The Gazette hails Expressway
The American poet Carl Sandburg said that 'poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.' He meant that poetry has the freedom to bring together disparate elements in the world and align them into something surprisingly new.
A new crop of poetry books from Montreal and beyond illustrate the persistent power of poetry to engage in the search for coherence and clarity amid incongruities.
Among the boldest and most original volumes within the group is Expressway, by Montreal poet Sina Queyras.
Expressway is a stark, disturbing, often disorienting volume in which the image of the expressway is examined as a unifying metaphor for the flow, connectivity, displacement and violence of the modern society.
In the opening section of the poem Three Dreams of the Expressway, Queyras finds in roadways a juxtaposition of the deeply personal with the broadly public, and discovers a bleak dystopia rather than the more recognizable romance of the road:
They move out of the domestic sphere, they
Move away from the office towers, they come
Down to the expressways with pickaxes, they come
With hammers, they come, suddenly clear,
Suddenly swinging hammers, they say, This
Is a metaphor too unwieldy...
Like David Cronenberg's film Crash, Queyras's Expressway examines the way in which our roadways have come to define us as a culture; we are caught careening in unknown directions at uncontrollable speeds within narratives over which we often have little control.
...
These four volumes show us once again that poetry, at its best, provides the alchemy through which all our contradictions - balding towels and pink panties, childhood and old age, expressways and pickaxes, soup bowls and swans - may be thrown together and, 'like arranged marriages,' create something that is potentially enduring, dysfunctional or maybe even transcendent.
