If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You by Adèle Barclay, reviewed by Mahy Arafa
If you choose to read Canadian author Adèle Barclay’s debut collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, prepare yourself for a journey back in time inspired by the supernatural, the occult, witchcraft, tarot cards, and Canadiana and Americana mythology, combined with intimacy, love, desire, and closeness. In her first poem, “Dear Sara,” the poet asks “Where are our time machines?” This question primes the readers for the poems that follow which act as a time machine, jumping through time and space. For instance, in her first two poems she deftly moves from “slick jaws/of Brooklyn” to small-town Ontario, where “a grunge trio’s name/references Alice Munro.” Barclay’s specific references give the reader a sense of familiarity amidst the travels through time and place. Barclay also plays with time within a single poem. For instance, the five parts of “Dear Sara,” span several generations to highlight the struggles of each time period.
In an interview with The Fiddlehead Magazine, Barclay explains, “My approach to tone in prose is heavily influenced by my impulses as a poet: a mood, feeling, or ineffable idea drives me to gather a collection of objects, sensory experiences, and cultural references to circle around it. I need to be able to see and smell and touch the world I'm writing about.” In other words, she writes with the intent to defy her expectations, following instinct and impulse rather than fixed forms and structures. A prime example is the poem “Testament Scratched into a Water Station Barrel by Eduardo C. Corral.” The line breaks are unpredictable and each line makes unintuitive yet fascinating connections. “The faucet/is a siren, the pipes freeze a rusted melody,” followed by “I’ve/turned Saturn/in my mouth/like an olive pit” are great instances in which the reader’s expectations are altered. It's almost as if Barclay is a witch performing magic and revealing to her disciple (reader) the trick step by step (line by line).
The materialistic and sensory elements that inspire Barclay are evident in her collection. In speaking of her writing process with Open Book Magazine, Barclay says: “I don't plan out poems, and I definitely do write from an intuitive place. Sometimes poems swerve in directions I didn't anticipate. And yet I often feel like a lot of these things exist as ideas or even sensations that are percolating or ambiently swirling around in my poet brain. The writing distills them.” This surprising, sensory imagery is especially prominent in “Suburban Sonnet,” a free-verse poem with a frenzied form and a piling of adjectives and comparisons. Barclay’s metaphors are unexpected and beautiful: “drunk as a busted patio umbrella blackberry/barbs the crank of old bike chains up anthills;” “silver creeks swallowed the highway’s shoulder;” and “hive-mind engines hum in the shallow of the night.”
The poem “Dear Sara II” is a remarkable piece in which all of Barclay’s techniques and themes intersect:
Dear Sara II
The witches of Bushwick ward off night
terrors
with warming spells, 72 Fahrenheit
in November. You frown and sleep
for days in my borrowed room. I circle the
bed
with diatomaceous earth, fill three cups
with water,
plait my black hair. We hang at a rabbit
hole
in the West Village, mirror Schiele—
twisted knuckles seize a dark aura, flecks
of silver
in the skirt. MoMA PS1 makes you hate art
and give up smoking. Fish heart, bones
within bones, hangnails and turmeric.
I wrap my right arm around your belly
and swat our nightmares with my left.
Sara, nothing like ambition or sanity
matters
because at Saint John the Divine
phoenixes baptized in rust swoop
from the cathedral’s ceiling.
The beasts stopped a whole city block
for a week last winter. Priests carted scrap
metal
off trucks and hoisted them up,
engineers determined how to best salvage
the holy arches from added weight,
and leashed tigers paraded in to pray
under the great hall’s open lungs.
With the indented, one word lines, Barclay creates a disrupted form that embodies the chaos of time. That being said, Barclay includes details that help guide the reader through the chaos. The poet speaker mentions MoMA PS1 to indicate a time-lapse and November, to mark the season and create a certain coldness. The one-word poetic lines also serve to usurp the reader's expectations, one of Barclay’s favorite techniques. The themes of religion, witchcraft, and the occult are prevalent throughout this poem with the imagery of cathedrals, baptism, priests, holiness, witches, nightmares, fish hearts, and bones. Barclay’s poetry desperately attempts to connect with the reader over distances while embracing ambiguity and encrypted messages in need of deciphering. Indeed, the young poet confesses to Open Book Magazine, “I'm not too interested in the reader needing to understand the private language of the epistolary mode in order to engage with the poem—just like I'm not concerned about trying to decipher or unlock a poem in general. The mystery is part of the magic. What's compelling to me about the epistolary mode is the heat released with this merging of feeling and form.”
Though Barclay thrusts the reader into different places and time periods, she grounds each poem with concrete indicators of the geographic location and time in history. The title of the collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, informs our reading of these poems: in each distinct setting, the poet speaker is willing to reach out with all their strength to connect to humanity, even if restricted by a cage. The humorous voice of the narrator is relatable and familiar, almost like talking to someone you know well. Through the reverence and mystique of her lively descriptions, Barclay creates the illusion of traveling back in time while diving into themes of millennial anxieties and magic.
If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You by Adèle Barclay
Nightwood Editions. 2017. 96 pages
