Review: Unseen Garden by Roxanna Bennett

Roxanna Bennett’s Unseen Garden is the latest chapbook offering from Toronto’s knife | fork | book. Kirby—publisher, proprietor, and benefactor extraordinaire in those parts—gifted me a copy at a recent reading there, and it turned out to be a gift indeed, a strong-voiced and technically interesting little volume.Bennett identifies herself as a disabled poet, and she positions Unseen Garden as speaking within the growing tradition of disability literature by referencing Jim Ferris, author of the groundbreaking essay, “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics,” and a poet in his own right. Bennett first quotes Ferris in an epigraph taken from the final lines of “Poet of Cripples,” where he writes, “Know that you are a cripple too, / I sing for cripples; I sing for you.” Bennett then opens her own volume by quoting the first line of that same poem, writing with Ferris, “Let me be a poet of cripples.”Bennett contrasts this role of poet that she wishes to occupy with the role of being a “patient etherized upon a table” or a “brain floating within a body,” positioning poetry as an active alternative to the forced passivity of a patient. She describes a “poor body,” a “body previously intact,” “inert” and “inarticulate,” and then demands, “Let me be any other word, any other body: stone, swan, sycamore.” Here, and throughout the rest of volume, she represents words as parallel to bodies, as having not only a voice but also a physicality, an almost muscular strength that allows the disabled body to reject the position of an unresisting and even anesthetized recipient of medical care.Structurally, the volume is composed mostly of sonnets, or at least of poems that often reference the sonnet form. These poems are sutured together by phrases and even whole lines repeated from the end of one in the beginning of the next. For example, the opening poem, “Unmeaningable,” ends with the line, “alien to pain, yet I remain, unseen.” The next poem, “Sick Queens,” includes almost these exact words split between its first two lines. This second poem ends in turn with the phrase, “so sorry / you understand this”, and the next poem, “Waiting List,” includes a variation of those words in its opening lines—each poem sewn into the next.

These looser poems disrupt the structure established by the sonnets in a way that Bennett describes as echoing breakdowns in physical and mental health.

This linking effect is further emphasized by the repetition of other phrases within the sonnet-like poems, building layers of meaning and connotation with each usage. The key phrase, “stone, swan, sycamore,” appears in just this way, first in the opening poem, again in the fifth, “My Toad Oracle”, the twelfth, “Unchastened,” the twenty-first, “Language of Hospital,” and so on. These linkages emphasize the sense that Bennett’s words are indeed building a body, one that incorporates ideas of the other bodies she could want to be, a stone, a swan, a sycamore—a body strong and beautiful literally in its own words.The body of the sonnets is not entirely unified, however, occasionally being interrupted by outlier poems written in a variety of looser styles. These looser poems disrupt the structure established by the sonnets in a way that Bennett describes as echoing breakdowns in physical and mental health. They do not link one to the next with the poems around them. They contain no reference to “stone, swan, sycamore.” They become, in effect, disruptions to the body of poetry.Interestingly, the disruption that they introduce is not absolute. Although they certainly interrupt the beginning-and-end linkages that connect the sonnets, and although they don’t always participate in the repetition of key phrases that circulate within the sonnets, they do often share images and key words with the more structured poems. They may not contain an instance of “stone, swan, sycamore,” but they do employ words like “toad,” “chemicals,” and “hyacinth,” all of which are used frequently as key terms throughout the volume. Their connections to the body of poetry are looser but not entirely absent.These looser connections seem to position the outlier poems as being interruptions to the body of poetry, but not entirely foreign to it. They too are part of the body, connected through word and idea, and they too play a role in building a layered sense of meaning and sensibility, in allowing the body of poetry to understand itself as an active and valid resistance to the passive role of patient that the disabled body is too often forced to occupy.

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Vocamus Press, a micro-press that publishes the literary culture of Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director at Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph. He has written a collection of poetry, short prose, and photography called Island Pieces, three chapbooks of poetry called CanCon, Trumped, and These My Streets, and an ongoing series of poetry broadsheets called Conversations with Viral Media. His criticism and poetry have appeared in places like The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.