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A love story to the emotional self--this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.
What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far can a heart stretch? How does being a parent stretch it further? How does ... Read more
A love story to the emotional self--this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.
What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far can a heart stretch? How does being a parent stretch it further? How does a heart manage under the pressure of children, of self, of hospital technician, of partner, of death? In this collection, big heartedness is both demand and desire. It emerges from family life--the kid who says to your face that she prefers her other parent; the father monkeying around in the art gallery; the mother who "gets on with it" in silence; the husband, distant and intimate under the marriage yoke. There is also in this collection the stirring of wilder desires than family is supposed to nurture, feelings more fiercely self-assertive than a parent--a mother particularly--is supposed to admit. This collection asks how to rise to the occasions that family presents and also how to let oneself spill over the bounds of familial roles.
Venart's poems reach into the past but don't get lost there; they look the present in the face--they have to: the clock is ticking, the children calling, there are hot dogs to be sliced and the dog won't walk itself. The title is ironic. And also kind of secretly stoically hoping that it's not ironic. But it is:
. ..And now everyone is arrow
arrow, arrows. Everyone harpoons.
And I am the big heart, aren't I?
When my black dog was being put down, in her last
second I whispered, Squirrel.
(from "Epiphany")
SARAH VENART’s poetry has been published in Numero Cinq, Concrete and River, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, This Magazine, Prism International, and on CBC Radio. She is the author of Woodshedding (Brick Books, 2007) and Neither Apple Nor Pear. Sarah lives in Montreal and teaches writing at John Abbott College.
Epiphany
Here I am, with one hour to find it.
Here I am in this tenth month, the peeler of pears,
the slicer of hotdogs, cutting them into strips
smaller than a child's windpipe.
Here's my apologetic smile, accepted by the daycare,
in return for my children. So what is there to find
in one hour on my desk's shallow surface?
I've mislaid all of it somewhere among
my mind's tiny grey flags, in the millions of scraps
piling up. I left it behind in the dark bleeding gums
of the dog that I loved, watching her clench yet another rock
from the tide. That was twelve years ago.
What was she looking for?
What if she'd stopped looking?
Metaphors were easy then, not only the sky,
but migrating everywhere. And now everyone is arrow
arrow, arrows. Everyone harpoons.
And I am the big heart, aren't I?
When my black dog was being put down, in her last
second I whispered, Squirrel.
The News
I placed the telephone in the cradle
and did not stop walking
until I was lying
under a cave of trees in a stranger's yard.
I lay there like a wide lake.
I didn't have the deep thoughts
of a lake. Instead, I had the modest thoughts
of a mother:
I am the lake if you want me to be the lake.
I can also be the kept lawn or this cedar shrub.
Even the roses, which I dislike. Or disliked
before I became them.
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