Canadian Literature reviews Nerve Squall

Grumpiness as a major trope is hard to pull off over the length of an entire book. In Nerve Squall, which won the prestigious 2006 Griffin Prize, Sylvia Legris sustains this perspective with considerable panache. Through the lexicon of electrical storms, migraines, and Hitchcock-like threatening birds, Legris invokes an irritable world, full of foreboding and anxiety. One is inclined to think it is the world we actually inhabit with its global crises of overpopulation, wage slavery, biosphere destruction, climate change, and interminable ugly wars. These poems seem to mimic the mood of our times—the colossal headache of the planet which humans have unleashed, though Legris does not make this connection particularly explicit.

Fish are an important motif in this disturbed world. "Barbed" is the title of the first section, which includes drawings by Legris of fish swept in by wind currents into the air, and a series called "Fishblood Sky", which makes the whole atmosphere into a watery world. "Falling fish; wounded fish; carp carp carp," she writes, ever playful with subtextual connections, "Stench of cod liver and creosote./ Everything slips." The last section of the book, entitled "Truncated," begins with a telling quotation, "The cameraman has tried to make an amputee whole again"; it closes with a drawing called "Fish / stump" showing a dead fish on a sawed-off tree.

In the middle section, entitled "Ornithological Tautologies," birds reign supreme, in poems entitled "Ravenousness" (referring to "run-of-the-kill carrion"), "Strange Birds; Twitching Birds," "Birds (An Apocalyptic Poem?)," and "Agitated Sky Etiology." The poems are liberally peppered with bird calls, screeches and hollers, and words mimicking or describing bird-like sounds:

Kittiwake Kittiwake Kittiwake (getaway-getaway-getaway).

Thorny nerves and bird-suspended bridges. O frigate frigate frigatebirds—even pelicans won't look you in the eye. The sky creepy with rooks and here you are, condemned, to the wrong side of the board walk— checkcheckcheckcheckcheckcheckcheck —a never ending game you are destined to bungle.

Legris is intensely playful with puns, half-rhymes, rhythmic echoes and onomatopoeia—at times rather formulaically, but often very subtly. Her poems rise like wind squalls in gusts of words, whirling insomniac dithyrambs; but there is much method in this Dionysian madness.