Fraser Sutherland on Nerve Squall

The aptly named Nerve Squall, this year's $50,000 winner of the Griffin Prize's Canadian division, is an excitable collection of poems about birds, fish and clouds. Not that they are separable, since the thumbnail sketches with which the author decorates her book often depict guppy-like creatures swimming through cloudbanks, or poultry apparently caught in a hurricane. With the book's first word-string, Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris begins as she means to proceed. On display are her stylistic tics: lists, parentheses and pedantry.

Campestre (open field): nerve-fertile, succulent (Autumn Joy, portulaca . . .) Palms prickle perplexity, electricity: senses sun-keen, idiopathic, tongue a ragged bundle of words (bramble, bristlegrass, clipped bite of mustard).

That's the scene at ground-level, but for this Chicken Little the sky is always falling.

Crawfish, craw (Daddy, don't choke on surprise!). Split-open sky, spitting wind, and yes those are cows on the roof! Fish at the window!

Nerve Squall may not be about likely animals in unlikely places at all, but rather about chronic migraines. The book's poem and section titles are relatively meaningless, because all is dominated by baleful mood and malign atmosphere. Everything seems to set off a hyperactive inner barometer, meteorological hysteria and a sick headache: "The water cooler sloshing like so much nausea"; "Sick sick sick; sick of stink, sick of summer, godforsaken and sticky as dog"; "Migrainous birds." Ah, those birds, escapees from a Hitchcock film:

Lose your way in eggshells and fowl drippings. Falling-from-grace Angel Cake. Burnt-to-a-crisp Devil's Food. Bad leavening. Blood-curdling milk. And birds HARASSING HARASSING HARASSING you from stove to fridge and back.

The "you" of the poems has a permanently unsettled mind:

Morning and the sun burns orange in your heart -- bile and red sky, portentous. In your mouth, taste of bitter and jagged star; mind frantic with erratic planets, platelets, irregular orbit.

Italics proliferate. Capitalizations and exclamation marks shout. Square and round brackets relentlessly qualify: "Quiscalus quiscula (Commonest Common Grackle)." Rhetorical apostrophes rise: "O blustering succotash! O mother of lightning!" At rare intervals, a felicitous phrase like "miles and miles of eye-quiet and blue" clears the air, and at times a relative calm is achieved, especially in the poems on snow that effectively use a shorter line:

It's as if you were never here (you start to believe this).

Walk the same footprints every day

and every day they disappear -- drowning

in the whiteness of it all, hyper-invisibly visible;

white trudging white.

But if this seems restful, winter produces its own forms of unhappy clamour.

Stalactites, stalagmites

(you can never remember the difference).

Noise assails you from north and south,

drum-puncturing icicles, ossicles

petrified.

Near the book's end, we are back to storm-warning advisories:

Quell the rain. Hell is your brain frozen over with too much reiteration. (Windows of nonstop bleeding. Elm trees of incessantly scraping fingernails.) Bad weather oozes into you unmediated. Wildly glandular. (A worsening ca-coughening!)

Legris is a great one for puns, and for interweaving snatches of proverbs and nursery rhymes: "Be nimble, be quick"; "Take warning! Take warning! Red ants at morning . . ."; "Lack-Lack-Lack. Lonely ducks plead for rain but rain rain's gone away . . ."

Those who enjoy linguistic foreplay, and the pinball wizardry of caroming words, will favour this book. Those like me will find that it all adds up to narcissistic inconsequence.

The judges' citation affects the kind of bafflegab usually reserved for blurbs and back-cover copy: "Legris' poems build like chords from sub- to super-sonic and, even at their most rapid and heightened point, sustain the force of poetic enquiry." Yet Legris might have been the right, albeit surprising, winner in a short list that included Phil Hall's An Oak Hunch and Erin Mouré's Little Theatres -- a short list that, like an erratic baseball team, lacked breadth and depth.

The judges -- Lavinia Greenlaw, Lisa Robertson and Eliot Weinberger -- deserve credit for wading through 441 poetry books. But in the case of the Canadian entries, they chose to favour language gymnastics over earthbound form and content. This year, the Griffin Prize could have shown a better, or at least more varied, face to the world.