Close to the Bone: Review of Emily Osborne's Safety Razor

Emily Osborne, *Safety Razor.*
Gordon Hill Press, 2023. $20 CAD.
Order a copy from Gordon Hill Press.

Emily Osborne’s Safety Razor displays an assured poetic voice, more so than one might expect in a debut. This is quite possibly reflective of Osborne’s scholarly background, which includes a Masters (MPhil) in Old English and a PhD in Old Norse, both from Cambridge. Despite the evident intellect and the erudite knowledge informing the writing, the poems in this fine collection are well-grounded, often visceral, and indeed often cut deep to difficult truths.

Wide ranging yet cohesive, the book’s three sections each have a different primary, though not exclusive, focus. “First Cuts” centres on experiences of childhood and young adulthood, and includes the wonderfully kaleidoscopic “Venn diagrams” with its evocation of sensory impressions and connections over a child’s school day “In the rings’ overlap / write flavours that cross ion channels…. Chalk, zinc, the flavours of math, / licking pastel gypsum from my thumb.” The second section, “Bare Bones,” steps back slightly to range over such subjects as the art of scrimshaw, paleontology, imagined life-lessons for a celebrity elephant, weather and environmental crises, while always maintaining an individual perspective. The final section, “Flesh Meets,” reasserts the intimate; early days in a level-field marriage and the wonders and terrors of childbirth and childbearing segue into oblique looks at family legacies and old age, along with dementia and the end of life.

Osborne’s original translations of Old Norse-Icelandic skaldic verse that stud the collection remind me of how Annick MacAskill skillfully and beautifully incorporated her translations from Ovid into her Shadow Blight. While Osborne’s translations are, evidently, different in tone and subject than her individual work, they also seamlessly slide alongside and enhance the other poems. Sometimes this is overt, as when a poem with the last line “we see a lake / brimming with a lost brother” (10) is followed by the translated poem “Auðr mourns her dead brother” or when one entitled “Old Age” is situated among the final group of poems with their intimations of mortality. Other times, the link is more thematic, such as the two skaldic rune-carving poems that appear early in the second section of the book and echo and enhance its “Bare Bones” theme.

Bones might, in fact, have been a consolidating image for the collection equally apt as the eponymous razor of the book and section titles (and design elements). Bones, skeletons and similar images appear multiple times, not only in the "Bare Bones" section but throughout, and touch on numerous other themes of the book: “Our bridge home mortars / the broken wrist of water/ in air and earth—a prosthetic/ gesture.” (19); “Claim my lost bone, / though I wasn’t the donor. What else can I give my sons / from my mother but pale eyes and stories?” (65); “their souls re-teething, growing fossilized knowledge in / new cartilage.” (69)

As befits as translator and one used to parsing variations of story and history, Osborne from the first poem raises questions of memory and its fallibility, asking “Can amygdalae bind memory / so early? Does terror find us in utero?” (3) and later in “Oral Traditions” the speaker and her love “extemporize on transmission, how / oral lore morphs before it’s pinioned to script” (50) both in different versions of old tales and in their own story.

Elements of ars poetica are evident in some of the Old Norse-Icelandic poems: “I carry word-timber, / leafed in language, / from the speech-shrine.” (20); “Poetry is my tool in tough times. / It pays tribute to my grit.” (52). Osborne even uses poetic terms of art as metaphor incorporated into the narrative of several poems: “The train auto-corrects, inserting commas / into a run-on sentence. In these caesuras, doors open in sync …The train’s line scans in iambic metre” (35); “Night skies were once syllabified in ballads, / heroes deified in trochaic glints” (43) and “commuters’ rushed iambs” (44)

The poet employs compound phrases (“Rust-gibbous lid”; “can opener’s merry-go-round teeth” (18); “cupboard-cool glass”; “ a rough-brushed ocean” (49); “reading by solar-dull bulbs” (54); “metal-on-bone rake you swung to tissue earth” (57); “cup your acorn-small shoulder” (62) ) that make language do double duty, adding density and depth to the work. Time, language and history, both familial and ancient, are among the many threads that Osborne intricately and expertly weaves together with barely-submerged rhyme and compelling imagery. “Our cellars lie on ancestors’ roofs, our footprints / sift dirt through sunken ruins,” (43).

Frances Boyle is, most recently, the author of the poetry collection, Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). Her debut novel, Skin Hunger, is forthcoming with The Porcupine’s Quill in 2024. Frances’s other books include Tower, a novella and Seeking Shade, an award-winning short story collection, as well as two earlier books of poetry, Light-carved Passages, and This White Nest. Recognitions for her writing include the Diana Brebner Prize, This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt and Pulp Literature’s Magpie Poetry Prize. Originally from the prairies, Frances has long lived in Ottawa where she is a past board member of Arc Poetry Magazine, and a current reviewer for both Arc and Canthius. For more, visit www.francesboyle.com and follow @francesboyle19.