“a thousand lichens”: Review of Selina Boan’s Undoing Hours
Selina Boan, Undoing Hours.
Nightwood Editions, 2021. $18.95 CAD.
Order a copy from Nightwood Editions.
The much-anticipated debut of award-winning poet Selina Boan, Undoing Hours weaves together themes of love, friendship, family, heartbreak, inheritance, the body, and time in (often formally inventive) narrative lyrics. Over the course of the book, the poet’s reflections are accompanied by the process of learning and reclaiming her cultural heritage and language, namely nêhiyawêwin (Cree). Throughout the collection, the perspective continually shifts; though I had the sense that there was one central figure, her experiences are transmitted not only through a conventional lyric speaker, but from other perspectives as well.
Perspective and voice are not the same thing, but perspective operates as a lens through which a poet’s voice is filtered. Undoing Hours uses almost every poetic perspective I can think of, allowing the reader to see the subject of the poems from different angles. Many poems use the first-person-singular lyric “I” (“campaign for my body’s mess,” for example), while others create intimacy with the second-person-singular “you.” At times, this “you” appears to represent the speaker talking to herself, as in “run the hurt,” one of my favourite poems in the collection:
through water / through grass / along the river where reeds brush
blood skin pus / where pain lets itself out little by little / there are
words you don’t want to write / a shape of history denied so many
times violence forms a country (72)
Elsewhere, the speaker uses the second-person to address another subject (“ongoing conversations with my acne”). There’s also the third-person narrative, where the speaker finds a counterpart to describe herself, “a girl” (“in six, the seasons”), and even the rare first-person-plural, the collective choral “we” (“we love,”).
Boan also experiments with the possibilities of voice within these categories, as in the persona poem “alter, ego (after Monica McClure),” where she turns to a portrait of “serena,” who is described as both “the right kind of mean” and “hot glue pressing herself to the party’s seam,” alongside other qualifiers (50). In “how to find your father,” the imperative mood is used across the form of the list poem to give shape to a story of renewed connections:
9. the hardest part. get yourself onto a bus. pull calm from your jacket. when he walks out of the elevator, be prepared for the way time will speed up like eyes following earth through a car window. peel awkward laughter back. watch it blister and gush onto the sidewalk. let it carry you both. (27)
The accumulation of metaphors in this passage allows the poet to underscore emotional tension. Boan has a knack for figurative language, particularly when she turns her attention to the subject of time. The complexity of voice in Undoing Hours does not stem from an exploration of perspective alone. Boan’s language is consistently varied and layered, incorporating direct and indirect discourse, descriptions of nature, and references to contemporary technology and culture. As an example, consider the opening to “emails with nohtâwiy”:
i lift you from an email and into a dream.
i hang a blue hip bone my cousin painted
on my bedroom wall.
when i undo time, it is a thousand lichens attached
to a branch. a crowd of emails, singing aloud, swaying to the
words.see you soon? (54)
The figurative expression “undo time” is qualified here by two additional metaphors, presented succinctly in apposition. While the first vehicle (“a thousand lichens attached / to a branch”) is more easily classified as belonging to a lyric register, I appreciate the unexpected poetic sensuality that Boan allows the second metaphor (“a crowd of emails, singing aloud, swaying to the / words”).
As the title of the collection suggests, time is not straightforward in Undoing Hours. The poet frequently turns to metaphor to convey her understanding of time: “the brief hinge of time won’t heal / between us” (“emails with nohtâwiy,” 54); “the summers we visited are an elastic stretched between time” (“email drafts to nohtâwiy,” 62); “pebbles of time loosened / & poured into a body of roads” (“suck it up <3,” 68), this last figurative image communicating a sense of time as non-linear.
Besides these direct reflections on time, many of the collection’s poems span years and even generations, while others find a way to stand outside of linear time altogether. “minimal pairs are words holding hands” progresses through sonic associations that accompany the linguistic phenomena of minimal pairs, words whose meanings change with a single different sound:
niyanân (us)
i took a photo of the window, the snow. none of nohtâwiy. i hold niyanân in my mind. his face in mine.
days fit into the holes where my wisdom teeth once were. blood, nerve.niyânan (five)
if-i-dream-polysynthetic-if-i-dream-nêhiyawêwin-will-i-finally-speak-will-nohkom-hear-me?
i missed knowing her in this world by niyânan years so it’s my friends who teach me to stop remaking all my bead lines. (43)
This poem also complicates the linear experience of time through reference to memory, dreams, and a consideration of what could have been. Elsewhere, “email drafts to nohtâwiy” renders an experience outside of the temporal through an exploration of hypothetical speech.
This complex understanding of time appears to be linked, in part, to the speaker’s studying of nêhiyawêwin and exploration of her Indigenous cultural heritage, detailed in the remarkable long poem “in six, the seasons”:
learning the seasons into six
a girl listens to her father’s first language
alone, never having been that far north
she hears a sound like a knee-pin
a forced fracture, fixed
with alloy and rods (19)
Like Marilyn Dumont, Louise Bernice Halfe, Joséphine Bacon, shalan joudry, and other Indigenous writers working in what is now called Canada, Boan’s exploration of her heritage is intimately tied to the reclaiming of an Indigenous language. Boan integrates words from nêhiyawêwin into her English-language poetry, often without translation, while also finding ways to depict the complexities of language learning. Boan’s skillful poetics allow her to mimic this difficult yet fruitful process in her poetry, much in the same way that her work does not just state an alternative understanding of time, but also finds a way to reproduce it on a linguistic and formal level.
Annick MacAskill is the author of No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the JM Abraham Award, and Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020). A settler of French and Scottish ancestry, she lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.