Dislocations, the fourth collection by Canadian poet Karen Enns (Cloud Physics) and part of the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series, skillfully evokes a rural upbringing and revels in the beauty of nature and music. The book opens on a still life of horse fields: "From here, the farm could be a map/ or a gameboard of neat squares./ Each square, fenced in, holds one horse,/ each horse has one trough, one blanket/ against the January cold." The alliteration and repetition form a calming chant. Sibilance and soothing rhythms carry throughout the volume. The multi-part "East of Here" spins scenes from Enns's growing-up years in Ontario. She remembers the hard domestic work of local Mennonites ("the shoes are polished,/ the Sunday shirts ironed and hung,/ the bread baked, the gardens hoed") and a wake she attended at age nine ("her last resting, her thin hands folded on her chest,/ the skirt close at her ankles, the black shoes tied,/ her good blouse").
"Ten Dislocations," yearning for knowledge and mourning losses, offers a contrast to earlier poems with its short stanzas and fragmentary phrases. One of its aphorisms could encapsulate the entire collection: "The ratio of love to grief/ we understood as music." Music and the natural world counterbalance sadness in "Piano Masterclass: Twenty-One Études" (Enns is a former classical pianist) and "Plateau," where trees are "mystics cowled with moss." Geese and sparrows fly through multiple poems. Updating the pastoral tradition, the bittersweet verse takes solace in music, nature, and the past. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck