![]() ![]() I was alone when my government let me down.’ (71) She said: ‘I thought my government would back me up. The matter was only resolved when Mohamud belatedly took a DNA test which proved she was telling the truth: It doesn’t take long before your find thatįeatures more fitting for the guilty (71) Have you ever been interrogated at an airport? Using her characteristic second person voice, Smith invites us to consider what the experience was like for Mohamud: Although she gave convincing evidence of her identity, the Canadian authorities would not accept that she was telling the truth, and she was unable to return to Canada for several months. She visited relatives in Kenya, but Canadian officials would not let her board the plane home to Toronto because they said she did not look like her passport photo in particular, they claimed that “the lips are different”. From the notes to the poem, we learn that “The Lips Are Different” concerns Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Somali-born woman who migrated to Canada and became a Canadian citizen. The poem heads the fourth section of the book, “passport without destiny”, texts that use themes of migration, surveillance, and racial discrimination to explore the complex matter of identity. While there are many ways of reading Ecliptical, we might choose to go straight to one of its richest texts, “The Lips Are Different”, and plunge into the linked multimedia version, a collaboration with Roger Dean performed by austraLYSIS. The feet are at once suggestive of the winged figure of myth, Mercury, and the traveler of great distances, coming thankfully to rest.Ī welcome feature of the e-book is the inclusion (in the Notes) of URLs linking audio and multimedia versions of four of the print texts in the volume. The abstract idea of orbiting vast space exhilarates while the experience of the traveler, captured in those eloquent feet, anchors us in materiality, which we must negotiate. The cover of Ecliptical, which features the artwork “Becoming” by Sieglinde Karl-Spence, figures the experience ahead for the reader. As always in Smith’s work, the creative tension between abstraction and representation engages us vigorously through multiple levels of apprehension. Our role is defined in one of the “bullet point” poems in the volume: “for enjoying music, you are more of a performer than a listener” (“Emergent Emergencies” 24). ![]() The poet’s project is to propel earthly dwellers on paths we cannot immediately discern but must help to carve out. ![]() For the Earth-bound watcher, in the course of a year, “the sun’s apparent path through the sky lies in this plane” (nasa. The title evokes the ecliptic plane, “the imaginary plane containing the Earth’s orbit around the sun”. Attractively produced in both print and electronic formats, the book offers a journey through linguistic, sonic, and visual worlds. Hazel Smith’s latest volume of poems, Ecliptical, engages us in several ways. ![]()
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