Thirsty [Paperback]

"... in the city there is no simple love / or simple fidelity, the heart is slippery / the body convulsive with disguises...." The 33 linked, untitled poems in Dionne Brand's Thirsty tell the agitated lyric tale of a father shot by the police in his own home, "thirsty" his last word, spoken as he dies. He thirsts for all those things he never had, will never have. A raw sense of absence echoes through these pages in the repetition of words for loss: abandonment, discarded, emptied, nothing, vanish, withdrawal, disappearance, departure.

A mother and a daughter remain, wounded and scarred in different ways, sorting out the bits and pieces of the city, "hurtling" into the rest of their lives. Often Brand's language is electric: "dance floors would bleed from the knife of her dress" and "she can ... illuminate / the dead street just opening her mouth." Brand talks about the "rough sonancy" of the city's sounds and says it would be a mistake "to take it as music." But the urban jangle by way of the Caribbean can be heard in many lines: "wracked on the psalmody of the crossroad" and "gardens of beans, inshallahs under the breath, / querido, blood fire, striving stilettoed rudbeckia." These are not easy poems, depicting as they do concrete urban realities and personal suffering--but, with their effusive language, they often break through into light. --Mark Frutkin

This could have been such a different book, such a different poem. It could have been more proximate and political like Land to Light On or No Language is Neutral if the poet who here roams the psychogeography of Toronto had taken up a different office, had taken sides. She didn't, though the poem's embedded narrative of a black man shot by police outside his home, echoing the city's recent history, provided opportunities. Instead, Thirsty is stunningly calm, full of a peace that seems, on reflection, the natural evolution of Brand's poetic persona. It comes right out of Land to Light On, where that persona seemed compelled to confront or convey, even to suffer everything dire. That confrontation can be merciless, "[t]he body bleeds only water and fear when you survive / the death of your politics," and Thirsty benefits from the enabling abdication of that suffering in the previous book: "Look. What I know is this. I'm giving up. / No offense. I was never committed. Not ever, to offices / or islands, continents, graphs, whole cloth, these sequences / or even footsteps." So Thirsty is a different book, even a peaceful book, and marvelously so.
Brand marks the difference in lists. Details are named, gathered by an inclusive vision, but nothing feels "read" for some purpose outside the significance of the moment or scene. XV for example is a list of noun clauses prefaced by definite articles defining "a city" (indefinite) as "hope gone hard": "The blind houses, the cramped dirt, the broken / air, the sweet ugliness, the blissful and tortured / flowers, ..." Perspective infuses novel collocations ("inconclusive women in bruised dresses") and seeds the whole scope of political possibility in Brand's composite portrayal of both city and story. Even then, she hitches, her language marking moments of reconsideration. Not just anyone, but "Anyone, anyone can find themselves on a street corner / eclipsed," repetition marking the recognition of wider implications. Sparse punctuation focuses attention on Brand's other strategies as voice determines sentence structure—or really, the ear recognizes syntactic units like sentences in sound. Those lists and hesitant hitches give the voice a grace that conveys serene accord with "the ordinariness of the city / the stream and crash of things lived," even with "someone's life falling apart," and there is something very satisfying in hearing Brand turn urban sage.
Chris Jennings (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

This is a poem about the city. About a man who has visions, hovering on the edge but hating it, restless and at war with the world but wanting the peace that passeth understanding. Everything he does is half-done, except his death. When he falls, his parched spirit crying "thirsty," his family falls apart. This is a poem about Toronto, the city that’s never happened before, about waiting for a bus, standing on a corner, watching a stranger: the bank to one corner, the driving school on another, the milk store and the church. This is also about the poet, her own restless sensibility woven in and out through moments of lyric beauty, dramatic power and storytelling grace. It is written in the margins, like a medieval manuscript with shades of light and darkness.

