Exploding the pattern

Dismantling
by Eve Joseph

Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2026
$20.00 / 9781772142563

Reviewed by Jodi Lundgren

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I first discovered Eve Joseph’s prose poetry on public transit, a good place for such intuitive, unforgettable images as, “The poet keeps a jar of commas on his desk. They look like the sheared ears of voles and are soft as apricots.” As a long-time fan of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, I was drawn to the “long lines and little garden-box shape” of Joseph’s poem. The shaping of sentences into paragraphs triggers a set of expectations in readers—for linearity, unity, causality. Prose poems subvert these expectations with bold, delightful leaps of logic. In Joseph’s latest collection of prose poems, she continues her profound, playful work in two parts.

I

Part One consists of Joseph’s own poems. To open them, she often hooks readers with an assertion and strings us along sequentially for a sentence or two before exploding the pattern. As pleasurably surprising as the reading experience is, the result is not incoherence but a richly imaginative text organized by sensual, imagistic and emotional logic. For instance, “astrology” opens with a lucid claim: “The sky changes as we orbit.” This assertion is followed by a relevant explanation: “Each night the stars appear to move slightly west of where they were the night before.” So far, these lines could be mistaken for an excerpt from a high school science essay. Not so the next one, which takes a tangent: “For forty-nine dollars you can name a star after someone you love.” Conventional paragraph structure then collapses altogether as the first-person speaker enters the poem to say, “I failed the memory test given to old people.”

Yet the opening frame of reference (astrology, sky, orbit) retains a tenuous hold on the poem, returning later in the words of the speaker’s mother, who says, “I had a child once, […] a boy who understood the loneliness of astronauts and language.” The rhetorical pattern set up in the poem’s opening two lines—claim followed by explanation—serves here as an interpretive guide, leading us to find the loneliness of astronauts and language expounded in the lines that follow: “What I fail to look at fails to look back at me. This is the lesson I keep forgetting. The one that dogs me. We sleep beneath a celestial graveyard.” Not only do we bathe in the light of dead stars, the speaker wants us to know, but entities die to us when we starve them of attention. Light years away by now from an essay on astronomy, we nonetheless feel the gravitational pull of the image cluster as the words “celestial,” “horoscope,” “constellation,” and “stars” crop up in “astrology’s” closing lines.

Joseph’s frequent allusions evoke traditions of both prose and poetry. In “sonnet”—a form famous for its volta—the speaker asks, “Where is the turn in a poem? The but and yet and wait a minute? The poem navigating according to its own frequency, finding its course by echolocation.” This idea of a poem’s driving force then attaches itself to “Mandelstam’s dolphin,” an allusion to Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who is quoted—“How sad and fine an animal’s dark mind”—before one image of a marine mammal sparks another: “Our grandson once slid down the aorta of a blue whale. Riding the chute from the tower to the wading pool. We lost sight of him at the bend.” 

As the countdown to the fourteen lines of a sonnet proceeds, the poem seems to shake itself out of its grandparental reverie to invoke the preeminent sonneteer: “Shakespeare’s spent swimmers coming up one last time for air.” In another expectation-defying choice, the allusion is not to a Shakespearean sonnet but to the speech of a captain reporting on the battle at the beginning of Macbeth: “Doubtful it stood, / As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art.” Joseph’s “sonnet,” “navigating according to its own frequency,” asserts its autonomy from the poet, a motif that resurfaces in a later poem, “home”: “I want to return to my mother’s lies, but the poem won’t let me. You think you’re going in a certain direction, but one whiff of home and the horse bolts for the paddock”—horses being another touchstone image in this collection.

Joseph’s allusiveness is not limited to text; her poem “reflection” is ekphrastic in referring to M.C. Escher’s 1952 wood cut “Puddle.” Victoria-based Joseph (Quarrels) provides enough detail that readers can look up the image: “In Escher’s woodcut the full moon hides in a puddle.” Once the reader locates Escher’s striking work of visual art, Joseph’s poem guides them to find the full moon in the artist’s image and to notice that “Two sets of footprints go in opposite directions on the muddy road.” In turn, viewing Escher’s work deepens and clarifies later images in the poem: “The afterworld is a mirror image of this one. Wherever you walk, wherever you go, the soles of dead people’s feet move against your own.” 

