Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review
Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) over at
Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this particular title, after
Pearl Pirie reviewed such via The Miramichi Reader.
You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:
From Holler (2012):
Snow
Every tree
a birch
in winter.
I read my old review of Holler in Literatured’s archives and find allusive words such as Whitmanian, Plathian and Plath-like, and the worst offender among them, housewifery, repulsive to the ear, eye, and sense.
What did I know, at the ripe young age of 19, about Whitman, Plath, or the domesticity (or absurdity) of being a hausfrau?
Whitman, arguably, sure, and Plath, I had certainly run into amongst the university shelves if not the public library. But it’s that last one that really did me in.
I find one salvageable morsel from this more-than-decade-old review, the excerpt I used from her work that still haunts me, (above; a Nelson Ball-like joke that smiles upon the competence porn of botanical poetics) and move on to flipping through Alessandro Porco’s introduction, in Deportment (2018), to her selected works, to get my bearings for this review.
And what do I see in Porco? Whitmanesque, Plath, and housewife.
I can’t help but disagree. Carl Watts had a review in rob mclennan’s periodicities a few years after Deportment was published and wrote something to the effect that on several grounds, Porco doesn’t seem to demonstrate what he says he appreciates about Burdick’s past or current work:
“2016’s Chore Choir, with Kingston’s Puddles of Sky Press, for instance, is a pocket-sized, two-page poetic-prose offering that seems like a more clipped and yet more irreverent iteration of the poetics of Holler’s “Mahone Bay rhapsody.” Pleasure Bristles, a chapbook coauthored with Gary Barwin and published by above/ground in the same year as Deportment, disperses Burdick’s tactics further, raising questions about Porco’s conception of a gradual move toward accessibility while also justifying the editor’s selections by further permuting Burdick’s recognizable forms and splicing them Barwin’s.”
And I published her poems in my 2022 zine, poets against fascism:
Honking bodies
Honk once if a homunculus
is jamming in the city core
yelling freedom into the feathered
bodies of city birds. The central
premise of the vaunted naifs
is immunity bleeds out the weak,
as if that’s a good thing. Pillows
plump up in cardinals’ mouths.
A crested red bird catches light
as she flies past stained glass.
I open a door and an eye peers in,
a warning to scale down
expectations, accept the dome
of the golden mean, tunnel
below the yellow brick road.
I’m sitting here with a tower of books looming over me, remembering how earlier today, I had experienced a lapse in judgment. I thought Alice Burdick had a book out with Gaspereau Press, because Nova Scotia, and I couldn’t find it in my Gaspereau pile. It’s because it was underneath her 2025 publication with no name or title on the cover, just a line drawing of El Yucateco hot sauce, A Holiday for Molecules (2019).
But I’m only as smart as my reviews make me out to be. I see in Porco something that reminds me of what John Metcalf said of critics echoing one another on In The Village of Viger. Just because you repeat something doesn’t make it so.
So today, I want to veer away from repeating what others and my younger self have said for want of more original reflection and approach Alice Burdick’s poetry for the first time again after so many years: no pretense, no comparison, no assumptions, no garbage.
Let’s just get into it.
The first poem is dedicated to Mary Pratt. Pratt is a painter, who lived with her painter husband Christopher Pratt, according to Wikipedia, very much framing their relationship in rural Newfoundland as part of her paintings, which also included many everyday household objects, to paint a scene.
Let’s not get sidetracked, let’s read part of the poem together (it’s a three-parter):
It’s a wonderful pain
for Mary Pratt
1)
A window in my arm,
blood and jello. Jar on
the windowsill, fat red light.
Mirror is a little bit of help,
rather unacceptable.
A lush, expensive decor -
I could barely wade through
the carpet. [...]
In the acknowledgements section of this chapbook, she writes that this poem (a two-parter) and the one after it (the other-parter, but actually a second poem) came after watching documentaries on Mary and Christopher (also a painter).
The first half of the Mary poems ends with this assertion: “[...] Here, in this place, / I’m the only one who can rule.”
The second half opens with a courageous tone:
2)
There’s an ease in the beginning.
I will always be who I was,
but I don’t know what that will be.
Life is a self-portrait - it is interested
in being done. [...]
I have thoughts I don’t know whether I’m as courageous as these resounding lines sound to say aloud. But I refuse to repeat. And no need anyways, for what she says is very straightforward: life is a self-portrait, as in, every person is a painter in front of the easel of their own existence. It is interested in being done, and forgive me, Alice, and other readers, because I can’t help but hearken back to what Porco mentioned in his introduction about the painful event of her mother’s tragic passing (her mother was visual artist Mary Paisley who, after enduring years of several, severe illnesses, took her own life in ‘94).
