Consequences of Human Experiments: Review of Anne Marie Todkill's Orion Sweeping
Anne Marie Todkill, Orion Sweeping.
Brick Books, 2022. $21.95 CAD.
Buy a copy from Brick Books.
In her debut poetry collection Orion Sweeping, Anne Marie Todkill attends to the consequences of human experiments and what we humans have made of our lives on Earth. Sectioned into fifths titled “Earth,” “Air,” “Familia,” “Loss Lessons,” and “Assisi Variations," respectively, the poems mostly fit to those themes, though the connections are sometimes indirect, even elusive.
The collection opens with a grouping of five poems that consider a record snowfall in Toronto in 1971; radioactive fallout testing of baby teeth in 1958; Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed and created; vestiges of trinitite at a nuclear test site; the naming of steps in Toronto’s Spadina Park. These are fine poems with subjects and narratives related to the theme of “Earth.” They are also, in the poet’s words, a “kind of weirdo.” To my eyes and ears, the poems are aesthetically and tonally disparate from others in the section and throughout the book, as if the poet struggled with the question: where to begin? Indeed, this question may be one of the endearing hallmarks and prevailing anxieties of this debut. The ways these five poems stand out could be an issue of poem order and continuity; the poems might have broadened and extended the book’s conversation had they been separated from one another.
As I read the second section, a “virtuoso nonchalance” emerged, bringing to the foreground Todkill’s powers of observation and attention to the natural world and animals, especially those from the Canidae and Aves families. With these subjects — really interactions — the poet seems more at ease and the poems take on a relaxed, conversational, even exalted tone. Here is an excerpt from “Central Experimental Farm, April,” in which wild geese are the object of attention:
But when we watch
the night flights landing,
their ponderous hover
above hard fields,
it's the coming-to-earth,
the tragicomical surrender,
the chastens us. (29)
The geese “are as we are, / tautologous with time.” Throughout this section Todkill’s poems soar the wonder and discovery of the “monumental and ordinary.” This section, “Air,” distinguished itself for me as the most artistically realized and satisfying section, bringing individual poems together toward a lauded whole.
In the following sections, as the poems move through the ways humans are reckless with themselves and each other, I encountered a nagging sensation of an unnamed background constraint. As I read on, I wondered if that sensation was based in the poet’s feeling toward the subject matter or something else. “Familia” and “Loss Lessons,” the third and fourth sections, respectively take on literal and metaphoric cleansing and the vagaries and realities of aging and illness; those occurrences associated with domesticity and death. A central pursuit of “Familia” is who falls and who takes the fall: “the ur-fall / of family lore.” While the poems in “Loss Lessons” are “sharply regardant” of mistakes and misunderstandings between lovers, friends, and relatives. The fifth and final section of the book, “Assisi Variations,” weaves narratives of faith, father, brother, and travel.
I am all too aware that my response to Orion Sweeping is focused on parts, especially the collection’s sections and the themes they claim; themes I feel guided toward by the agenda of section titles, rather than ones I discover. As I consider why I am focused on sections, I arrive back where I started: Trying to discern the logic that links poem to poem to theme to reader. What aesthetics and poetics empower the poems to assert themselves and to forge relationships? How, in this collection do the poems move closer to their own “definition of wildness,” distinct from the logic the structure of the book imposes on them and leads the reader to believe is there?
The poem, “Toward a definition of wildness” might offer a response:
The fox before you saw it.
The fox before it saw you.
The fox before it knew it had been seen.
You, before you had thought of the fox.
You in the moment of seeing, when you were all fox. (20)
But the answers lie in the structure and sequence of this constellation of poems, and in the sections! This book’s sections and themes feel forced. And, I find myself wishing—I can’t help it!—that the poems were not sectioned off from one another in this way. An alternative reading of the first line of “Toward a definition of wildness” (above) could be: The poem before the poet ordered it. The sectioning seems to limit rather than facilitate the poems’ and book’s inspiring intentions and actual offerings. The result is often movement by non-sequitur, which I found distracting, diminishing. And, disturbingly, the thematic sectioning caused the poems and their subtle, elegant power to fall into the background, subordinate to the sectioned themes occupying the foreground. The structure of a book matters; it is the structure’s job, via section titles/demarcation and poem order, among other elements, to elevate the poems into a macro wholeness that is a distinct articulation beyond the micro concerns of individual sections or poems. To my read, the structure of Orion Sweeping is not in service of the poems. Instead, the poems seem to want to navigate as crows fly “their silhouettes apt against a smoky sky.”
As challenging as it is for me to shake the could-have-been “bold assemblies” of the poems, I must bring myself back to the book that Orion Sweeping is, which acts more like a sheaf of individual poems. I hasten to add that the poems are beautiful and affecting, devoted to expressions of life, miraculous and disastrous both. It is clear that Anne Marie Todkill is a poet who cares deeply about all life forms and Earth; her poems make apparent the “sacred and pragmatic” as they share “the exhausted space of love.”
Jami Macarty gratefully recognizes the Coast Salish as the traditional and rightful owners of lands where Jami has the privilege to live and learn—as a teacher at Simon Fraser University, an independent editor, and as a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry. Jami is the author of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘴 (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award - Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by funding from the British Columbia Arts Council and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. To learn more about Jami's recent and forthcoming publications, visit: jamimacarty.com/