Paul Vermeersch
Dionne Brand, Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems.
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2022. $45.00.
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is yet another important landmark in a career filled with important landmarks, but its significance is not limited to the life’s work of its author. Dionne Brand is one of Canada’s most celebrated and admired poets—at home and internationally—so the publication of her new and collected poems should rightly be seen as a momentous occasion for the whole of Canadian letters. This book is a gift not only to every attentive reader of contemporary poetry, but also, thanks to Christina Sharpe’s detailed and insightful critical introduction, to literary scholars interested in Brand’s “work, political engagements, commitment to experiments with form and shape, her place in Diasporas, her influences, and the beauty and radical push of her poetics.”
Nomenclature brings together all of Brand’s previously published collections, with the exception of 1978’s ’Fore Day Morning: Poems, which she considers her juvenilia, and 2018’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, which, owing to its recency, could be seen as a companion volume to the collected poems. For long-time readers of Brand’s poetry who may be hoping for something new, this book comes through with “Nomenclature for the Time Being,” a previously unpublished seventy-page-long poem that begins: “The apocalyptic reports have come / true, dilute in our arterial solvent / the atrocities saturate our latent notebooks . . .”
This captivating long poem cements several things we can now observe about Brand’s poetic output: that she is a master of the book-length poem or poem sequence, that she wields the prophetic and critical voices with equal and powerful authority; that her work is often quietly self-reflexive, highlighting the role the written word must play in communicating her foresights and critiques. In the worlds Brand creates, the portents of a coming apocalypse or the critique of an untenable system exist simultaneously in our “arterial solvent” and our “latent notebooks,” that is, in our bodies as well as our language. In Brand’s work, we inhabit, and we are—physically as well as intellectually—what we fashion from our language, and we cannot separate these ways of being from ourselves.
A “collected poems” such as this is not just a storehouse of old favourites, but an opportunity to consider them in a revised context. Consider for a moment that the word “revision” means “to see again”; consider that the title Nomenclature refers not simply to the names we give things, but to the systemized act of naming. In seeing these works again, now juxtaposed together within the vast thematic arc they form, within the dynamic system of Brand’s poetics, their manifestation as a unified oeuvre comes into full view. We see that Brand’s poetry is both powerful and empowering, but it is never passive, and it does not surrender easily to passive reading. Because it gives so much, it asks we give something in return: our engaged focus on the world of language and the language of the world. For those who come prepared to meet these texts on that level, the rewards can be life-altering, life-affirming, or both.
Paul Vermeersch
is a poet and multimedia artist whose most recent book is Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. He teaches in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing and Publishing program at Sheridan College, and he is the senior editor of Wolsak & Wynn Publishers Ltd., and the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing.