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Description
Understories is an exploration of things visible mostly to the inner eye and memory, things below the surface. The book began as a riff on Mark Strand's brilliant title, "Planet of the Lost Things," and it is an exploration of loss, but also of recovery through memory and language. The first part, "A Perfect Afternoon" follows an unfulfilled romance through significant moments and years to elegy for what never was and for the loved one himself. The romance is juxtaposed with epiphanic moments of reflection, joy and dismay, perceptive growth points. The second section, "Functional Families," considers the theme of family, especially mothers, and moves through varying visions of family to a sort of resolution though the poet's mothering of her own son. The third section, "Going the Distance for Poetry," focuses on poetry and art, some of the connections that make the poetic quest possible, literary, artistic and natural (looking at mountains, listening to trees). The final section, "Lost Cities," looks at New York, Toronto, Florence, ancient Rome, Mayan Mexico through the lens of history and memory, alternating sorrow for loss with belief in the power of poetry to preserve. Once of the themes of Understories is "where does the story end?" and the book takes the long view, writing beyond the apparent ending.
Contributor Notes
Elizabeth Greene has published two previous collections of poetry, The Iron Shoes (Hidden Brook, 2007) and Moving (Inanna, 2010). She edited and contributed to We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman (Cormorant, 1997), which won the Betty and Morris Aaron Prize for Best Scholarship on a Canadian Subject, 1998. She has edited/co-edited four other books, including Kingston Poets' Gallery (Artful Codger Press, 2006), The Window of Dreams: New Canadian Writing for Children with Mary Alice Downie and M.-A. Thompson (Methuen, 1986); On the Threshold: Writing Toward the Year 2000 with Foxglove Collective -- T. Anne Archer, Mary Cavanagh, Tara Kainer, Janice Kirk (Beach Holme, 1999); and Common Magic: The Book of the New, with Danielle Gugler (Artful Codger Press, 2008). Her poetry and fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She lives in Kingston with her son and three cats.
Editorial Review
"A layered, compelling collection that maps genealogies and tenuous, emerging flocks of selves. At once lyric and storied, Greene's poems celebrate discovering community and living a poetic life with the cards we are dealt. Thank goodness Greene has, in her fine poetry, dared to disturb the universe."-- Jeanette Lynes, author of Archive of the Undressed"Greene has written a beautiful book (including the petalled cover) that smoothly fuses details of her life from her son's birth to her dying mother to the vanishing vistas of aging, with allusions to the texts she has read and taught over the years from Eliot and Euripedes to Olds and Plath, and to places she has traveled through like Florence, or lived in like New York. As with the best of Frank O'Hara, Greene is able, much of the time, to make us care about the people who inhabit her poems, from Arthur, who grew gardens of "apples and quince, roses and hosta" to trans-gendered Terry who came out as a woman "at 79...[and] wore swishy dresses, lime green or ice blue, with frilly necks." The book begins with a bang. What I like about Poetry sketches a poetics in which the poem is ambivalent in its potency, giving the reader the freedom to "enter...or...walk away." Pregnancy and its effect on familial dynamics is explored in poems like Raindrops Lounging on Magnolia Buds; Heaven in Bits engages with aging and its recollections from a museum in Santiago where the speaker witnesses, "pots the red-brown of eclipse"; Last Week enters Sylvia Plath's death, and Planet of the Lost Things traces fleeting neighbourhoods: "I'm still turning corners to failed coffee shops/dreaming egg and anchovy sandwiches". These poems sing with the sense of a full life, including its bitternesses, its unfulfillments."- Catherine Owen, Marrow Review"In this four-part collection, Greene cleverly resurfaces stories and memories to explore loss, healing and the preservation of legacies through the power of the poetic form. In "One Perfect Afternoon," Greene invites us to experience a momentous but unsuccessful romance by asking us to imagine a love that is tangible but unreachable at the same time. Just as one poem alludes to a cosmic romance ("You took my hand. / Energies of the universe / flowed over us, / wind blew round us"), another underscores that relationship's fleeting nature by recollecting "All those years of silence, distance, absence." These cycles of memory and lamentation reflect on the past as a path to healing and closure.The book's second section explores familial relationships. The most powerful poems here navigate the speaker's tensions with a mother who "wasn't mean-critical- / passed on a pot of self-doubt / so black I'm still scrubbing." By revisiting the role that criticism and illness played in her relationship with her mother, and by reflecting on her own, very different, relationship with her son, the speaker maturely acknowledges that familial relationships take on many forms. In "Time Travel," the speaker must "travel through those layers of years, / take my past selves by the hand and bring them finally, home" and reconcile with her past in a manner that nurtures the absences she has felt in her own family.The third part, "Going the Distance for Poetry," is not only a tribute to powerful art and poetry but contemplates how to enter a meaningful, poetic journey. The speakers in this section struggle to find inspiration and meaning in the poetic pursuit, as in "Leaving Chile," when the speaker asks, "How will we find poems / in the midst of dailiness?" These poems affirm that poetic inspiration comes from everywhere and provides an avenue to use one's voice, but only practicing this craft by "turning sand into pearl / over and over / makes the artist."As the collection draws to a close, Greene brings her themes full circle. Here, the loss of a marriage, friends and a mother is juxtaposed with places and poetic works of art that seemingly last forever, though the nostalgic connection to such things changes. Places hold stories and memories: "These streets embrace us / their stones full of stories," but it is through revisiting and re-engaging with their own memories that the speakers are able to reconcile loss with the legacy stories provide. Greene's collection reminds us that such legacies are created and sustained by the unfolding and sharing of histories."- Tiffany Moniz, Arc Poetry Magazine
