I find it interesting to realize that my two 2022 titles—the poetry collection the book of smaller and my suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties—are both projects built around attention and constraint, each arising from the situations surrounding their particular periods of composition. Although one might argue that everything I attempt is a project of attention; seeking to attend, to articulate and document. To actively listen across the lyric.
the book of smaller was composed from December 16, 2016 to October 16, 2017, a stretch of time that originated during the tail end of Christine’s second year-long maternity leave, opening into my eventual attention of solo at home, full-time, with baby Aoife and toddler Rose. I’d already been home full-time with Rose after the end of that first maternity-leave year—attending naps, visiting parks, going on outings. I’d run a home daycare a few years until my eldest daughter, Kate, was four years old—ten hour days with three three-year-olds, five days a week—although that was twenty years prior. As well, the adaptation of writing full-time for twenty-plus years down to days with small children was a shift I hadn’t had to contend with during that original first round; I was twenty years old, and had no routine from which to adapt. Twenty-three years later, I learned to write in-between, negotiating this second round of parenting and attending a household. If I had twenty minutes to sit at my desk, that was my window: I had no time to linger. Soon after Aoife was born in April 2016, I’d put the finishing touches upon the poetry manuscript World’s End, (Arp Books, 2023), a title that stretched out a couple of years, articulating not just the beginnings of further-parenting but a geographic shift beyond the boundaries of my two-plus decades within Centretown; we were beyond the city’s gates, so to speak. In this 1950s suburban wild.
If the baby napped half an hour, or even two full hours, while toddler Rose held her occasional mornings at preschool, that was my writing day. Otherwise, it was diapers, laundry, dishes, stories, walks. Poems emerged from a shorter attention—examining form through the compact single-stanza prose poem—as first drafts of poems were sketched out during Aoife’s nap, as they played in the living room. On warm summer days, I would sit with notebook and watch as they played in the yard, or excursions to the park. One poem was first sketched in a dark hotel room during an in-law Christmas visit during Aoife’s nap, as Christine and Rose were outside in the snow. Poem-fragments were captured in a variety of notebooks, scraps of paper and hotel letterhead, folded between the pages of whatever book I was carrying. The days required that muscle. And the chaos of two in cloth diapers, spending days at a variety of local parks, baking homemade banana bread and remaining close to home. This is a book of household and small children, fractured attentions and small moments. A book of appreciating that space.
essays in the face of uncertainties emerged as a pandemic-specific project, existing within those first one hundred days of original Covid-19 lockdown. In mid-March 2020, I began to compose prose notes from the perspective of this new array of days: set as an ongoingness, a perpetual present. I was distracted away from work due to crisis, I realized, so why not make crisis my work? By that point, I’d also been nearly a year driving out to the farm for weekends with my father; I was relieving my sister, as he required twenty-four hour care due to his erosion through Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. We all remained home in an uncertain present, and I kept notes, attempting to capture the swirl of everything—news updates, cultural moments, intimate detail—as it occurred. He kept the CBC News Network on as perpetual background through much of the day, cycling every thirty minutes across the same loop of updates, ramping up my anxiety on what was unprecedented through both of our lifetimes. On the homestead, I made notes as my father poked at his tablet, working his puzzles, and caught occasional breathing updates through a tube; once home, I made notes as our young ladies ran through the living room, hallway, fenced-in backyard. I was attempting to make sense of the chaos of reports, responses, children and loose threads. I was attempting to make sense of it all.