It is perhaps death-centred images such as this one that lead writer Sadiqa de Meijer to describe Dismantling as “an embodied and inquisitive record of a life aware of its culmination.” The book’s focus on mortality stems also from Joseph’s former employment as a palliative social worker—a career eloquently recounted in her memoir In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying. 

But Joseph does not focus on endings only. With often breathtaking effect, she compresses the arc of a life into a series of momentous events: “The baby could arrive. Or my father take his last breath. My brother might return with news of where he’d been all those years”; “I can’t tell if the child I’m becoming is the same as the one I once was”; “I believed I could be a constant for my children. A light in the sky they could navigate by. Forgetting the moon is slowly drifting away from us at about the rate our fingernails grow.” Joseph captures the sweep of time and shows how, as relationships change or even reverse, its passage warps us.

II

Part Two of Joseph’s book is comprised of twenty-six centos, “prose poems made up entirely of other poets’ lines”—a choice that befits such an allusive writer. To review these centos in a conventional way would be a daunting task. Below, I aim instead in ‘cento of centos’ to represent the flavour and form of the second half of Dismantling by taking one line from each of Joseph’s centos, followed by the list of sources. As Joseph notes in her introduction, “It has been a joy to search through the works of beloved poets and to find new writers whose lines fill me with delight.” She adds, “in a time of war, it is often the poets who call upon us to remember what it means to be human.”

cento of centos

The shades above the city have already been drawn, the pockets of wind emptied. Tonight quietness in the room. I hear all the books in all the rooms breathing calmly. We must breathe time as fishes breathe water. How do we fly inside centuries and carry on? There are not more stars in the desert, even if it feels that way. A far-off flash inside a cloud, boiling in the night sky for a moment, seraphic. I look up and the clouds are sneaking away again. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf? Light needs much dark in order to dazzle. Dark of evening deepens into night and the sea becomes sleep. Somewhere there is a winding river. What shall I do with this body I’ve been given? I like being in the dark as to where I’m going and where I’ll end up. In the ocean, a man dissolves like a bar of salt, and the water doesn’t know it. Nothing lost stays gone forever. Time passes. Seasons change their gloves. When I was little, I was waterproof…. water is history and the end of the world is water also. Yesterday, my dreams took the night train and I did not know how to say good-bye to them. The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life. Seabirds cry to be heard over the waves. Across the harbour? The baby being born pauses. I hear a sound over my head like angels.

cento of cento, sources

— Mark Strand, “In the Grand Ballroom of Eternity”

— Phyllis Webb, from Naked Poems

— Denise Levertov, “August Daybreak”

— Denise Levertov, “Variation and Reflection on a Theme by Rilke”

— Philip Kevin Paul, “Of course time was passing; of course it wasn’t”

— Emily Khilfeh, “Airport Poem”

— Patrick Friesen, “Monkey Hands”

— Alden Wallace, from Epigrams

— Ocean Vuong, “Torso of Air”

— Edmond Jabès, “The Beginning of the Book” (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop)

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from So Far So Good

— Jordan Abel, from Empty Spaces

— Osip Mandelstam, “What Shall I Do With This Body I’ve Been Given” (translated by James Greene)

— Charles Simic, “Hide and Seek”

— Pablo Neruda, “The Sea” (translated by Alastair Reid)

— Emily Khilfeh, “Chanson Mystique”

— Don McKay, “Look At Me World”

— Chika Sagawa, “Promenade” (translated by Sawako Nakayasu)

— Kelly Shepherd, “Train Lines”

— Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Water”

— Mourid Barghouti, “I Have No Problem” (translated by Radwa Ashour)

— Stanley Kunitz, “Touch Me”

— Mary Ruefle, “Long White Cloud”

— Spencer Reece, “Portofino”

— Russell Thornton, “North Vancouver Snow”

— Sharon Olds, “The Sound”

Jodi Lundgren (PhD) belongs to the Open Learning Faculty at Thompson Rivers University, where she teaches literature and writing. A settler of English and Danish descent, she lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. [Editor’s note: Jodi Lundgren has reviewed Eve Joseph, Jane Munro and Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst in BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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