Gravity Matters
reviews

Carolyne Van Der Meer for Canadian Woman Studies
Andrew DuBois for University of Toronto Quarterly
The other group of poems is a sequence only in a sense less contained, scattered as they are throughout. I have never read anything like them. With Sylvia Plath was encountered what before had hardly existed (having hardly before been allowed to), an expressive range of mother poems, not merely imagined but straight from a mother herself. Since then, in the genre there have been numerous elaborations of tone and voice, updates that registered social changes, and expansions of viable subject-positions. Greckol’s contribution is compellingly specific.
What do you do when your daughter embarks on a career that you cannot help but admire, but which also causes you emotional pain? What do you do when your daughter undertakes the dangers of aid work in faraway, war-torn lands? Underneath the specificity, however, is also the lurking universality of the soul-harming paradox of the successful mother, whose hopes for her child are fulfilled: ‘That your appetites are large, I see / is redundant among my wishes. Your arc / is larger than the scripts I | un | furled.’
In other words, how does one handle the pain that one inflicts on oneself by having reared the independent and ethically minded child that one always wanted into the well-adjusted adult that leaves one behind? ‘A Girl Studies Genocide,’ ‘What She Learned,’ ‘What She Decided’ – this is the start of the arc of the sequence. The last ends where many lesser parents would never have gone: Now we have taught ourselves what our daughter learned. I grasp /structural adjustment/coffee markets/foreign currencies/planned genocide/ our complicity: And a daughter sets her radius to Kigali – declares her own Never again
After these lines follow three spare poems – ‘Mother Watch,’ ‘Skin of the Universe,’ ‘Small Disturbances’ – that register Greckol’s unease and her determination to remain even-keeled. In the poem after those, ‘Gravity and Flight,’ we enter by seeing the doorframe on which the daughter’s height has been measured through the years. Strangely, the marks do not uniformly ascend. Mother and daughter ‘chuckle,’ but there is sadness tracked in the ebb and flow of those marks that also mark their relationship. What is so atypical of this parent-poet is how clearly Greckol shows the symbiotic nature of their love. Her daughter can be both teacher and taught. She herself can be made younger than her daughter when her daughter, although still and always her child, becomes an adult: ‘A week before you left, / we bought pillows on Spadina Ave: / you plumped and squeezed and giggling / lay your head down and buoyed your courage and my urge // to be the feathers that could hold you; smoothed my / frayed edges, / and I found my young feathers imped.’ A word worth looking up, that last one, as well as an occasion to add that Greckol’s strength is not just in her fearless approach to meaningful subject matter, or in her idiosyncratic but in-the-pocket rhythms (established not only by impeccable enjambment but also by her use of indentation, of stanza breaks, and of the page as a field). Her strength is also her vocabulary.
Poems such as ‘The Mother Line’ and ‘More Self-Portraits in the Mother Line’ complete the series. The book as a whole is fleshed out by others. Everywhere there are lines that reverberate: ‘Undone is my fecundity’ or ‘Her slanders lay in half-knowing whole truths’ or ‘the bodies of the girls / who left, hand in hand, giddy / in gilt sequins under the silken / fringe of our mothers’ dread.’ But it is not just a matter of lines; whole poems are beautifully built. Take ‘Joy Riding,’ which I cite complete:
Too young, they decided, and lined up
the high school at the yellow buses
and took them to the funeral.
Decapitated, we whispered,
left behind on the soccer field,
when the cable across the plant gate
sheered off the top of her head,
and we imagined her body lying
tight in that coffin, headless.
Joy riding, we heard, drawn up high
on the transmission hump –
we knew where teenage girls rode –
in that red and white Imperial,
page boy streaming,
her mouth a bright streak.
It didn’t happen that way, Olga said,
that poor beat up girl found someone was kind to her for a time,
took her for a ride, he’s dead too,
Why’s this story about you?
University of Toronto Quarterly
Volume 80, Number 2, Spring 2011,
pp. 151-218 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press
Karen Cope for Dalhousie Review

The work of creating a fully habitable life with a past and present preoccupies Sonja Greckol. In Gravity Matters, she traces an arc: from a nineteenth-century European family that immigrated and settled in central Alberta to a digitized wondering held together by Skype and Google rooted in central Toronto. In this, a first collection, Greckol turns obliquely from the matters of largely personal lyrics to historical and international preoccupations that, nevertheless, remain embodied—a pentimento of certainties, sensualities and queries, empiricism and theory in science, moving from daughter to mother and then mother/daughtering once again—in a feminist voice that is urgent, empathic and wry. Her long poem, Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire, a fractured sonetto magistrale voices a eighteenth-century physicist and noble woman, Emilie du Châtelet, a key figure of the Enlightenment and locates her in mind and body as well as in her time. This poem was short-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2008.
The work of creating a fully habitable life with a past and present preoccupies Sonja Greckol. In Gravity Matters, she traces an arc: from a nineteenth-century European family that immigrated and settled in central Alberta to a digitized wondering held together by Skype and Google rooted in central Toronto. In this, a first collection, Greckol turns obliquely from the matters of largely personal lyrics to historical and international preoccupations that, nevertheless, remain embodied—a pentimento of certainties, sensualities and queries, empiricism and theory in science, moving from daughter to mother and then mother/daughtering once again—in a feminist voice that is urgent, empathic and wry. Her long poem, Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire, a fractured sonetto magistrale voices a eighteenth-century physicist and noble woman, Emilie du Châtelet, a key figure of the Enlightenment and locates her in mind and body as well as in her time. This poem was short-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2008.

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