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Every Shameless Ray
"...powerful and evocative...will test the elasticity of readers' minds and imaginations."-- Ormsby Review The capacity of the world to signal and illuminate, restore and repair, fuels the poems in Every Shameless Ray . Emotionally acute, intellectually intriguing, and playful in form, these poems rely upon the unreliable, as when a tipped-over kayaker rides a river's current upside-down and discovers a channel to another world. Misunderstanding a child's word leads to a glimpse of longed-for innocence, or when assuming love will not be found signals, in the movement of a man's hands, a love that will last for years when he eases out the under-row of the black seeds of a papaya. Like the shock of seeing a Matisse painting, underestimated by the artist as merely decorative, these encounters "tear the fabric of the world." In poems of tenderness and ruthless truth, Every Shameless Ray disrupts personal terror, familial myth, art historical bias, and political madness, offering some unlikely means for living in our unlikely times.
- GenresPoetry
118 pages, Paperback
Published October 25, 2018
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 7, 2023
My appreciation to author Leslie Timmins for her evocative, keenly intelligent poems in Every Shameless Ray. Timmins has a vivid sense of the natural and human worlds, and our nature-human connection.
The last section of the collection is called “A Fine Disorder.” It features poems about paintings by the experimental artist Henri Matisse, and this notion of disorder being “fine” permeates the book. The disorder of a broken heart may lead to healing as in the poem “I Saw My Mother’s Face the Day I Was Born” (page 31), just as tipping over allows a river kayaker to “revolve/ upside-down/ and travel like that/ through hollow rooms of the river” and “in head-splitting cold/ righten.” In the swift river current a kind of freedom is found.
For the most part, the natural world and even cancer may offer transcendence, or at least the solace of a broadening empathy. When a couple watch an eagle flying, as in the poem “The Prevailing Wind,” they feel it “liquid as a manta ray swim/ the visible shallows of wind” and they “breathe it in and our ribs unlace/ our flesh so easily wing.” (13) In the long poem “Dear Cancer”, surgery with its “steel table, bucket, the unlovely taking/ of the bride from her body” is chilling to read, yet a loving partner is “just outside nothing lost/ between us,” (43) and another cancer patient in the shared hospital room is sung to with the words “I will not forget you Oh my darling.” (39) During sleepless nights, the cancer survivor feels something alive under the surface of her fears, something beyond the “body’s scarred / and saddened walls” that is both “salmon-skinned” and “shark-finned” and strangely nurturing. Rather than being carried away again into fear, the speaker finds “when still I can’t sleep”/ I think of all/ the sleepless others/ stepping in beside me.”
There are poems about rape and a stillborn baby, children trapped in war, an unhappy love affair, the failure of a way in which you’ve understood your life and the pain of allowing it to unravel like a “spinning tale unspun.” What “can’t be searched for / is found,” this poem declares, but only by accepting emptiness, confusion, failure, sorrow, stillness.
Even in the beloved natural world, there are limitations, as in the poem “The Undertaker Bee” where we are told about the genius of bees’ ability to direct other bees to food sources through a kind of dancing, and of being able to see with “five eyes,” at the same time we are told, bees “can’t see the true/ colour of the rose.” (4-5) Yet there is a kind of testifying throughout the collection to the value of persistence. Of receptivity to the moment and in what seems, at least here, to be the generosity of a world in which, just by raising our heads, we might glimpse the sky or an eagle or a loving partner or a sufferer we long to comfort – and feel the space of freedom.
The last section of the collection is called “A Fine Disorder.” It features poems about paintings by the experimental artist Henri Matisse, and this notion of disorder being “fine” permeates the book. The disorder of a broken heart may lead to healing as in the poem “I Saw My Mother’s Face the Day I Was Born” (page 31), just as tipping over allows a river kayaker to “revolve/ upside-down/ and travel like that/ through hollow rooms of the river” and “in head-splitting cold/ righten.” In the swift river current a kind of freedom is found.
For the most part, the natural world and even cancer may offer transcendence, or at least the solace of a broadening empathy. When a couple watch an eagle flying, as in the poem “The Prevailing Wind,” they feel it “liquid as a manta ray swim/ the visible shallows of wind” and they “breathe it in and our ribs unlace/ our flesh so easily wing.” (13) In the long poem “Dear Cancer”, surgery with its “steel table, bucket, the unlovely taking/ of the bride from her body” is chilling to read, yet a loving partner is “just outside nothing lost/ between us,” (43) and another cancer patient in the shared hospital room is sung to with the words “I will not forget you Oh my darling.” (39) During sleepless nights, the cancer survivor feels something alive under the surface of her fears, something beyond the “body’s scarred / and saddened walls” that is both “salmon-skinned” and “shark-finned” and strangely nurturing. Rather than being carried away again into fear, the speaker finds “when still I can’t sleep”/ I think of all/ the sleepless others/ stepping in beside me.”
There are poems about rape and a stillborn baby, children trapped in war, an unhappy love affair, the failure of a way in which you’ve understood your life and the pain of allowing it to unravel like a “spinning tale unspun.” What “can’t be searched for / is found,” this poem declares, but only by accepting emptiness, confusion, failure, sorrow, stillness.
Even in the beloved natural world, there are limitations, as in the poem “The Undertaker Bee” where we are told about the genius of bees’ ability to direct other bees to food sources through a kind of dancing, and of being able to see with “five eyes,” at the same time we are told, bees “can’t see the true/ colour of the rose.” (4-5) Yet there is a kind of testifying throughout the collection to the value of persistence. Of receptivity to the moment and in what seems, at least here, to be the generosity of a world in which, just by raising our heads, we might glimpse the sky or an eagle or a loving partner or a sufferer we long to comfort – and feel the space of freedom.
Displaying 1 of 1 review