Wells

by Jenna Butler

Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother’s disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in long poem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman’s life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman’s granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of identities: of she’s and I’s. Few poets could execute this with convincing solemnity, while simultaneously recovering the dignity of the sufferer and her loved ones. Butler does. Poetry lovers, critics and scholars, and readers who crave a deft style charged with honest emotion should read Wells.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

Jenna Butler is an award-winning poet and essayist whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies around the world. She is the author of three books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road (NeWest Press 2013), Wells (University of Alberta Press 2012) and Aphelion (NeWest Press 2010). Her book of essays is A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail (Wolsak and Wynn, 2015), and her latest work is the poetic travelogue Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard (University of Alberta Press, 2018).

Butler is a professor of Creative Writing and Ecocriticism at Red Deer College in Canada. She lives with a den of coyotes and three resident moose on an organic farm in Alberta's north country.

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful homage to a grandmother through starling verse.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wells is divided into eight parts: "Wells", "Flight", "Garden", "Home", "Grain", "He", "& She", and "Flesh"...

from "Wells"...

1

The north sea speaks carefully around a mouthful of flints.

The beach is a buzzard feast, salted carnage. Miles upon miles
of razor clams, caught by the headland, butterfly open under a
cacophony of gulls. This is not the image you had held of this
place, but it is right, if ironic. Memory has pinioned this beach
as a place of calm; a dimly-recalled mother in housedress and
cardigan, pockets bulging with hoarded stones, walking through
the surf. At home, a telegram she had not allowed you to see,
detailing the loss of your older brother at Normandy. Sitting on
the beach in wellies and bathing suit, you wonder if she might
not walk out into the sea. She was already weighted down with
stones; it wouldn't have been much of a stretch. And she might
have done, with greater impact. As it is, you have no recollection
of her disappearance from memory. Her image simply filmed
over like a dimming eye; sank cleanly and without fuss.

Out from the shelter of the pine woods, the wind along the tide
line scours the lungs with unceremonious brutality. Sandwiches
and tabbouleh in the beach bag over your shoulder, the smell of
mint leaking from the Tupperware. On an ideal day, you'd slip
out of your sandals and test the water with false bravado, feet
so slim and pale they hurt to look at. Today, though, doing so
would be risking excoriation; clams pock the sand like chipped
teeth, fragments from a war you knew nothing about.

- pg. 2

from "Flight"...

1

Sometimes I get through the day solely because there are birds.

* * *

2

Spring months, sky clocking almost blue. Over the salt marshes, a
linnet in aerobatic flight, it's song paling like rain. Transitory as the
moon, whimbrels on stilt legs, their fluted bills and panpipe call.

April, and you have left me in every way but flesh. There are grasshopper
warbles nesting in the old flint quarry, their namesake silver thrum
flashing from the bracken. Sound of neurons misfiring; beyond
language, the tone of the body leaving itself. Ventriloquial. Wherever
you are, be somewhere else.

- pg. 10-11

from "Garden"...

1

You father, cheerful in worsted and Donegal tweed, spade cocked
over one shoulder, taught you all he knew of earth.

* * *

2

Larkspur, he named, its ultraviolet bells agog with bees. Love-in-a-
mist, punch of blue in a jacksnipe of prickles.

* * *

3

His favourite was none of these. At the bottom of the garden, half
hidden amongst the nettles, rose rhubarb-like plumes of green
flowers. Mignonette, he named them, tapping the stems with a stick.
The scent, piercingly sweet and sudden, threatened to break open
the world.

- pg. 18-20

from "Home"...

1

Home was only a word, a small box bursting at the edges with an
idea too big to be contained. What spoke to you of home in this
place once were the scents. The narcissus in brilliant, fragrant drifts
outside the kitchen window, strung along the foot of the yew hedge
like fairy lights. The rose garden you planted outside the coal shed
after the War, as though with every blossom's emergence, you could
force the depravity of those years outside the bounds of memory.

- pg. 26

from "Grain"...

1

Stay out of the barley during August, they warned, when the stalks grow tight
and tall and you cannot see the ground.

* * *

2

Should have known better. Should have known that forbidden is as
good as daring to children who have lived all their lives within sight
of barley fields. Children who have lain on their backs under dryhusk
curtains of golden heads, sky tessellated with barley beards. Under
their skin, June-gold light, echoes of men working the thresher
crews up in the high field. Between their teeth, bitter, hard grains,
somehow more real than any summer fruit.

- pg. 34-35

from "He"...

1

smelt of pipesmoke and peat, sour waft of whiskey sweat, rich scent
of earth. Out hunting with the fieldworkers, he was sent downwind
where the rabbits could not get the breeze off him, his jacket
redolent of Black Cut Cavendish.

Your mother hounded him for it, but he was never without that pipe,
tight-grained cherry burl, tamped down hard and scarcely gleaming.
His lapels shingled with ash.

Twice, he flushed a kettle of hawks from the scrub on a turning wind.
A sudden, vagrant breeze; the grass underfoot exploding into flight.

- pg. 42

from "& She"...

1

had a tongue like a whipcrack, upstart Catherine wheel. She was the
only woman you ever knew who could make tone into epithet; after
the Wars, the only one who could reach into your father and jerk him
back out of himself. Clack of internal monologue cracking its spine.
His eyes interrupted, verdigris with fury.

Grateful.

- pg. 50

from "Flesh"...

1

Corset.

Crinoline.

Petticoat.

Girdle.

Stockings. (Silk, if you saved for them. Nylon, during the War.)

Buttons. (In their hundreds, hard enough to bruise fingertips,
appetites. Pearl.)

- pg. 58

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful

[Colleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous! I'll be doing a video review but in the mean time, I highly recommend you read this work from the favorite of all my past English teacher's. I was lucky enough to notice a few copies at the bookshop I work at so I read this on my lunch break. I will, however, be buying a copy.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous language.

[Stan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was okay, but I liked her earlier book better.