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Signature Editions, 2005
ISBN: 1897109016
96 PAGES
• Shortlisted for the Mary Scorer Award
(Manitoba Book of the Year Awards)
• Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award
ABOUT THE BOOK
Canadians get wind of it sometime after 3 PM — Pierre Elliott Trudeau is dead. And while the country wallows in its solemn dirge, the news thrusts Venus, a 50-something woman -- suddenly, unexpectedly -- back in time through memories of a past affair, including an extended flashback to 1968 at the height of Trudeaumania. Montreal, still pumped and aglow from Expo ’67, is the Paris of North America and an exhilarating backdrop for passion and the imagination.
Satie's Sad Piano is about that world—a little less grey, a little less safe. It is about putting all your eggs in one basket and going for broke, about risking everything for your one chance at living all the way up. It is about living.
COMMENTARY / REVIEWS
Reviewed by Bert Almon
for The Montreal Review of Books
Carolyn Marie Souaid is a thoroughly serious writer: centric, not eccentric, and eager to confront the key issues of Canadian society. Satie’s Sad Piano is a civic elegy in the tradition of Dennis Lee, a poem exploring Canada’s uncertain destiny. She begins with the announcement of the death of Pierre Trudeau on September 28, 2000. The broadcast triggers the memories of a failed love affair in the protagonist, Venus, who became involved with a charismatic teacher and poet in 1968, the year of Trudeau’s election. The symbolic name given to the protagonist has its source in Romeo and Juliet : “Venus smiles not in a house of tears.” The repressions of a Catholic girlhood and adolescence lived just before the Quiet Revolution changed Quebec give a special edginess to Venus’s rebellious commitment to the body.
Souaid finds tropes as clever as Solway’s to describe physical desire: “her filly slit weeping / warm champagne.” Venus encounters not a true love of her own age but a “Charlie Manson of Letters” who doesn’t scruple to become involved with her: abuse of trust we’d call it now. Their affair is associated with the outburst of Trudeaumania in the 1968 election. It was, after all, the 1960s, and a politician with the charisma of a pop star was briefly conceivable. Souaid knows that Trudeau was more than a momentary celebrity, and she captures the power and the flaws of his hubristic personality. The failure of Venus’s affair and the abortion of her baby parallel the failure of Trudeau’s affair with his country. In both cases, the stormy overture dwindles into the oddities symbolized by Satie’s sad little piano pieces. It may seem odd for a poet to use a love affair as an analogue with Trudeau’s political career, but then Trudeau’s own private life became painfully public. Considering that Souaid was about nine when Trudeaumania swept Canada, she has captured the era very accurately. Souaid doesn’t rely exclusively on storytelling: she deploys rhyme subtly, her use of alliteration and consonance can be startling, and her images are powerful and original. This is a book that will engage its readers stylistically, emotionally, and perhaps even politically.
--Bert Almon teaches modern literature and creative writing at the University of Alberta
* * *
Sunday, August 21, 2005
The Halifax Herald
GOODISON, SOUAID GIVE NATIONS VOICES
By George Elliott Clarke
Today I'm in Turkey and Abo, Finland, but by Sunday, when this column appears, I'll be in Old Scotland, antique Scotia, and thinking, no doubt, about New Scotia, Nouvelle Scotland . . . I'm here in Finland to discuss the idea of Canada being "post-national." But I wonder if the concept is sound: Aren't we still trying to be a nation?
Two poets articulate brilliantly the effort, the dream, of being voices for a nation, but only the non-Canadian one can achieve this end unquestionably.
Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, in her latest book, Controlling the Silver (University of Illinois Press, paperback, 120 pages, $17.94), extends her career-making objective of singing Jamaica, and all things and beings Jamaican. She combines family history, national history and natural history to discourse credibly and incredibly on the essence and experience of her nation.
But it's tougher for Canadians - English-Canadians - to be 'national' poets, 'national' voices. Few have even bothered - see E.J. Pratt, Al Purdy and Earle Birney - as the major, semi-successful examples.
It seems the country's too big, the accents too varied, the regions too particular (and peculiar) to allow any one imagination to articulate the whole.
(Indeed, it's artists, musicians and politicians who came closest to expressing a vision of the whole nation. Since Trudeau, our lawyer-politicians must all wear buckskin jackets.)
But Carolyn Marie Souaid's fourth collection of poetry, Satie's Sad Piano (Signature Editions, paperback, 112 pages, $14.95) is a fine achievement in attempting to explain the importance of Pierre Elliott Trudeau - and his passing, five years ago - for the national imagination.
A bilingual Quebecoise who writes in English, Souaid enjoys some advantages in taking on a character as complex as Trudeau.
But she makes things even more complex by writing a narrative that involves a 50-something woman who, upon learning of Trudeau's death, remembers a painful romance, the heady days of Trudeaumania (Canada's version of France's May '68), and a Quebec - and women - intent on emancipation.
Souaid even enlists the voices of characters as unusual as Radio, Mont-Royal and a modern apostle.
This long poem is perhaps the first serious effort to encompass the nation since Dennie Lee's problematically Ontario centric/Torontonian Civil Elegies appeared in 1868 and 1972.
