REVIEWER: Wendy Donawa is grateful to live on the unceded territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples, and to see the Salish Sea and the Sooke Hills from the window over her desk. Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions is her second collection.
Poet Wendy Donawa
unpacking the poem:
Regional reviewers focus on regional poems
Reviewer Wendy Donawa unpacks a different poem every month. She examines the poem in a way she hopes is helpful for readers and other poets to understand how craft works in a particular poem, for a particular effect.
february 2023: chantal gibson
misplaced modifiers
she served her daughters
on melamine plates, left
the Royal Albert on the
top shelf waiting for good;
she read them fairy tales
from the little Golden can-
non of dead mothers in pink
floral head scarves, trembled
page corners with wet finger-
tips and kissed each one good
night, she wrote her aubade
at the kitchen table, lit her
smokes on the stove, burned
amber holes in the dark til
every orphanprincess was
Crayola Brown; she stopped
shaking just enough to stay in
the lines, to forge their future,
and set the table for morning
Poet Chantal Gibson
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her graphic poetry collections How She Read (Caitlin 2019) and with/holding (Caitlin 2021) bring a critical lens to the historical representation and reproduction of Blackness across cultural media. A 2021 3M National Teaching Fellow, Gibson’s works appear on curriculum readings lists across the country. She teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
For more about Chantal:
Web: chantalgibson.com
Instagram: @chantalgibsonartist
Unpacking “misplaced modifiers”
How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019)
In case we’ve all forgotten our Grade 7 grammar, a misplaced modifier is descriptive language misplaced so it modifies the wrong thing. The writer of “she wore a ribbon in her hair which was green” had probably not intended to describe green hair.
In “misplaced modifiers,” Chantal Gibson repurposes this grammatical error intentionally and deftly, to witty, thought-provoking, and often devastating effect. Given that her concerns in art and poetry have centred on the historical and cultural representations of Blackness, the reader can be sure this is not just a poem about a mother having a smoke after tucking the children in bed.
As well as the misplaced metaphors, Gibson’s ingenious line-breaks ensure almost every line has a double meaning. In the first couplet alone: the mother has not, of course, literally “served her daughters/on melamine plates,” although the phrasing brings to mind the adage “served her up on a platter”: to leave someone vulnerable and defenseless. And the couplet’s first and last words: “she…left” might remind us of the gendered and generational displacement of BIPOC women and their children. Our country is full of women who have left children in their home countries to supprort them through menial work abroad.
“Waiting for good” might refer to the Royal Albert’s seemingly permanent colonial presence.
It might also suggest an endless waiting for something good to happen. The whole poem implies forms of cultural erasure, and the silencing of BIPOC voices. Fairy tales from the Little Golden Books (publishing since the 1940s) offered European fairy tales, and fictional models of suburban family life and “good” behaviour for children. These books were cheap, mass produced, and often the main recreational reading in homes and classrooms, regardless of cultural background or family structure.
The mother writes her aubade at the kitchen table as the evening darkens. The aubade, a song or poem for lovers who must separate at dawn, here takes on poignant meaning as the fading light turns the illustrated princesses “Crayola Brown.” This mother does “just enough to stay/in the lines”; she doesn’t get “out of line” enough to transgress, to endanger the children’s future, as she sets the table for their motherless morning breakfast.
Of course, if we read the poem aloud, we could hear the last line as “and set the table for mourning.”