So she sees this documentary about Mary Pratt and finds affirmation for life in her portrayal, as though suicide were not a rankling heirloom of a notion but merely something that happens to other people. Alice Burdick’s poetry can be very frank.
But I don’t want to err into the territory of assumption by assuming that, despite acknowledging the inspiration for this poem, the poet herself is the speaker of the poem. It sounds much likelier that it is Mary, in fact: “[...] Life is a violent affair / of primrose paths. I’ll shuffle off / with those who worked. Maybe / one day I’ll be seen. I cannot hope / beyond my own satisfaction. / I hope I reach, but will not care / about your joy.”
Isn’t that a marvellous way to say a thing? “I hope I reach” beyond her own satisfaction; “but will not care” about the joy of her artwork’s viewers. Their joy is beyond her satisfaction; she paints for herself alone. It is a bold statement and unique to her person—a fantastic first poem.
Then, the second poem begins:
You did it my way
after Christopher
Aesthetics are managed by direction -
put this here and it is much better.
A tunnel of disturbing balance.
Amused contribution -
a control that always asserts.
Truth and fiction work together.
Especially the fiction, because truth
is never believed. [...]
I hope you sense the tension in my expression and my hesitation to overquote her poems, because they so clearly speak for themselves with an effect I can neither emulate or deconstruct. But Burdick here is self-aware of her relation to the subject and the speaker of the poem, slightly different from the Mary ones before, where it was Mary all the way.
Then, the end, to not leave readers hanging, but not give away the middle of the poem:
[...] I’m not suicidal - bing bang, wharf.
Sleep, however, forever -
that is that, left, fine.
We’ll leave it there.
It doesn’t bother me.
It’s hard to tell who the speaker of the poem is talking to, because it feels like she is embodying his persona. Meanwhile, he is simultaneously talking to himself in front of a listener, Mary, but as a way to prove his point, opposite the effect of hers: you can totally commit suicide, he says, “bing bang, wharf.” But he doesn’t see it as an existential threat. He wants to avoid the discomfort I didn’t cite above, but occurs between start and finish: “A wheel turns, and we don’t / take each other seriously. [...]” He wants to resolve conflict; he doesn’t want to talk about suicide.
You know that meme, “there are two wolves inside you”? Christopher and Mary Pratt are two such wolves for Alice Burdick. These poems make such a great opening to this latest batch of her poetry, because any dialogue between two opposite characters, to me, borders on the infinite in possibility. It is borderline mythological. I may also be a bit of a sucker for inspired verse, especially when the inspiration is a wife-husband duo of Canadian painters.
You may also be relieved to hear they divorced in 2005.
What’s the rest of I Am So Calm about? Where did the title come from? Is it unassuming or all-encompassing, neither or both?
There is a poem in here that she describes in the back of the book as being written after she and her younger brother met their older brother for the first time (“On the end of the first reunion”). It's touching. The poem captures a delicate bouquet of emotions: closure, hope, excitement, mundanity, unexpectedness, gratitude, and a whimsically familiar sense of solidarity. As a would-be enjoyer, I’ll leave it to you, reader, to acquire a copy if you’d like to check it out at your local library or through above/ground press.
I continue reading and am humbled by the lassosnap wit she corrals words with. In general, critics overcompare, but Alice Burdick is simply masterful.
There is a poem in here that riffs off of Lorine Niedecker’s “Thomas Jefferson” that’s very good, but I won’t get into here to make myself scarce on comparison, as well as to leave some joys unusurped for those inclined to seek it out on their own. It would make an excellent subject for a future review, too (I never said I would eschew speculation).
Finally, there is a poem about ham: “Spiced ham street party.” It’s five stanzas and concludes the collection but it follows two other poems I could readily call my favourites of the bunch (“Reaction time” and “The bed book”). Read the middle stanza with me:
The best way to prepare for the apocalypse is to lasso
the pantry. Imagine the taste of cold war meat. Imagine
that. The hard ham of dollhouses, chipping teeth.
Develop your project more, ham, to be considered
for the grant. Form wings to fly closer to the heat
lamps. Fly the fondue pot to the edge of the volcano.
Funny, uncanny, brilliant, bizarre. What’s not to love?
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