The Swailing

Canadian translator, scholar, and poet Patrick James Errington’s debut, The Swailing, tenders lyrical navigation of spaces and boundaries. A taxidermist enters an animal body:

In the cradle behind the ribs, he plays
the horologist, unwinding the mechanisms,
the decay […]

In “Shrift,” a woman’s lover “admits her like a sentence / he has formed before,” knowing “[i]f she breaks / it is because she has / a body”; later, the poem swerves to a different sort of breaking—the stacking of stone slabs “on one man’s chest, like / a hand, a comfort.” Elsewhere, a son reflects on his relationship with his father: “though we kept no cattle, no horses, / the untended fields were scored with fences.” In “Alta, leaving,” the speaker holds “so much Alberta in me, my body, atlas.”

Amid the gripping particularities of these poems surges the metaphysical, surfacing in “For a Liberation of Bees”:

[….]Softly, you
Wonder if all souls aren’t bees
battering against the body’s
windows. All bodies beating
against their breaths, their habits,
untouched glass. [….]

These elegiac, searching poems inhabit liminal spaces of dying people and places, unfolding like a series of black and white photographs retouched in color. “On Highway 2A Near Blackfalds, Alberta, As Night Comes On” begins: “You could come here and never arrive. / These towns like memories of towns,” with colors blurring, bodies found in “almost- /iced-over river[s],” and town names “peeling slowly // off sheet-metal siding or a rust-graffitied / bridge,” as commuters hurtle past. The poem ends at a bar, where the bartender has just cut her palm: “Her blood is a dark hole in the ice / on a river we were all sure we could skate on.”

Swailing is the practice of setting fires to manage fires. The slow burn of these poems culminates in evocative and expansive lyricism. “Had I eaten my fill of you I might have lived,” says the speaker in “Kwashiorkor,” who concludes:

[….] Had I slit myself
down the middle, let in the famished air, is there
some thing left in me that might fly out