This is the landscape I was made for, where the work is a word half-recalled, unpronounceable without practice, or a story in which my great-grandfather tends a strawberry farm in a small town beside the Pacific: the rotting mulch, the suck of mud on a boot, vines’ frost-stunted fruit; the way the ocean nested driftwood across the frozen beach, or the time a nest of field-mice ruined the only rice for months— vignettes I had to hear to see. Today, I eat strawberries in bed and sleep until the sun raises its bright meniscus over the brownstones, the endless meiosis of the off-ramp, the median’s poor attempts at colour: early magnolias, narcissuses, clumps of parched crabgrass. I have heard, too, how my great-grandfather died of tuberculosis in a northern city, having left his wife, his children, the farm, to travel across the country to study the lucrative sculpture of false teeth. Somewhere, in an Ontario attic, there is a leather satchel filled with his tools: a fine-stemmed mirror like a flower stripped of petals in a game of he-loves-me-not; a steel drill, its bit as thin as a hummingbird’s beak. And somewhere, inscribed on each, a name I couldn’t say without having heard it said first. Tomorrow, when a late snow gathers along the sidewalk like bone-light in an x-ray I will stay inside and imagine its cold dissolving on skin, its wet weight tugging on a heel.
"The figures of psychological and physical opposition are erased: sun and rain, progress and stasis, night and day are existentially merged. The vision of 'soft fire and delicious death' is the Edenic alternative, a consolation expressed with moving directness."
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"I chose to translate this whole book rather than another selected edition because, although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The 'plot' follows a general trajectory—from early to late Alzheimer’s—with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness."
