Prairie Fire reviews Nerve Squall

In the uncanny world inside Sylvia Legris's Nerve Squall, the mind and more particularly the mind of the migraine sufferer provide an analogue with a cosmic epistemology for revelation. This year's winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Nerve Squall is a well-integrated collection, with each poem following the previous one, typically in a series or a synaptic "run" drawing imagery from such widely diverse areas as neurology, astronomy, fishing, technology, meteorology and ornithology. Within these series, moreover, each poem is syntactically precise as word follows word, and image connotes image, in what may be compared to a neurological connection. Throughout the collection, the poet makes excellent use of typographical expression, whereby the manner in which the words are placed on the page becomes aesthetically and expressively important. The white spaces between the words may be used to create their own resonance or somehow be eloquent and, on one occasion, an upside-down question mark whimsically represents a fish hook. I was delighted by the pen-and-ink illustrations Legris herself adds in the pauses between poems, which complement with just the right touch of hilarity verse marked by a sometimes obsessive and slightly narcissistic though dispassionate look inside the speaker's migraine.

In "4 Nerve endings, Remainders; Jagged White...," the imaginative landscape of a migraine is rendered in terms of a meteorological disturbance:

Neuro-fault line; nervequake; hemicranial. Wind rips into you!--a tree split mid trunk. Blast

of sheet-metal lightning, two plates of skull pried apart. You are frayed optics,

mind a double edge. (15)

From a meteorological analogue, the metaphor in the second stanza shifts to astronomy and to the moon. And this perspective enlarges to include the universe in the final stanza: "No, the whole universe is a thought/ruptured/just short of completion..." As always, Legris is careful to allow the form to dramatize the content, and thus the line breaks themselves become eloquent.

In a more comic rendition of the migraine, the title "Sirius Fracas" puns on the name of the dog star, Sirius, and the adjective "serious."

WOOF WOOF WOOF. August is maniacal, wild dog fights, matted hair. Helixed

nights with one eye always vigilant. Restless restive. Twirling sheets, tilt-a-whirl gut.

Irritable, irascible, rickety with alliteration going to Hell—definitely GOING TO HELL

and you can't wait. (21)

Altogether a linguistic energy brought to bear on this poem allows the reader to feel the wind blow through his/her brain and the poem, and to sweep him/her on to an absurdist view with metaphysical oddball details including "dog fights" and "twirling sheets." "Fishblood Sky"(The Malahat Review long poem contest winner, 2001) applies the linguistic principle that each image is modified by the image that precedes it, and that it, in turn, modifies the image that follows it. Thus the astronomical image of the "moon," in association with the pond, comes into play in the fourth part:

Moon aphasia; mute-eyed and tongue a blind pool enveloping. The tide serrated

with syntax

and hook. Mayfly, fly-fish, flying fish; snarl of fin and wing, spiny things (31)

Here the white space between "tongue" and "blind" not only provides a concrete expression for the moonlight reflection on the pond, but also evokes the "whiteout" associated with certain kinds of migraine.

"Strange Birds; Twitching Birds" effectively dramatizes the pain, isolation and panic that accompany the migraine. In a graphic image, the speaker compares this migraine experience to having her brains pecked out by birds.

Holy Bone Pickers! Holy Bird Mutations! Terminal Highway just lingers and lingers—

unpleasant aftertaste and maddening jingles in your head (Double-your-pleasure? Double-your-

pain?) Nostrils stinging of hot rubber, Firestone-fast food...and now what? Roadkill

phantoms? Circling above you heat mirages?

No

such

luck. (60)

Reaching from this personal Promethean cliffhanger of an experience, the consciousness of the migraine expands to a universal or an apocalyptic level (with a parenthetical question mark that undermines all excess solemnity). Legris's work, it turns out, is rarely without this hallmark irony and tongue-in-cheek humour.

Idiocy of March! Foolish April! Nonstop birds dare you to cross a wire-crazy edge.

You are raving

with rumours of sun and flower plumage: blue sky and the whole blooming

blossoming spectrum. (65)

In thus describing a myopic world in pointillist detail, Nerve Squall requires a close read that opens up its own peculiar perspective on reality, but not without humour. If I was amused by Legris's microcosmic and absurdist cosmology, I was also delighted by the leitmotif with birds strutting or tumbling sideways or upside-down out of the tempest-tossed pages, and enjoyed Bill Kennedy's cover design, which reminds me of the work by the painter Paul Klee.