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Once the driver wound a little handle
The destination names began to roll
Fast-forward in their panel, and everything

Came to life. Passengers
Flocked to the kerb like agitated rooks
Around a rookery, all go

But undecided. At which point the inspector
Who ruled the roost in bus station and bus
Separated and directed everybody

By calling not the names but the route numbers,
And so we scattered as instructed, me
For Route 110, Cookstown via Toome and Magherafelt.

Notes on the Poem
How can simple words on a page manage to create an unmistakable sense of motion and manic activity? Let the deservedly revered Seamus Heaney show us.

Heaney creates momentum in this vibrant segment of the poem "Route 110" with straightforward, active verbs and lively images and metaphors. He combines them with increasingly hectic energy that verges on the comic. 

Heaney starts to transform a bus trip into an animated adventure with the picture of the driver winding a device for displaying destination names as if the entire scene is being wound up like a toy or clock. The word "fast-forward" catapults everything "to life" serving as both adverb and verb, and moving from old-fashioned winding up with a handle to speeding things up with a button or remote control device.

Passengers metamorphose into a frantic gaggle of birds, madly off in all directions - that is, "all go // But undecided" until a transit official intervenes and starts directing traffic. The inspector perhaps introduces a modicum of order by "calling not the names but the route numbers", but the harried rooks/passengers still "scatter", even as they comply "as instructed." Seamus Heaney's narrator, however, remembers both his bus route number and the names of the route stops, as if he is calm and directed, moving forward with purpose amidst the wound-up mayhem.

to undo, to undo and undo and undo this infinitive     
of arrears, their fissile mornings,     
their fragile, fragile symmetries of gain and loss     

Notes on the Poem
Sometimes a seemingly tiny detail in a poem's composition can add a startling new dimension to the piece, or can deepen what is already evident. Sometimes that fine detail can even inform an entire poetry collection. Such is the case with Dionne Brand's "Ossuaries", which already has layers of storytelling, craft, cadence and imagery to richly commend it.

Brand's long poem narrates the mysteriously peripatetic life of Yasmine, a fugitive who has been the victim but also the perpetrator of violence and strange dealings. It's telling that the title of the collection and of the chapters of her story are ossuaries, which are buildings or receptacles serving as the final resting place for human skeletal remains.

Even more telling, then, is the subtle typographical detail that introduces each demarcation in Yasmine's story. Each opening stanza is right aligned. In languages where text is read right-to-left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, flush right alignment is common. It's a more unusual layout for text in English, where it might be used to set off a small amount of introductory or quoted text.

Is the opening text in each segment of "Ossuaries" a cryptic epigraph? Is it meant to somehow preface, introduce or label each section, like an inscription on an actual ossuary? Whatever its purpose, that intriguing touch manages to cast anew the meaning of each ossuary segment.

My pencil, Venus Velvet No. 2,
The vein of graphite ore preoccupied
In microcrystalline eternity.
In graphite’s interlinking lattices,
Symmetrically unfolding through a grid
Of pre-existent crystal hexagons.
Mirror-image planes and parallels.
Axial, infinitesimal bonds.
Self-generated. Self-geometrized.
A sound trapped in the graphite magnitudes.
Atoms, electronics, nuclei, far off.
A break, without apparent consequence.
Near-far, far-near, those microfirmaments.
Far in, the muffled noise of our goodbyes.

The surgeon, seeking only my surrender,
Has summoned me: an evening conference.
We sit together in the Quiet Room.
He cannot ask for what I’m meant to give.
No questions anymore. Just say he’ll live.
A world of light leaks through the double doors,
Fluorescent mazes, frigid corridors,
Polished linoleum, arena sand
Where hope is put to death and life is lost
And elevator doors slide open, closed,
The towers of the teaching hospital.
The field where death his conquering banner shook.

