Wry, shrewd, and brassy: Review of Jen Currin's Trinity Street
Jen Currin, Trinity Street.
House of Anansi, 2023. $19.99.
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In characteristic wry, shrewd, and brassy poems, Jen Currin gives readers Trinity Street. In this fifth collection, Currin maintains the quick, leaping, and associative qualities of the poems in the previous four books. Currin’s is a poetics with roots in the New York school, and which, Currin has transferred to the streets of Vancouver. Currin’s is a “local” poetry, local to this writer’s social, political, and artistic life in the City of Glass, variously described in the poems as rainy, foggy, mildewy, and musty. Such is life in a rain forest! The Trinity Street of the collection’s title is an actual Vancouver street, and from the title poem, we learn the name also points to “a garden holy / with unburdened bodies.” This hoped-for, as-yet-only-imagined delightful garden absent humans’ mistreatment of one another and of Earth is a central ethos of these poems that focus intently on relationships—to place, to those who are alive in or have passed from the poet’s life, as well as the poet’s relationship to writing poetry.
In the opening poem “From Surrey to Commercial Drive,” two poets converse: One “says he wants to take fewer / leaps in his poems, to stick a little / longer with one thing. The leaping / has become too easy.” Easy or not, Currin seems to shrug, and as in previous books, forge ahead, doubling down on the hang-and-swing relay from line to line in the poems of Trinity Street. For Currin, the associative leap from one image tone, flashing thought, or speech snippet to the next is akin to a bus that “lurched” and “tripped” a passenger. “This poetry winks” at Currin. To Currin, associative leaping seems to make sense in a poem because it is a natural aspect of vehicular, physiological, and cognitive movement; plus, it is fun. To pan out a bit, the textually reflexive yokes with the quality of ongoingness in both the poetics and subjects from book to book in Currin’s oeuvre. Then back in, the associative leaping in the poems of Trinity Street seems to require the one giving them to be, at least some of the time, an observer from the perimeter: “Taking notes: realistic, romantic, romanticist.” This peripheral positioning, in the poem “Periphery” and many others, is an aspect of Currin’s poetics that provides vantage and allows perspective, and it facilitates a layering mix of the relational, hearing- and speech-based within a poem. Any person passing, thing seen, or word overheard is fair game and fairly included.
If the poet is not positioned on the periphery in service of writing a poem, then the poet seems to want to push certain things to the periphery. Two such things: technology and thinking. Each can interfere with the writing of a poem. Not to mention the ways each hinders possibilities of communion with self and other. The ubiquity of cell phones, whether “broken” or “dead” or in use within the poems seems to signal a desire for alternative attention—perhaps to poetry or to beloveds. It is interesting that this alternative is suggested by giving attention to the cell phone, allowing the device a role in many poems. This is especially so in the first half of the collection. Poems such as “Where Buildings Pose as Mountains,” “Friday Mouth,” and “Dear Healing Walk” are ghosted by someone “looking down / into the face of” the phone, “ancestors / who call,” and a “dead cousin [who] called my cell.” As intermediary and conduit, and as a symbol of our turbulent times, the cell phone is transformed into a “fear instrument they were / always buying/updating.”
Currin’s is writing aware that “No one ever completes”; what is said trails off, loops are left open, calls dropped or go unanswered. That struggle to connect points directly to a riptide of grief running through the poems: “the deaths are often sooner / than expected.” Many of the poems are or act like epistles, addressing deceased family members, dear friends, and the environmental crisis. As the opening line of “Come Together” states: “This historical moment is overwhelming—” Then, in “Dear Prince of Melting Icecaps”: “We are in a state. A state.” A state where, as in the poem “Procure,” what is brought to the fore are “insufficient politics,” and this poet is “not / interested in polarizing rhetorics— / poet or politician.” And there it is, the assertion that what Currin is after as a poet and in poetry is beyond an either/or premise. Might that account for the doubling down on the all-subjects-in, leaping, and associative within the poems? Perhaps, in part. With “ink & intention” “poets can say things / like that,” things that have high stakes in life and poetry, like what Jen Currin says in the moving and discovering poems of Trinity Street.
Jami Macarty gratefully recognizes the Coast Salish as the traditional and rightful owners of lands where Jami has the privilege to live and learn—as a teacher at Simon Fraser University, an independent editor, and as a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry. Jami is the author of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘴 (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award - Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by funding from the British Columbia Arts Council and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. To learn more about Jami's recent and forthcoming publications, visit: jamimacarty.com/