Lee Gould Recommends SKEIN OF DAYS by Sonja Ruth Greckol

SKEIN OF DAYS
By Sonja Ruth Greckol
Pedlar Press, 2014

In her second collection, innovative  Canadian poet Sonja Ruth Greckol set herself the task of reconstructing “the time of her life,” 1945 until the turn of the century. Rather than untangle formative issues for us, Skein offers the tangle itself: a diary of entries compiled and composed around Greckol’s February birth date as published in print media, popular songs and poems excerpted from the Governor General’s Poetry Award collections as well as witty prose poems, some incorporating symbols and blanks as well as catch phrases and illustrations.

Found poems consisting of garbled headlines introduce the reader to the vocabulary that typified the era. Occasionally I felt as though I were there absorbing the news as though  skimming a journal over a train passenger’s shoulder or half-listening to the radio. An amazing range of issues is considered: the new feminism, guns & butter, mining, farming,  first nations peoples, the Cold War, poverty, as well as lives of ordinary Canadians.

Highlights are the lyric poems that book-end the volume and appear intermittently throughout. The initial untitled poem introduces us to Greckol’s view of what constitutes history and the “intricate textual rhythms” of her language:

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The hidden, the obscure fall
                        outside sweep to dark surround
                        audible   barely   discernible   manifest
                                                                        and something is added to history

In Coda: More Things Thing Up, (a terrific title) Greckol pulls the skein tight: the times are varied, chaotic; she (and we) house it all, and struggle:

    Change accumulates time, weaves rhyme geographic

                    vultures disappear one by one   suddenly Parsi cannot bury
                                    their dead
                                                            in the Tower of Silence           no
                    vultures for food
                                                        where small things that can’t thing up
                                                                                        lie between here and not

How can I tell you something is out there: something that I must
live to aspire to, whether a pulse, debris, perhaps   blank…

Headlines and subheads appropriated, often reconstructed into dense, highly active lines plus brief personal narratives tie the collection together. These collage-like word-flows—cacophonous, soothing, disturbing, comic, comforting, melodic—replicate the era’s ambient sounds:    

                                        1962

…the first rainbow first snow first falling star Cuba expulsion
costly to U.S. the Red and the Thames are
never so sweet to skate upon swim in or breaking up is hard to do
            begins baptism with silver and light…

From this unique, well-researched volume, two lines I’ll never forget: “You’re always running into people’s unconscious,” says  Marilyn Monroe in July 1961 and the beautiful mysterious line from 1947, A bomb snow made ladies out of trees…

You can read an excerpt for Skein of Days in Issue 6 of The Rusty Toque

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Lee Gould's poems, essays, and reviews appear in:  Blithe Spirit, Bridges, Magma, Quarterly West, The Berkshire Review, Salmagundi, Gay and  Lesbian Review, Chronogram, Women and Environments, Passager and other journals; in anthologies  “Burning Bright,” “Still Against War,” “A Slant of Light: Women Writers of the Hudson Valley.” Her chapbook  “Weeds” appeared in 2010.