What do you think?
Rate this book
Siren
Siren, Kateri Lanthier’s astonishing second book, calls us to attention. In her search for what she calls “compelling melancholy,” Lanthier’s new poems not only draw on the ghazal's history as love poetry but remind readers of the dangerous and alluring quality of the ancient form itself. The siren was a lethal yet seductive figure, and that sense of power—and as well as her fast-taking bemusement at her own reputation—is present in lines that marry unnerving dream logic to emotional fearlessness. Siren is an uncompromising achievement: an original style at once mysterious, witty and musical that refines and clarifies the world in consistently surprising ways." Call it playing with fire. Call it connect-the-dots lightning."
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2017
1 person is currently reading
22 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 10, 2017
The language play in this volume makes me shiver. Kateri has a true gift with playing with metaphors and saying something new by twisting things just a bit. It's a gorgeous collection filled with vivid emotion.
February 7, 2021
There’s something extravagant and baroque about the poetry of Kateri Lanthier. In the contemporary Canadian poetry scene her lush, alluringly sensual, yet dark and vaguely disturbing imagination makes her appear almost like an exotic outsider.
Siren, Lanthier’s new book of poetry, is published by the independent Montreal publishers, Véhicule Press. It’s quite different in tone and spirit from her previous collection – 2011’s Reporting from Night. That book was generally lighter in tone and more flickeringly ephemeral. It required careful attention before the reader could tune into the light touch, limpid imagery, and play of sounds in its poems. Both books are filled with wit. However, Reporting from Night's word play was far more pronounced and self-conscious.
In the 2011 collection Lanthier combined domestic scenes with the fantastic. "In Arcadia," one of the book’s high points, is comprised out of alluring dark memories and histories of Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. The poem’s wit and language achieved a perfectly pitched tone at once melancholy, wry, and self-mocking:
Where are the radical summers?
The fashions are back.
Platform shoes raise the idealistic
a few inches above the pavement.
Shoulders and hair slump
in eco gloom.
I recall the thunder of Riders on the Storm
in the submarine-schoolbus of hippie camp.
Felt pens for never-finished mandal posters,
paper sunbursts, fingers implicated
by indigo tie-dy.
The agit-prop of story-book theatre.
Et in Arcadia ego.
Ergo…
"Oscar Wilde at the City Auditorium" is another standout. It contains allusions to the Wilde play Salomé, and is at once elusive, dark-toned, suggestive, ambiguous, and yet also admirably understated:
She won’t go in.
She will wear a porcupine quill
behind one ear, or prick a finger to let fall
a red drop on the red floor of pine.
Her secrets are scrolled in birchbark,
posted in the rose bed to an underground province.
An emerald moth has flattened itself on the window
like a set of poisoned lungs.
Reporting from the Night did hit some wrong notes though. Not all of the poems achieve the intensity and coherence of the stronger poems mentioned above. Sometimes the book’s use of the second-person left the impression of being far too ready-made and a little too reminiscent of the default lyrical mode to be found in a lot of contemporary poetry. And at times the collection’s light narrative arcs were a little too coy, the word play a little too precious.
Overall, though, Reporting from the Night’s accumulated impressions conveyed an intensity and complexity of tone that is rare in contemporary poetry.
In Siren, we recognise the same allure of dark memories that we found in the best poems of the earlier collection. But Siren is a lot more ambitious in poetic technique and scope. Though more challenging, the poems in this collection are on the whole more pleasing and finished. Siren is notable for some of the clever things that the poet does with the traditional ghazal form. “My Red Hair,” for instance, provides an example of the way in which Lanthier seems to have made the form her own, making it answer to her particular needs and worldview: “Was it ’70s film stock that first lit the flare? / Blonde-haired babe, auburn kid. Now I choose my red hair. / Small-screen siren comedienne, curled-lip long-stemmed rose. / Unbeliever! Fingers fire-walk through my red hair.”
The ghazal is traditionally composed of five to fifteen couplets, with each of the couplets containing a structurally, thematically, and emotionally self-contained thought. This partly accounts for the form’s intellectual suppleness – as it seems to leap from one image to another – as well as its simultaneous formal control.
The final couplet typically contains the author’s signature, referring to the poet in the first or third person, and often includes a play on the poet’s name. Lanthier’s humorous variation of this is to present us with what seems to be her nickname – “Red Kat, October poet, you’re not immortal Red Tara” – and a repetition of the poem’s refrain – “The fire in snow, the flash in opal: my red hair.”
