The quintessential West Coast poem has the author-narrator
reclining on a bamboo rocker while gazing across the Juan de Fuca Strait’s
expanse, haze or fog acting as all-purpose counterpoint to the setting sun. As
a representative image in The Unsettled, Mona Fertig’s 2010 collection
of poetry, it’s unfair to link it so. But as metaphor for vague longing or
disturbance vs spiritual satisfaction (if not realization), it’s an apt image
throughout the book. Then again, there’s “Quiet lights thread along a distant
road across the bay” from a poem in the middle movement.
Fertig’s loosely-linked diary ruminations accrue in five
sections. The opening series of poems depict a personal journey to, in, and
from Mackie House, a heritage home that seeks out and accepts artist-visitors
for overnight (and longer) stays. Her trip links the House’s more lurid
histories – suicides, hauntings – with a personal fear of the unknown. It’s a
fantastic idea for an extended suite, but Fertig drops the ball. The hauntings
are a tease, the personal demons unexpressed and undifferentiated (a mother
bear and her cubs appear several times like dazed refugees from an
overpopulated Yosemite). Stupefying cliches follow in their wake: “[B]lack as
night”, “dim light is still depressing”. After another desultory patch, the
break between subsection 18 and 19 (out of 22) clumsily splices the scene into
“After two weeks in residence/it is time to leave.” Three lines later, “I am
glad to be back on Salt Spring.” And in the longer final subsection,
“Chief-White-Buffalo-Man-Many-Feathers/from the Okanagan Nation” gives the
House emergency cleansing. Would that the reader was so fortunate. Fertig’s
final lines: “I try to settle on words for this journey./But find only/mystery
and relief.” And here we have it. The journey has nothing for the reader.
It’s a poet (any person, really) talking out loud to any stranger who’ll
listen. The connection, the concern, is a closed circuit. I would have loved to
have found out something about those ghosts (which would have been real
mystery), and about the other people living in the area, the wildlife
surrounding it, and a fearless self-appraisal in relation to it all. Don’t
blame me for setting the bar so high. The structure of the series invited it.
Fertig’s real relief: the Chief was able to eradicate three lingering negative
spirits that followed her back to Salt Spring. So much for living with ghosts.
Sections two and three are ostensibly a clear shift – the
narrator follows, somewhat uneasily, a young homeless girl as she tries to
survive outdoors in the mild climate that attracts other uprooted souls from the
harsher environs of Canada. But again, Fertig’s investigations only serve to
show she’s sensitive. Barebones, obvious rhetorical ponderings punctuate the
poems here: “Where will your spirit wander then?” At this point, the curious reader may be
forgiven for wondering what’s up with all the italics. Has my computer been taken
over by a random insurgent text from unquiet ghosts upset by the last
paragraph? Alas, it’s both much simpler and more puzzling than that. For
whatever reason, Fertig seems to believe that emphasizing certain
phrases baptizes them with a kind of permanent poetic dew, encasing the chosen
words in a fixed freshness and profundity.
Section four is a rather superior admonishment to a wayward
husband. The connection couldn’t be more unconvincing. The viewpoint shifts after
several poems from third- to second-person. The suffering wife, in a poem
entitled “Tsunami”, undergoes “the tidal wave of grief”. Proportion? Why tamp
down an emotion sure to gain its rightful share of sympathetic readers? And
poor hubby. I’m not implying anything, understand. (And the relationship could
be purely fictitious. Who knows?) But with unsolicited, unimaginative, high-
and heavy-handed advice like “Look at the ocean and the stars./See the power in
the wide oak”, I’m guessing his scary and desperate boat trip to the great
beyond was a last, unsuccessful attempt to get away from “a goddess” who “still
fits you like a glove”.
The last section is supposedly a paean to Salt Spring Island
itself. Local history was incorporated in a clumsy and distracted fashion.
There were some decent attempts to contrast the older boomers with their more
restless offspring or with recent transients, but the images didn’t leave much
of a residue, and for a 5 1/2 page closer, with its ambitious fifteen-repeater
“This is Paradise,” kicking off
each verse paragraph, there was too little euphoria and too much flotsam.
The Unsettled is Fertig’s thirteenth book of poetry,
the last five arriving via her (and her husband’s) own press.
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