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Two Bowls of Milk
The poems of Stephanie Bolster’s second collection move with delicacy and power, whether focussing on a flock of snow geese on a flooded plain, on the paintings of Jean Paul Lemieux, or on two wasps in a Pepsi can on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These intimate acts of language create a space infused with stillness and an edgy expectation. Here is a poetry of engagement and mystery, in which truth is found in seepage and the bowls of milk the colour of milk; the two facing human profiles forming between them the shape of a vase. This volume sketches a clear, unwavering arc through poems sometimes raw and painful, but always exquisite, and, ultimately, transformative. Two Bowls of Milk confirms Stephanie Bolster as one of the most gifted new poets in Canada today.
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 3, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 27, 2022
This dome opened
the year of my birth.
My whole life stands
on this wooden bridge, arched
over water.
Below, plump and golden
fish ripen.
Foliage, hushed as silk, encroaches.
* * *
Are two bowls of milk. They are round
and white and have nothing to do
with the moon. They have no implications
of blindness, or sight. They wait
on the doorstep like bowls
or like things that closely resemble
bowls in their stillness. The bowls do not
foreshadow cats. There are two
because two hands set them out
and each wanted to hold something.
Milk because not water. The curve of
milk against the curve of bowl.
* * *
Too many hours beside him on the bed are never enough.
Outside is the sun's old light, inside its dim reaches.
The bleached hills out the window
are not Crete. Heat is an indoor pleasure,
snow heaped in the courtyard over the balançoire.
She dreams alien neighbours and wakes to their footsteps.
Easier even than the warmth of his sleep
in her own tunnelling in. Her skin wall-white
as though she's seen something terrible.
* * *
Here a glimpse of soaring blue: her scarf,
flicker of summer maples against river.
This Madeleine you've married, will she
make you remember who you were
before cold weather? With grace her sun-
burned neck bends to the view you paint
her into. This morning she laid aside
her brush to make your lunch
and has not picked it up again.
(Before your death she'll speak
of sacrifice as though it were a pool,
blood-warm, and I will read her archived
words, furious in winter.) Whose
choice was this? Though you
believed her praising eye alone
kept your canvases alive, you killed
the part of her that could have lit you.
Love bends me in more resistant shapes;
my neck cracks like ice. I would not give you
a shred of blue, my own too few and far.
* * *
In childhood I dreamt I would be in such a still place.
These plants were never pulled from actual
earth, they were always here under pebbled light.
Their leaves are green and paler green, and flowers
bloom an antiseptic pink in rows. Painted,
this wold be more than real. Itself, it's less,
a simulation copied from no thing. And I?
What air is here is thin, held under a bell jar.
In the dream, goldfish the colour of blossoms
were under a bridge under a sky, it was a good place.
the year of my birth.
My whole life stands
on this wooden bridge, arched
over water.
Below, plump and golden
fish ripen.
Foliage, hushed as silk, encroaches.
- Life and Death in the Conservatory, pg. 6
* * *
Are two bowls of milk. They are round
and white and have nothing to do
with the moon. They have no implications
of blindness, or sight. They wait
on the doorstep like bowls
or like things that closely resemble
bowls in their stillness. The bowls do not
foreshadow cats. There are two
because two hands set them out
and each wanted to hold something.
Milk because not water. The curve of
milk against the curve of bowl.
- Two Bowls of Milk, pg. 19
* * *
Too many hours beside him on the bed are never enough.
Outside is the sun's old light, inside its dim reaches.
The bleached hills out the window
are not Crete. Heat is an indoor pleasure,
snow heaped in the courtyard over the balançoire.
She dreams alien neighbours and wakes to their footsteps.
Easier even than the warmth of his sleep
in her own tunnelling in. Her skin wall-white
as though she's seen something terrible.
- Noons, pg. 34
* * *
Here a glimpse of soaring blue: her scarf,
flicker of summer maples against river.
This Madeleine you've married, will she
make you remember who you were
before cold weather? With grace her sun-
burned neck bends to the view you paint
her into. This morning she laid aside
her brush to make your lunch
and has not picked it up again.
(Before your death she'll speak
of sacrifice as though it were a pool,
blood-warm, and I will read her archived
words, furious in winter.) Whose
choice was this? Though you
believed her praising eye alone
kept your canvases alive, you killed
the part of her that could have lit you.
Love bends me in more resistant shapes;
my neck cracks like ice. I would not give you
a shred of blue, my own too few and far.
- Les Beaux Jours (1937), pg. 42
* * *
In childhood I dreamt I would be in such a still place.
These plants were never pulled from actual
earth, they were always here under pebbled light.
Their leaves are green and paler green, and flowers
bloom an antiseptic pink in rows. Painted,
this wold be more than real. Itself, it's less,
a simulation copied from no thing. And I?
What air is here is thin, held under a bell jar.
In the dream, goldfish the colour of blossoms
were under a bridge under a sky, it was a good place.
- Garden Court, pg. 64
February 4, 2023
I understood or relished the sound of the language on only a few pages of this collection with its beautiful cover which given Stephanie Bolster’s reputation may say more about me than the poetry.
February 27, 2023
This collection has two of my favorite poems ever. However, the second part is all about ekphrasis, a genre I loathe.
September 11, 2024
A solid collection from a good Canadian poet. The artist and painting poems means you will need this book when you travel to the National Gallery of Canada.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews