13th Canadian Challenge - 8th Review - Tomorrow’s Bright White Light

I am not familiar with the Canadian poem Jan Conn, despite this being her 9^th book of poetry (with 2 previous volumes on the Brick Books label).  Here are a few intriguing facts about Jan Conn: she is a professor of biomedical science (so being a poet is only a side gig for her and she has serious science credentials) and she has done most of her field work (on mosquitoes) in South America, notably Guatemala. Bolivia, Peru and Brazil.  This biographical experience only works its way into a few of these poems (most notably “On the Left Bank of the Itaya”) but was a much more prominent theme in her previous collection, Botero’s Beautiful Horses.  There is a fairly extensive interview with her on the Brick Books' website for those interested.

I’d say that these are poems that creep up on you (or at least the ones that held my attention on a second or third reading).  In addition, at least some (not all) of the poems tap into a bleak vision that all is not as pleasant as it seems on the surface.  “Family Portrait in an Unmarked Car" focuses on a family trying to keep up appearances in the face of some unspecified economic ruin: “in the parking lot where our neighbours dwell-- / new lives in old cars. … / … In winter, we’ll run low on fuel, / station ourselves in the basement of that shrink-wrapped / renovation.  When security insists we move along,  we’ll bark a lot. …”

While the narrator of “Frontier Mentality” has much further to fall, economic disaster seems to be looming here as well, though there also seems to be a strong thread of urban anomie present in the poem: “More and more we turn to urban life where the next big thing / is being created as we speak …  /  … What possessed us to purchase a condo whose / single distinguishing attribute is a view of a reflection / of the Statue of Liberty? … / college loans unforgiven, we’re looking for the scam / that makes the ends crawl a little closer together.”

Bad real estate decisions also come into play in the slightly surreal poem “Melodrama is Foreign to My Name”: “By error I rent the shadow / of an apartment building, celebrating / all the ledges I have never dusted. / … / I’m forced to abandon summer: / the boarded-up lighthouse / blocked my paths to sunlight / one by one.”

I’d say in general, these are fairly challenging poems that never reveal their meaning clearly, but her sometimes sardonic tone and outsized vocabulary holds some appeal to me, so I’ll likely check out a couple of her previous poetry collections.