Kate Braid's ​Elemental

Reviewed by Amy Mitchell

Caitlin Press, 2018

Kate Braid’s new collection, Elemental (Caitlin Press), is artistically and conceptually very tight—an impressive feat considering the poems were written over several decades and therefore likely not, originally, composed with this present collection in mind. And yet they work so well together: while the parts are accomplished, the whole is even stronger. Braid groups the poems in thematic units based on the four traditional elements—earth, air, fire and water—and takes the liberty of substituting the Chinese element wood for the Western, mystical ether. The result is a collection of quietly shifting moods that all emphasize the weirdness and the transcendence hiding in plain sight all around us, if we would simply pay attention long enough to see it.

“Water," which is in many ways representative of the approach in all the sections, is the first one in Elemental, and it veers between the calm, the whimsical and the deeply threatening. There is the quotidian in the wry “Vancouver Spring,” which recognizes the joke of celebrating a very wet, grey season on the West Coast:

Soggy under a glaze of wine,
the surreal grace of grass and moss
abundant
and another wet Vancouver sky.
It’s spring, we say,
ubersweet, as we suffer
one more grey day.
…

​There is meditative calm in the quiet “Listen,” which closes the section:

It is night. Outside
a light across the blind
and the wet rubber sound
of a car passing.
…

“Swimming in Time” imagines us continuous with dolphins and whales:

… With the next long stroke
I forget about breathing
while my sides sizzle
with sapphire green bubbles.
…

The joy in the conceit is mirrored in the delightful consonance of “sides sizzle” and in the rhyming final lines:

… I twist in a lazy curl
And dive for pearls.

​But water also brings death, as “Tattoo” acknowledges; the speaker “Once … dove off a boat and almost couldn’t get back,” and the glare of the water, even on that boat, is painful and disorienting:

… But I’m not making headway
Try as I might, unanchored, my eyes shut tight,
Blind from too much aluminum, too much light.
​...

“Water” would not work nearly as well as a whole without these hints of more sinister aspects, which remind us that the world is a lot bigger, stranger and more significant than we are. This transcendent reality that we only sometimes recognize is the focus of a quiet search for knowledge that permeates the whole collection: a knowledge that is humbling, partial, and spiritual without being religious. Elemental asserts that we can find some contentment in the fact that we fit into this process in a small, messy way, as “Lava” in the “Fire” section observes:

…
and remember
we are all transforming
 
more or less slowly,
more or less within the lines.

Those two final lines in “Lava” have stayed with me long after finishing each read-through of the collection as a whole.
​
The search for ultimate knowledge—even if only partial and transitory—is most evident in “Earth,” the final section of Elemental. In “Wood Buffalo National Park,” the speaker’s face-to-face encounter with a buffalo that has left its herd to approach her points toward something larger in significance:

…
Three steps away, he stops.
You can’t smell him, only
fix on the side of his massive head
where one luminous black eye holds you,
a lake, alive with everything
you ever wanted to know     here.
 
Maybe if you wait he will bless you.
 
But no. He moves off, too soon, too
graceful for such a huge creature and you
are left, abject, awkward, stick-thin
and still not knowing
 
but closer.

Braid is so good at what she does: the line “one luminous black eye holds you” slows the reader right down and fixes their attention on that singular eye, just like the speaker’s experience.
​
A suddenly-changed perspective on stone provokes a similar and even more complete realization in “The Door to Rock,” in which “you” initially take large rocks for granted and then realize what they actually represent:

These three massive rocks, moss-covered,
that you so carelessly sat upon
for lunch (hadn’t even asked them to be
your chair, your table, sandwiches spread)
suddenly vibrate, alive.
 
…
 
you turn with the others—foolish human--
and walk as directed into the hall
where you will sit
shimmering, your hands open
because now you know.

This knowledge, whose precise content is elusive but stunning, causes silence and negates the busyness of modern life, both the literal and metaphorical noise that “Airplane Whine” in the “Air” section captures so hilariously:

...
Now it’s one cramped seat in front of the other, jostling knees and full combat over who gets to jam all three pieces of their matching luggage plus the precious (monster) vase for Aunt Maud that CAN NOT BE CRUSHED into the tiny overhead bin, first. You pack your carry-on around your feet. Think plaster cast.
…

Instead, the “Earth” section offers the shocking and silencing experience of floating down a river in a cave in “Cueva del Indio, Vinales, Cuba,” only to emerge unable to readjust quickly to the usual:

…
She can’t shake this feeling of something familiar. Then a turn and light breaks open her eyes—a long bright slit, leaf-like, framed by darkness. The river floats toward it and the boat on the river and she inside. She cannot change it (her hand on the side of the boat, forgotten). She cannot change anything now as the boat passes through then suddenly it is day and hot here and a man extends one hand to help her from the boat and with his other extends the basket for tips and this time she drops in silver and paper but she still feels oddly lost and a little sad until someone slaps her gently on the bum and says, You can breathe now. You’re born again. It’s a joke. She laughs. But all the rest of that bright day she feels a little new, a little old, like a cup, fallen, almost shattered but found again, now whole and filled and beautiful.

