Baseline Press Chapbooks

Reviewed by Amy Mitchell

remnants by Shelly Harder
​Baseline Press, 2018

Quell by Sandra Ridley
​Baseline Press, 2018

Slip Minute by Anne-Marie Turza
Baseline Press, 2018

The very first thing anyone who picks up a Baseline Press chapbook notices is how exquisitely crafted it is. These chapbooks are art objects in their own right, lovingly assembled and incorporating texturally beautiful paper and lovely prints. As one small example, the three chapbooks I’m going to review, remnants by Shelly Harder, Quell by Sandra Ridley, and Slip Minute by Anne-Marie Turza, have the following respective flyleaves (according to their colophons): “Philippine Sheen paper,” “handmade Nepalese paper,” and “Japanese watermark grid tissue.” Photos do not do these chapbooks justice; they are a joy simply to handle.

But the poetry within the chapbooks is also beautiful. One very interesting result of a chapbook series like this, for which there is one editor (Karen Schindler), is that it’s possible to see certain aesthetic choices resonating across the series, always expressed in an individual way but lending a kind of thematic wholeness to the chapbooks as a group. In the case of these three chapbooks, the aesthetic throughline is a deep fascination with the evocative potential of sound. All three employ unusual word choices that contribute to unique aesthetic soundscapes—and in the case of remnants and Slip Minute, sometimes these choices teeter on the edge of losing literal or even connotative meaning, but at the same time they create aesthetic landscapes that extend beyond rationality and “meaning.” This is not to say that there is no meaning—there is!—but that the experience of the poems often transcends the reader’s ability to explain how each component in them works.
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Quell, by Sandra Ridley, is the most deceptively simple of the three chapbooks. I learned at the Baseline Press launch that this poetic sequence is based on Ridley’s own experience with a good friend’s near-drowning, and the chapbook as a whole explores the lines between life and death, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between water and land, and between individual people:

How long have you been in the water? Do you know your name? Sagebrush. Bullrush. Bough laid bare, uncovered. Under summer. August cusp. Water—lap lapping at the edge.

In the above excerpt, some of the seemingly disconnected details mimic a flickering consciousness near the water. Aurally, however, all of these details do belong together, and they weave a dreamlike backdrop to the accident and its aftermath. There is an interesting juxtaposition between the beauty of the natural setting and the horror of fighting for just one more breath: “still, stilled, I hear gasping …” This juxtaposition is, in the end, reassuring, since it situates the individual accident in a larger calm:

The way out seemed certain. We were wrong. The shore, too far. Yes, we lay down on wool and wished for a winter’s deer-bed, opened ourselves to this—sweet heart—still, stilled, I hear gasping. Even here, I won’t let you go. A polestar, somewhere, roots to stone.

This chapbook is organized as a series of small prose poems, one per page with lots of white space around it—the form invites the reader to linger on small details and contemplate their larger significance. One such page contains the following:

OK, nothing happened. And later, leaves will fall away. Again, blanket the ground we once gave ourselves to. The words, wool, we linger and to cling to.

Nothing happened, and yet everything happened, and these quiet life-or-death moments hover at the edges of all of our lives. Quell does an excellent job of inviting us to examine these moments.
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Shelly Harder’s remnants also has a meditative mood as it takes us through Harder’s experiences travelling in Europe. The Grand Tour has certainly been written—over and over again—but her take on it is self-aware, perceptive and fascinatingly idiosyncratic. Consider the following, from “Avignon”:

I have little to say about the south of France. That there must have been an intricate cathedral … That it was nice to see the papal palace, to be buttered slick in sun above the Rhone …

After Harder appends a few more generally-expected details about France, the poem breaks and veers into an intensely personal, impressionistic perspective on the landscape:

          words are toads slinking morning a pig rooting across dew-dense fields the toads startle & leap as the nosing hog meanders

Harder juxtaposes a straightforwardly prosaic approach with this kind of deeply poetic perspective, a technique that succeeds in rendering quotidian encounters strange, pointing towards a kind of meaning beyond our immediate grasp. For example, in “Conversions” she recounts a brief conversation with a Catholic missionary who tries to convert her and who reluctantly allows that “being gay probably isn’t as bad as murder.” The encounter is told in conventional paragraph format on the left page, using a conversational style, while the facing page on the right is right-justified and breaks into poetically-observed details:

She speaks of knife-throat skies, of mud horizons. She speaks of prune-plush mornings, of mortar-and-pestle voices that grind minutes soluble. She speaks of the kettle’s purring, the mirror’s ticking. She speaks.