Dionne Brand is a poet and novelist living in Toronto. She was recently named the Poet Laureate of Toronto. Her ten volumes of poetry include Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Book Award in 1997; thirsty, winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize; Inventory, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award; and the forthcoming Ossuaries. Dionne Brand’s most recent novel, What We All Long For, was published to great acclaim in Canada and Italy in 2005, and won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, she won the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing. Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

I

This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held

the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath

and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed



A Word about the Poem by Franca Bernabei
“This city is beauty.” With this striking affirmation Dionne Brand opens her text to the city and immediately places the reader in the scenario of Toronto. In the long poem thirsty, Toronto will become the absolute subject and agent of her spatial critique. This critique connects the lyrical “I,” the city, and the poetic text through a sapient play of prosodic rhythms and phonetic, syntactic and semantic trajectories. In its turn, the polarized — but intersecting — social contextualization of the multi-ethnic urban site both shapes and pulverizes the discourse of the self. A self whose inner, reflexive itinerary will crisscross the restless, tragic route of Alan, a West Indian immigrant killed by the police; those of the women making up his family; and the daily routes of the suburban dwellers and the inner-city immigrants.

In the first two stanzas of this introductory poem, the self “declares” both its “innocent” condition of liminality and suspension with respect to the “fierce departures” and “submerged landings” that occur in the streets of Toronto, and its will to speak and make the city known. The shifts of grammatical subject (“this city,” “I am,” “let me,” “we,” “I”), the different speech acts and verbal modes, and two distinct but converging constellations of images — one referring to the body (“eyelids,” “eyelashes,” “breasts,” “brittle,” “gnawed lives”), the other to features of the city space (“streets,” “thresholds,” “elevators,” “doorways,” “corners,” “shops”) — mark above all the porous boundaries between the “unbreakable” and “amorous” beauty of Toronto and the surrendering “lovesickness” of the speaker’s body. This porosity then invests the “I”’s relation to the other urban dwellers, with whom it shares a peculiar form of intimacy: the spatial specificity of a city — as we will learn later — “that never happened before.”

In the third stanza it becomes even more evident that this particular urban site is a space of contingency which not only captures the “I” with its beauty but also holds it by means of its heterogeneous singularities which constantly intrude on and question the “private” space of the self. Furthermore, the shift from object (“blushes me,” a transitive verb) to subject (“I”) prepares for the move from indicative to interrogatory in stanza IV, in which the present tense of the “I” is related to a past that perhaps might have had a different outcome in another context. Once again, a chain of bodily images transmits the reception (actually, the “embrace”) on the part of the “body-self” of an “iridescent” medley — note the purring of alliterations and assonances here — that composes the city. Note also how the puzzled mood of the speaker is modulated through the use of repetition (“I am held and held,” “how come, how come,” “would I…would I”). And this special form of availability/vulnerability is further qualified in the last stanza. Here the “I” becomes “we” again, in order to emphasize that Toronto’s urban milieu is composed of the distribution and dispersal of people’s everyday paths and routines, their contingent and fugitive encounters, unsatisfactory translations, and acts of camouflage or discardings of previous identities. The city is a composition which simultaneously absorbs and dispels, binds and loosens.

As we will learn in the course of this long poem, the collective “we” is made up of a recalcitrant multitude which contributes to the city’s “murmurous genealogy” and refuses to coalesce. Gathered under the all-encompassing figure of a “vagrant, fugitive city,” and reinforced by the metaphors of “thirst” and “falling,” these intersecting, disenfranchised bodies breach the “I”’s singularity and compel it to confront itself through its own alteration and embrace a conflictual ethics (a politics?) of accountability and compassion. As the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has pointed out, the modern city is not so much a civitas (a community of citizens) as it is a place in which something takes place that is different from place. And yet, Dionne Brand’s remapping of the metropolitan paradigm suggests that the uneasy and volatile proximity of Toronto’s (im)possible citizens, their mobile geography of looks and glances, or even of bodies brushing up against one another, and “hyphenating” the streets in which they transit, may be capable of establishing new and perhaps incommensurable spaces of negotiation, transformation, and representation.

Franca Bernabei — University of Ca’Foscari, Venice