The collection as a whole essentially recreates this interior experience for the reader, and does so very effectively.
​
Inevitably, Elemental also functions as a kind of personality test: which section/element speaks to you the most? What does that choice say about you? My personal favorite is “Wood,” with its focus on the continuities between the mysticism of the forests, the care of the carpenter, and the taken-for-granted nature of the wood that surrounds us in our daily lives. This section marvels at the science of trees, as in “For Jude, the Cabinetmaker, In His Shop”:

​The forester says
if disease strikes a tree at one side of the forest, the rest
 
simultaneously make antibodies. Like a cathedral,
one pillar relying on every other to create a sacred space
 
each element in touch, alive—moulds to roots to leaves to creatures
visible and invisible, trees and mosses, insects and birds.
 
Is this what we call holy, this connection of the whole,
each to every other?

“Masters of the Earth” (an ironic nod to the position we think we occupy, but don’t) observes that

Seismologists can’t test during storms
because the movement of tree roots
distorts sound.

“Wood” also contains the two glosas in the collection, “Fairy Tale” and “Tree Song.” A glosa inserts the poet’s new work between the lines of existing poetry, creating a kind of poetic hybrid that reverberates back and forth between the two interwoven works. “Tree Song” is particularly effective at deploying this form. It begins with the following from John Terpstra’s “Naked Trees”:

Naked trees extend their complicated praise
branches sway, in
a sort of unison
not agreed upon
each their own way

Braid teases apart these lines to insert between them her speaker’s own musings on eternity, the human, and the non-human. The first stanza, for example, is the following:

May I be forgiven, may I forgive
myself this endless search for someone, some
thing to explain, give me the reason we’re here
and what lies after and if there’s a plan
(or even better) Planner—if I could only
know for sure (just once? a deal? I’ll stay
right here, you whisper in my ear, The Answer …)
while all around me animals carry on
regardless. Plants and insects don’t bother counting days
and naked trees extend their complicated praise.

The trees’ “complicated praise,” originating in Terpstra’s poem, anchors Braid’s speaker’s existential questions and points towards a kind of answer—not one easily encompassed or explained, but one that is emotionally fulfilling nonetheless, and one that is in keeping with the partial answers suggested in the rest of the collection.

Braid’s two glosas are also examples of her interest in using predetermined poetic forms. The “Acknowledgements” section at the end of the collection identifies a variety of these forms for her readers, including palindromes and found poetry. Her formal decisions largely work very well for her. The only slight weaknesses are the two ekphrastic poems based on Japanese art; while they are strong examples of their type, that type is rooted in the modernist fascination with Eastern aesthetics that has been reproduced very extensively, and Braid is at her best when her chosen forms more clearly emphasize her own unique voice and perspective. Her decision more broadly to engage with formal poetry is an interesting one, however, and one that I think fits well with the emotional/spiritual content of Elemental. The ineffable cannot be said, but it can perhaps be briefly and partially contained—just as the cave, the trees, the rocks and the water are forms that open up brief glimpses of transcendent knowledge, even if the content of that knowledge is ultimately unknowable, so the poetic forms give shape to not-easily-articulated psychological states and insights. The shape pins them down briefly for us to examine and enjoy.
​
It is fitting that the final poem in the collection is both humorous and thoughtful, and expands on the awed silences that the elements inspired in previous poems. The title alone is wonderful: “You Are a Traveller Standing in Front of a Mountain and Were Just Going To Say Something Important.” The poem picks right up where the title left off:

but it comes out of your mouth
a gravelly sound
 
and when you look--
mere stone
 
part of the larger community of rock
known for the silence of its speeches
 
the weight of its utterance,
long pauses.
 
You of the human shape
can’t imagine the patience it takes.
 
…

“You of the human shape” should consequently be quiet, look around you, and pay attention to the larger and greater things that allow your own shape to briefly hold the meaning it’s searching for.

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Amy Mitchell is The /tƐmz/ Review's social media editor (as well as a writing editor) and a college professor. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Western University. Her reading tendencies have been described as "promiscuous"; she is interested in a wide range of fiction and poetry, and particularly enjoys finding new and interesting works in translation.