The effect is that the two pages seem like warped mirrors of each other; their connection isn’t completely clear, but it seriously complicates the content on both pages, and the lack of clarity invites us to look from a different angle at the details around us, especially all the sounds, qualities and images that we take for granted but that can invest life with a strange, aesthetic quality that transcends our prosaic concerns.
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Similarly, “Cock’s Crow” contains a more-easily-parsed prose poem on the left-hand page that wanders from scratched, worn floors to European philosophy (David Hume would grin at the line “While many knew the rising of the sun is no matter of logical necessity …”) to transient encounters with a lover. The right-hand page is right-justified and consists of the kind of childlike river of sounds that fascinated Joyce:

no no no, no river the samelike rather startlelike is that a starfish starkfish no a sandstone glitterstone the sun’s asetting here oh mio myoh mythsome tattler of space and of kind
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time what time?

Beneath the intellectual engagement with what we might term the European Cultural Edifice is this childlike wonder at details that breaks what could otherwise be reasonably conventional travellers’ accounts out of their conventionality and opens up new possibilities for us.
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As Harder observes in the final poem of the collection, “There and Back Again,” “places happen in no predictable way so there’s no knowing where you’re going.” Her work helps us to truly see the places she visits, while at the same time gently reducing Europe’s belief in its importance to more appropriate proportions, as in the poem titled “Being and Teatime.” This chapbook is a delight to read.
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Slip Minute, by Anne-Marie Turza, is in some ways the chapbook out of these three that is the most difficult to parse, since it is the most interested in the effects of gathering sounds and images together without being constrained by literal meaning. Consider the following from “Some Jimmy Uprising”:

Confuse fur for a sound. Strip a roof. Be courteous
to a mollusk where there is none. Some Jimmy
finishes his coolness for irrational beginnings.
He finishes his coolness for a wound.
The sharp cramp of not being dead,
of giving it or keeping it, whatever it this is,
mistaking the air for a known hour
in which to billow humanly.

There is also the wryly melancholic “Whales of the 80s,” one of my favorite poems from this chapbook:

I picture the lap of a massive person
 
also of the ‘80s. The person has a neon face
at the far end above its chest, lots of blusher
up and up, blurring in the off zone no one
can see. A lifesize-for-giants ‘80s person
 
who will save the decade’s whales.

Throughout Slip Minute, the natural world intrudes on human meaning-making in unusual and unexpected ways, as in the poem “The One Snail Theory of Metaphysical Events.” Often this intrusion is somewhat unsettling alongside the knowledge that people threaten this realm of unusual detail, texture, meaning and animal life. The eponymous poem, “Slip Minute Excerpt,” considers (among other things) our attempts to understand plant perception/consciousness, which can take the form of human cruelty—we have investigated responses through inflicting damage on them. The “slip minute” could be the moment of utterly different plant consciousness in-between the moments of consciousness familiar to us, or it could be the moment that a mimosa plant is dropped in order to investigate whether/how plants learn. Our scientific terminology is utterly incapable of capturing the slip minute from within:

c) ‘Slip minute’ is a problem term in brouhaha vernacular.
          Don’t blunt it with dull diagram.
          Don’t word word word another word.
 
                    - If plants have darknesses.
                    - Is that where plants are. 
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d) Are is not for anyone
who hopes to think on time’s fancy maths— 

Turza’s technique also opens up her poetry to astonishing depths of empathy—the very first poem in the chapbook, “Down the Corridor a Chair With Wheels, Rolls,” demonstrates how the felt and the non-rational can help us bridge seemingly impossible gulfs, such as that between a younger adult and an elderly adult in (presumably) long-term care, as the following excerpts illustrate:

The lobe of this old one’s ear is the most yeared obvious aha
familiar thing I’ve ever gently touched in space-time.
 
…
 
We were persons together.
First person and first person, like filaments,
second person and second person, lit brass lamps.
 
In whatever were her measurements.
 
In the human time of tool and die prepackaged cakes
 
…
 
Press your forehead to my forehead, older
and older self. I’ll show you a meaning
 
with two animals inside it.

As with the other two chapbooks, Turza’s is worth returning to over and over, yielding new perspectives each time.
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Baseline Press is a gem in the Ontario literary scene, and its gorgeous, thoughtful chapbooks are always worth picking up. 

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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.