THE OUTER WARDS - A NEW BOOK BY SADIQA DE MEIJER

Comforting words are in short supply these days, unless I’m looking in all the wrong places. At some point most afternoons, I walk north on Rideau from my place on Charles, and then along the Cataraqui River, sometimes kicking a stone ahead. I’m doing my best sullen teen impression, except for the telltale ache in my knee, the hop-skip stutter sometimes of my heart. 

The aim is to exercise, sure. And to clear the head. And on a perfect day I will stumble upon a few publishable sentences. But truth is, the words that have come to me so far on these urban treks seem woefully inadequate. Not up to the job at all. And so despite the best intentions (the plan when this shitshow began was to fill up the pages) I’ve become pretty much mute.

Mute and also still. With the real estate business on hold and the streets full of traps unseen, I stay home mostly. And when I return from those once-a-day walks along that pretty but polluted stretch of river, I slump into a deep, comfortable kitchen chair for a long time, usually with an NYT crossword or a book.

And that book, more often than not the last couple of weeks, is Kingston poet Sadiqua de Meijer’s new collection, The Outer Wards.

A while back, De Meijer suffered a serious concussion and was confined for long stretches to shuttered, quiet rooms. Which means, appropriately enough in this oddest of seasons, that these are regularly poems of either isolation or of eventual re-engagement with family and community. They are poems of healing and of motherhood in extremis. 

There is, I realised early on, the very eerie sense in these pages that de Meijer is somehow reporting from the future, having already endured the information fog and the self-isolation that the rest of us are living through now. Read that way they become, in a quiet way, an instruction guide. It is as if we have been gifted a manual of solace. As if she has done us an essential service.

But none of the above should diminish the book on its own terms. At any time, in any year, these are fine poems. In a world in which it feels everyone walks around with a Moleskine notebook claiming to be a poet, how refreshing it still is to come across the real deal. 

I am most impressed, perhaps, by the clarity here of the gaze de Meijer is able to cast over her shoulder, into what must have been the cruellest of mists (“the stupid jukebox in your skull” is how she describes it). That she has been able to recover such fierce detail strikes me as rather marvellous. What we are left with is as much memoir, or artful documentary, as it is poem. 

The work here is concerned pretty much equally with these outer and inner geographies. And the way in which de Meijer seems to be able to tease an idea from its conception in some deep brain-fold out onto the page, all without seeming to lose any of the wondrous atomic detail to friction, is rare almost beyond imagining.

These are poems set in our own Swamp Ward.  It’s important, perhaps, to end with that fact. I recognise the streets and the street corners, the parks and playgrounds described here, as clearly as if I had been there myself when they were recorded. You will see yourself in these stories, I’m convinced of it. 

The longest poem in the book – “It’s the Inner Harbour neighbourhood, / but everyone calls it Skeleton Park” – provides a set of scenes as vivid and telling as a couple dozen Vivian Maier photographs.

De Meijer must have a favourite tree somewhere. She describes it this way: “That small maple is the first to turn each year; an ignition in the crown.” Reading this lovely book provokes the same sort of spark.

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Oscar and Joana are still selling books at Novel Idea, and Oscar can leave a copy of this one for you at the door of the shop. And last I heard he was even prepared to drop them off at your house. A dispatch from the future, there when you step outside. How great is that?