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.
june 2023: eve joseph
The capon exploded…
Poet Eve Joseph
Eve Joseph: Author of In the Slender Margin
evejoseph.com
I acknowledge, with gratitude and respect, that I live and work on the unceded lands of the Lekwungen speaking peoples
Unpacking “The capon exploded…”
How often have we begun a conversation with, “You’ll never believe what I…?” Or even “That’s incredible!” In Eve Joseph’s spare and surreal poems, the illogical finds its own logic, creates its own flashes of transcendence. This month we unpack “The capon exploded…” from her 2019 Griffin-winning Quarrels, a volume of prose poems.
Unlike, say, the sonnet or the ode, the prose poem is a relatively recent poetic form, without set line-breaks, rhyme, or rhythm, and there has been discussion, even resistance, as to whether it is “real” poetry. Admittedly, with prose poems we approach a different kettle of fish—or should we say a different pressure cooker of capon?
Changing times bring forth changes in the arts, and what is newly thought finds new forms of expression. Of her own writing, Eve Joseph has said, “I try to pay attention to things, to name the world as best I can….intentionally looking for the surreal in everyday experience.”
So, this poem begins in domestic daily reality; what could be more homely than chicken dinner? Until the pressure cooker explodes, a not-unknown calamity in the days when these were the newfangled thing. At this point, the poem explodes too, with brief illogical perceptions that somehow hang together, dream-like and surreal. The unfortunate fowl stuck to the ceiling becomes, metaphorically, hilariously, a black chandelier, then a weathervane, then a well-worn doorknob.
And a bizarre conceptual leap now takes the reader from the capon to a 9th century pope’s decree that a cock must top each church steeple in Europe. Whether or not this is historically accurate no longer matters: the reader is caught up in the dizzying linguistic journey that swoops back to the speaker’s home, which is now “a holy place” for all life forms.
A poem, then, packaged in this tidy square. A whole worldview is evoked through astonishing metaphors, dazzling narrative leaps, and heightened, focused language that “explodes” like fireworks in the reader’s understanding.