My writing tablet, opened on the table.
I touch it with my hand. The paper thins.
The paper’s interwoven filaments
Are bluish gray and beige. No questions now.
What is the chiefest deed that’s asked of us.
No questions anymore. No questions now.
I turned my back on heaven for good, but saw
A banner shaken out from heaven’s walls
With apparitions from Vesalius:
A woodcut surgeon opening a book
Of workshop woodcuts, skilled, anonymous,
The chisel blade of the engraver felt
Reverberating through the wooden blocks
Among eroded words, ornately carved:
Annihilation, subtly engraved:
All those whom lamentation cannot save
Grown fainter through successive folios.
A seraphy turns a page above: he’ll live;
Then turns a page again: he can’t survive.
I turn the page myself, and write: he’ll live.
Smell of my sweat embedded in my clothes.
The surgeon says: we’ve talked with him; he knows.
A seraph leaning near, Oh say not so.
Not so. Not so. My wonder-wounded hearer,
Facing extinction in a mental mirror.
A brilliant ceiling, someone’s hand on his.
All labor, effort, sacrifice, recede.
And then: I’m sorry. Such a man he is.

Notes on the Poem
Gjertrud Schnackenberg's arresting collection "Heavenly Questions" is epic in scope, abounding in rich classical references, mythology, science, mathematics. She majestically marshals those themes and sources to circle and zero in on her own pain. This portion of the poem "Venus Velvet No. 2" illustrates well her ability to swoop from the immense to the intimate.

As the narrator of this poem awaits devastating news, her pencil and paper are like talismans. Contemplating the organic miracles that make the objects possible distracts her and takes her to other marvellous realms ... where perhaps other miracles are possible.

"Atoms, electronics, nuclei, far off." 

But does the scientific wonder that is graphite, now in her hand, also make her confront the science that can do no more for her own personal situation? 

"Far in, the muffled noise of our goodbyes."

Spiralling in and out of levels of awareness, from the microscopic to the broadly universal and cosmic ("microcrystalline eternity"), Schnackenberg struggles to find where in that vast spectrum she can face and deal with her immense grief and bewilderment. The harsh reality of her situation brings her up abruptly in the midst of this contemplation:

"No questions anymore. Just say he'll live."

Just as the results of a pencil touching paper can endure for a while, Schnackenberg acknowledges that all ultimately fades ...

"Annihilation, subtly engraved:
All those whom lamentation cannot save
Grown fainter through successive folios."

              There is a sound
that is a whole of many parts,
a sorrowless transparency, like luck,
that opens in the centre of a thing.
An eye, a river, fishheads, death,
gold in your pocket, and a half-wit
son: the substance of the world
is light and blindness and the measure
of our wisdom is our love.
Our diligence: ten fingers and
a healthy set of lungs. Practise
ceaselessly: there is
one art: wind
in the open spaces
grieving, laughing
with us, saying
improvise.

Notes on the Poem
Fascination with and love of music infuses much of the poetry comprising Jan Zwicky's "Forge." "Gigue" is the final section of a series of short pieces gathered under the title "Practising Bach". The title of each section following the prelude is a type of traditional dance, and collectively the entire poem encompasses a suite of different dance styles and steps, of which the gigue is probably the liveliest.

As the name phonetically suggests, a gigue is a lively baroque dance similar to a jig. A jig is a jaunty dance consisting of lots of leaping and bouncing movements. You can't imagine feeling downhearted or pensive when you are either participating in or watching someone else perform a jig. 

In short, crisp, unadorned lines, Zwicky captures the rhythm and spirit of a jig. Surprisingly, her subject matter flits from the benign ("sorrowless", "an eye", "a river") to the practical ("diligence") to the seemingly positive ("luck", "gold in your pocket") to the possibly or definitely negative ("death", "blindness", "a half-wit son"). But the spritely tempo of the piece continues throughout, through joy and sorrow, to a final exhortation to try to laugh, to improvise, to prevail through it all. Literally and figuratively central to the dance is that "the substance of the world / is light and blindness and the measure / of our wisdom is our love."