A. Garnett Weiss (JC Sulzenko), Life, after life—from epitaph to epilogue (Aeolus House, 2024).

JC Sulzenko’s Life, after life presents sixty new short poems. The handsome volume features a striking painting by Martin Soldat on the cover and is generously laid out, with just one poem per page.

The white space surrounding the words affects the reader’s approach. Much like a haiku, or, another Japanese form explicitly invoked in their structure, the tanka, each poem renders a mood, or a moment, rarely making a direct statement, sometimes not even a complete sentence. The reader is left to make sense of the elements on offer in each poem and to ask after their coherence.

Sound patterns may guide us, like the alliterations and interplay of short vowels and long in “Current Magic”:

Under the auspices of energy,
a starlit hymn
in the arms of lightning

turned diamond force
into a sunrise.

The poem invites us to hear its image of light by playing the attenuated quiet of the vowels of “starlit hymn” against the vigorous “diamond force.”

There are recurrent images among the poems — natural phenomena, such as stars, gardens, or flowers, children, books and storytelling, and abstractions, such as grace, justice, community.

Each poem is just five lines, in a three-plus-two structure that delivers a kind of resolution to its enigma, setting up a sensual image, and offering a meaning, as in “Drive Deep”:

On a northern road at daylight —
marbled colour gathering
at boundaries of the horizon,

the quiet revered, held close,
gentle as salvation.

These poems achieve their effect without fanfare, both individually and as a collection.

But there is something I haven’t told you yet. There is a game afoot in these poems.

All art functions by constraint. There are rules. Some are handed down by tradition. A symphony is not a sonata; nor can a sonnet be a ballad. Formal expectations require an artist to work within boundaries. A poet’s achievement comes from making her statement without breaking the rules.

A more modern version of the rules is for the poet to set her own constraints, as is the case here. Following a modern poetic movement known as “found poetry,” the poems in Life, after life take their phrases from another source, and reorganize them to make their own statements. 

The author tells us the rules in the preface: “Every poem … takes words and phrases, unaltered, from death notices and obituary articles published on a single day in the Toronto Globe and Mail over a six-year period.”

This constraint, limiting one’s choice of words to an arbitrary source, may account for the enigmatic nature of the poems. But knowing the nature of the source influences our understanding of the poetry. The words and phrases do not point only to their own context, but also invoke lives lived, as an obituary does. To know that the phrase “a village / where everybody walked to school” is not (only) a poetical fancy, but a description of a real person, now no longer with us, and their experiences, makes the lines on the page resonate.

As the poet describes her process, “I wait with this harvest of words until they suggest a poem, distilled and derived from its sources, yet also distant from them.”

The poem “Gifted” is a striking composition on its own. But knowing its words are taken from the commemorations of eleven different people found in the Globe and Mail of 4 April, 2017, can only make us wonder about the lives described in this language:

Children loved being on the front porch,
the carnival unfolding
the fast-talking patter of an artist

entertaining in a large circle
with nuggets of truth in his hands.

This is a coherent image, the metaphor complete. And yet, we wonder, whose life contained a memory of carnival, whose of fast-talking patter, and, whose of nuggets — and were they “of truth”?

The poet, herself displaced under a pen name, offers the memorialized a life after life. The words themselves have been freed from their context, but necessarily bear with them their origin. It is both, as the final poem puts it, “the commonplace lost to ingenuity,” and “thoughtful lessons / a free mind trusted.”

Life, after life is at Books&Company.