Border Crossings praises Expressway
'Sina Queyras's poetry collection Expressway, which was nominated for a Governor General's Award this year, is ... concerned with walking, moving through landscape and considering the connections between humanity and nature. Yet, unlike Zieroth, she strenuously questions - and ultimately rejects - the listener/receiver model of poetics.
Instead, her poetic persona, a woman striding along the edge of an expressway talking (or is she listening?) into her cell phone, kicks over the traces of the undivided subject, the solitary walker wandering lonely as a cloud in a 'natural' and naturally beautiful environment. Indeed, in the opening poem, 'Solitary,' she explicitly evokes the Wordsworthian moment, that cloudy daffodil-flocked day that still hovers on the periphery of some allusive, elusive romanticism of the mind. But Queyras's walker strides forth out of the 'Post-Romantic years,' her cell phone cocked to her ear, her perspective cast backward to history's finish line and forwards to the mock-epiphanic moment when 'Nature / One concludes, is nostalgia.'
Who is she but the expressive traveller hastening ever further along the expressways of her past and future selves? Not to mention history, memory, Genesis, the apple tree, a father's death, speed, optimism, the urban sprawl, post-Industrial ennui, the history of hurtle forward and hold fast and throttle back. And what is memory but one of the cars that flash by, fleet and shining, on either side of the expressway? Yet in Queyras's collection, memory of the individual self is not privileged over the collective memory of a larger self, a bigger world, a higher and more conscientious consciousness or, alternatively, a subjectivity that is split and widely proliferating as in the poem 'Progress.'
One is not simply.
One is not.
One is ever after.
One is as much as this.
Queyras's aesthetics are not those of lyricism or beauty. 'This poem stinks of dynamite,' she writes in the poem sequence 'This is not My Beautiful Poem.' And later in another resonant phrase, 'Writing is the disordered hum.' Dynamite, disorder, the apprehension of and willingness to elucidate 'stink' - this is her manifesto, and the collection, which includes poems 'crafted' from texts as diverse as Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Letters as well as various fragments, police reports, and newspaper clippings from Google text, comes to achieve the constructedness of the medians and highways, the thoroughfares and crash sites, and neural pathways of that expressive straight line with all its crooked moments of interruption and connectedness.'
