Eye on Legris
Big--money literary prizes are great for several reasons beyond the obvious bottom--line benefit to being one of the lucky winners: they stir up fevered debate around the merits of selected works, they lend moments of glamour to what is usually a lonely pursuit and, perhaps most importantly, they inspire readers (including book critics) to pay greater attention to a previously overlooked book.
On June 1, judges Lisa Robertson, Eliot Weinberger and Lavinia Greenlaw awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize to Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, from the international shortlist, for his Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan University Press, $27.95, 143 pages) and to Saskatchewan--based poet Sylvia Legris, from the Canadian shortlist, for her Nerve Squall (Coach House Books, $16.95, 112 pages). Both poets went home $50,000 richer than they arrived and, one hopes, with an ever--increasing circle of readers.
An old boyfriend of mine used to compare literary excavation -- that searching for clues and interconnected meanings -- to Freud’s theory of paranoia. This came to mind repeatedly as I moved my way through Legris’ consciousness--bending tour de force Nerve Squall. The book, packed with dizzying associative leaps between brain function and bad weather, portrays an atmosphere teeming with omens. This creates a place of shifting horizons, a place where, as The Five Man Electric Band once sang, "Sign, sign, everywhere a sign / blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind." With cinematic references from The Birds to The Wizard of Oz, Nerve Squall positions the reader smack in the middle of the storm, in a landscape that attacks and seduces with a bristling, frenetic beauty. As the borders protecting the individual break apart, the world is turned, literally, upside--down: fish swim through the sky and we drown in the incantatory rhythms of breath.
From the first page, external reality is seen as an invading force, as the poet describes a confrontation with an open field of pepper--grass -- "nerve fertile, succulent" -- and the following "aura preceding the storm: vein lightning and thunder." The reference is to the onset of a migraine, an allergic reaction to the natural world, but this affliction is felt emotionally as well as physically. If the book is to be read as an extended metaphor on the blinding brightness and episodic suffering that comes with being alive, then this is one hell of a headache.
As the book progresses, divisions between the human body and the outer universe begin to disintegrate as the poet identifies more and more with animals -- all manner of fish and fowl, from mackerel to chickens -- and the ego collapses, reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s ecstatic communion in "Song of Myself." We are at once trapped in the perspective of the individual and connected to the whole. Legris effectively nails that foreboding sense of disorientation one feels in the face of annihilation squarely on the head. One senses that detachment and union are both equally unbearable. In the end, the only cure for this terrifying state, as "sensory overkill sends you anaphylactic," is this constant movement through; the act of speaking, naming and writing. On the last page, Legris offers a parting gift -- "your transorbital EpiPen" -- and we are saved as the self is reconstructed through language.
The result is a laser--like reflection of modern alienation, anxiety and obsession. Like a dishevelled Tippi Hedren dosed on psychotropics, we try to beat back the news of existence even as we reach out for it.
