Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand (review)

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• Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand
• Michael Joyce (bio)

nomenclature: new and collected poems
Dionne Brand
Introduction by Christina Sharpe
Duke University Press
https://www.dukeupress.edu/nomenclature
672 pages; Print, $29.95

Reading Dionne Brand is like waking from a dream of a long conversation to find that the conversation—or is it the dream?—continues in waking life and cannot be shaken off. Brand has received every major award for Canadian literature, and this new collection has already been dubbed "a monumental publication from one of this country's most important poets" by the Toronto Star. She is one of a small, albeit global, benighted cohort of what might be called "most celebrated, least known" writers, especially revered by other writers, about whom most American readers remain oblivious or uninformed until a Nobel Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, or like announcement flashes across a screen. Her thirty-five books and films present a poet, novelist, essayist, poetics innovator, cultural critic, activist, polemicist, and seer of astonishing range and enduring import. Hers is a transcendent, fervent presence and woven witness, a radical independence and fiery resistance.

Approaching such a monumental collection as a new reader, one might happily start with Christina Sharpe's brilliant introductory essay, a model for what ought to replace outworn canonical declinations, offering close readings that are acts of contextualization and provocation, protective of an evolving—alive—poetic consciousness. Another choice, taken here, is reserving Sharpe's essay as a corrective and conspiratorial accompaniment to a kind of hybrid, even quirky, bracketed reading of Brand's published work starting at the end with the insistent sequence of lyric/narrative poems, Ossuaries (2010), and then circling back to the earliest book collected here (she declining [End Page 92] to collect an earlier as juvenilia), Primitive Offensive (1982), putting off the seven intervening books and newest work for a time.

In their differently voiced, thirty-year-apart braidings, both Ossuaries and Primitive Offensive are characterized by what the Nobel award for Alice Munro, the first and thus far only Canadian woman to be awarded it, described as the "uncompromising way" Munro "demonstrates that love rarely saves us or leads to reliable happiness, and that few things can be as devastating to us as our own dreams." Like fellow Trinbagonian V. S. Naipaul, Brand, to quote the Nobel citation for Naipaul, unites "perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny … that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

Primitive Offensive foreshadows Ossuaries in method and subject, alternating between voices of observers and protagonists—women on the run and in search of something—or, in Primitive Offensive, any thing. Its speaker, noting "there is a thing / I want to be / there is an endness / to it," (pro)claims "I am not frightened / I am dead already." So, too, amid Ossuaries' dispatches from "this big world, our ossuary," whose exiles "incubated, like cluster bombs / whole lives waiting, whole stellar regions // discoveries of nebulae, and compassion," comes an anxious episode recounting an Albany bank holdup by the radical Yasmine and companions that, not surprisingly for a novelist of Brand's talent, reads with the suspense of Danish noir detective stories. Like them, here Yasmine faces a bleak landscape in which "being alive, being human, its monotony / discomfited her anyway /, the opaque nowness / the awareness, at its primal core, of nothing." While the more mature verse of Ossuaries takes on a fugal richness, it seems prefigured by Primitive Offensive's shaping of its cantos into a bell-like threnody of hammered copper, its mournful clangs marking what Sharpe calls "a long, desolate, and raging poem in which a young poet observes the treatment of Black peoples in the Americas, in Europe, and on the street."

A similar sonic apprenticeship energizes both Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia (1983), proving them worthy of their acknowledged debt to Cardenal. The former, a haiku-like series of thirty-five epigrams, summons the drear despair of Toronto winter with Dostoyevskyan economy as background to a Frauenroman of a young artist whom Sharpe aptly notes "inhabits politics broadly." There, "Snowflakes, brutal as rapists" fall and "cold is cold is / cold...