Souaid imagines Trudeau in deft, crisp images: "We desired a God, bedrock, the model/Spartan, mind and muscle/armed for calamity, //insurrection. Which arrived ubiquitously/in the guise of poetry: metred clash /of line and space. Carnage/in virgin country."
On Election Eve 1968, as Quebecois rabble-rousers pelted politicians with pop bottles and rocks in Montreal, Trudeau was the only one to stay on the podium and shake his fist at the protesters. Thus was his first majority government born.
Souaid writes, "This is how he came to us: cool, detached. With unblinking panache. //Heavens cocktailed with Molotov."
Souaid's Trudeau "knew how to win, but mostly/how to fight. . . . A man of letters, too./Homer with a mean streak." Yes, and stiff-upper-lip Franco - "British until the bitter end."
Her Maggie sees her future husband" at the epicenter, the sun, in shambles, pivoting/breathlessly around him.// Genius? Philosopher?// Mountains, he'd said, gravitated to him/in dreams.
Likewise, Souaid's woman character remembers a lover just as dangerous, dramatically "charismatic. Stringing me along a new and dangerous arc."
Her relationship entails an abortion - and this event is not unlike the strained relationship between Trudeau and Canada: We wanted him to be more than he wanted to be - and so he failed. But he had the humility to understand that Canada is greater than any Canadian: the wilderness dwarfs us.
Just as Souaid's heroine cannot find lasting happiness. With her mate, so did we - all of us - fail to create the Just Society that Trudeau called us to contemplate in 1968. (Which is not to say that we should quit trying.)
Lorna Goodison's paeans to Jamaica are easier to compose: there is only one Jamaica and one Jamaican history - as opposed to the endless number of Canadas that Canadians may consider: French, English, aboriginal - and that's just for starters.
In Jah the Baptist, Goodison domesticates Greek scripture, recalling that, in material Bible stories, "John the Baptist was dread righteous Rastaman," who preached, "Strive not to imitate Babylon, become your own man and woman.
"Before he baptized with the waters of clear insight, hard-case words of locust musk kicked off his tongue."
Goodison remembers, too, Jamaica's birth in slaverys "You have the eye, from the foothills you can/discern the washed bones of many million// drowned on the Atlantic side, where long-meter waves hexameter swell . . ."
Maybe this is what English-Canadian poets need - as Souaid knows - a commanding vision of our own history.
--George Elliott Clarke, a Nova Scotia-born author and poet, teaches literature at the University of Toronto. In 2001, he won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
* * *
Jury Citation / Pat Lowther Memorial Award (2006)
The jury says: "Carolyn Marie Souaid's book-length poem, Satie's Sad Piano, revivifies Trudeaumania's Montreal 1968 and that of millenial 2000, the year of Trudeau's death. She accomplishes this through a novel cast of characters, including a free-wheeling Apostle and Mont Royal, "a mountain with a view." Her poetry rings of Erik Satie's music in its avant-garde inventions and in its symphonic love chronicles, whose Maggie-Pierre and Venus-Lover pairs echo composer Satie's own tumultuous liaison. Souaid's long poem is a masterpiece of consistently heightened, jazzy, and passionate language. It dares risk, in poetry and in life."
EXCERPTS:
everything points to your
absence:
dimmed tail lights of cars & outgoing geese
the grim, subtracted leaves
a bristled, Andean chill to the air
you on exotic soil
–I, exiled
in the long, wan shade
of home
metaphors not of sadness, really
but of the enormity
of unneeding you
this late in the afternoon
* * *
How we become what we become in this life,
I wonder. How many grey newsreel images
are cushioned in the archival cortex?
Waiting to be categorized.
Who knows, beyond doubt, what enticed him,
what lured him to look beyond the immediate:
hallways forking into hallways, a meander
through Mesopotamia, whatever sprang to mind
when he opened Plato or Aristotle.
Perhaps the things he saw as a boy
staring onto Durocher: the universe
between the seeded grass
and the infinite sky.
Look hard enough, you’ll find it.
The silver pulse through a restless pond.
A robin winking from the foxglove
after its elated flight through space.
Of course, there’s the other theory, too.
That he’d always gone against the grain,
a born wayfarer forever negotiating
the impossible road
between colour-plated reality
and the fantastic.
* * *
We desired a god, bedrock, the model
Spartan, mind and muscle
armed for calamity,
insurrection. Which arrived ubiquitously
in the guise of poetry: metred clash
of line and space. Carnage
in virgin country.
Election eve, 1968, televised.
Silence bludgeoned with crowbars
and bats and the Latinate yelp of blood:
Death to the hypocrite!
Maudit traître!
This is how he came to us: cool, detached.
With unblinking panache.
Heavens cocktailed with Molotov.
This, especially, about him:
his carnivorous, adversarial dance.
Centre stage, despite the hissing
soda just missing him
by the bare length of a javelin.
Who knew how to win, but mostly
how to fight the fight. A man of letters, too.
Homer with a mean streak.
Shrugging off victory, applause,
with shy but stately precision.
British until the bitter end.
Evening, in ruins, at his feet.
Strewn with the gurglings of loss,
his shattered opponents, down.
