipede while he and I measured salt
grain by grain into the beaker until
the solution changed to saturate. Salt
thickened into snow, a build-up of cells,
like scar tissue, the lowly
worm on his arm recording data
and hypothesis, our method, the conclusion
we could not predict until we saw it forms,
like the slice bisecting your eyebrow
where no hair will grow after the downhill flight
that landed you on your skull. You recall
the concussed crack that scared your rescuers,
who were sure you had knocked yourself
brainless. The scar red as a misplaced comma
above your eye when we argue about words or
other surprises. Meet me now in the kitchen
to measure all that accumulates between us,
the saturate of our life together, to watch the way our
heads break open, and the worm beneath
the skin rises to the surface
- Scar Science, after Ondaatje, pg. 73
January 2, 2018
My review when I was clearly too busy to review: I can count on Tanis MacDonald's work to twist out of the known grasp, turn the globe a little askew on its axis. "I told you that your eyes would steam,//your head crackle with static." Indeed.
My continuation: I am a gigantic fish of a fan of MacDonald's work. She works on me in sinuous, seductive ways, and I am all ocean, ready for reefs, ready for tides, ready for fandango. When I read her, I sometimes swim around my house holding my head because she uses language in mesmeric ways. How did she do that? I whisper. How? I cannot imagine her medium of air and pen and ink because I swim in water. One of *those* writers, the rare ones.
My continuation: I am a gigantic fish of a fan of MacDonald's work. She works on me in sinuous, seductive ways, and I am all ocean, ready for reefs, ready for tides, ready for fandango. When I read her, I sometimes swim around my house holding my head because she uses language in mesmeric ways. How did she do that? I whisper. How? I cannot imagine her medium of air and pen and ink because I swim in water. One of *those* writers, the rare ones.
May 8, 2009
I absolutely love it, it's perhaps my favourite collection of poetry.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews