A Daily Glance

Emily Carr’s & look there goes a sparrow transplanting soil combines a feminist critique with ecopoetics. The sparrow from the title seems to be connected to the image of women attempting to fly in an atmosphere made for falling. The sparrow also connects women to nature, and the male presences (or at least the non-female presences) are shown as trying to destroy nature and cover over it with concrete. I don’t mean to suggest that Carr tells us these things with straight-forward narrative pieces; rather, her poems are fragmented and full of brackets. In fact, the brackets are the most interesting part of the poems to me because they remind me of reading the fragments of Sappho. Often Sappho's editors use brackets to suggest an omission in the text, and the brackets seem to suggest the same thing in Carr’s work. From this chapbook, I’m excited to see the direction Carr’s work will take in the future.

Comments

Popular Posts