"Fashion Advice for Eternity" is a good example of Lanthier’s chief poetic strengths – a facility with dense, multi-levelled imagery, a mythological richness, sensuality, humour, and a deft musicality:
The Zuni jeweller takes a fingertip of shards
from a surgeon’s tray of stars
and sets a miniature Thunderbird, Knachina dancer,
Knifewing, Roadrunner, face of the Sun
in spiny oyster, abalone, turquoise, onyx night
ringed by silver kicked from a horse’s hoof
on your finger, by your breastbone, at your ear.
"Guanyin Lamp" and "Emerald Table" both show examples of Lanthier at her most ambitious and cleverly allusive. In “Guanyin Lamp” she takes on the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy Guan Yin: “Here’s the boy, the girl, faces stroked by your robe. / You’re a hollow never filled / And your face is serene.”
Though the poem strives to draw the deity within the ambit of modern life and modern Western concerns, it doesn’t quite seem emotionally convincing: “All the cries of the world! Something to sell, swallow, sorrow. /
Your uncontrolled kindness / Rains on the void.”
In "Emerald Lamp," Lanthier weaves a mystical meditation on love, artistic conception, and loss: “You fanned my hair in red-gold rays. Bull’s-eye. In one. / Your aim was true. You wrote the code, set flame and fired from the sun, / An elegant sharpshooter.”
It reads like a weird yet strikingly beautiful visionary trance with explicit allusions to Hermetic philosophy and to Dante’s Inferno. Its language is reminiscent of Shelley’s and that of the sixteenth-century Hindu mystic poet Meera Bai. Beautiful though the poem may be, its attempts to combine these various elements does not seem to have been successfully resolved into a coherent whole.
There are several standout poems in the collection. "Those Pretty Wrongs" from Part Two of the book displays an inventiveness and sophistication in its conceits and imagery that is almost at an Elizabethan level: “ My pigeon-blood ruby, my travelling ruby, / my star-of-India found on the street. / I carry you in a fitted velvet case.”
Other standout poems – "The Year of La Jetee," "Night School", "Playmates", and "What Washes off, What Sticks" – are all characterised by their swiftness of thought and assured imagery.
However, the book’s final three poems are amongst its finest. "The Headless Long-Stemmed Rose on a Staircase in the Subway" draws together several of the book’s patterns of imagery and themes – Demeter’s journey to the underworld to search for her abducted daughter Persephone, the Sirens who were sent to look for Persephone, Orpheus’ journey to the underworld, memory, desire, the loss of desire, and the spectacle of the self.
The ghazal "To Kateri" echoes these patterns of imagery and theme. The poem’s speaker invokes the native American historical figure “Lily of the Mohawks,” Kateri Tekakwitha of Kanien’ke ha: ka. The speaker alludes to the various ways this figure has been mythologised – to suit the needs of the Catholic church, North American frontier heritage, and even Leonard Cohen. The speaker’s native American namesake connects the poet’s own personal history to the “Highway of Tears” murders of native women along Western Canada’s Highway 16 – “a continent-wide slash” – and to the long history of women talking to other women, and passing on memory. It is a melancholy and deeply moving poem that resonates on many levels – with the poet’s personal identity, women’s history, contemporary white Western guilt surrounding native cultures, and non-white, post-colonial feminine identity.
In "Only Rain," the final poem in the collection, the relatively simple imagery and strong narrative present an apt and powerful conclusion to the collection. The speaker is Demeter again and also a Siren: “I’ll be rushing, the way I do. Before the door slams. Half in love with vertigo. / You were the unforeseen, uninvited, un-be-lieve-able and now undoable.”
The speaker’s words recall a lost lover, a lost daughter, the depths of love, and the pain of love’s absence: “In the experiment, we are immersed in water. Left on twin hilltops. / Denied electricity. / How many seasons must I wait? This snow tests positive for / crystallized tears.”
This last poem conveys the powerful attractions and pleasures of desire. The speaker is held in place, torn apart, and yet remains powerful – “I could swim there in three strokes” – but she’s also weak since “Pleasure longs to drown, blacks out.”
The speaker is at once the ravished Leda and also the “swan on the bank, dropping red petals.” She is the abandoned lover and the agent of desire: “After you left I took / the hurricane inside. / When I spit it out, it’s only rain. For still temptation follows where thou art.”
The last line here alludes to “Those Pretty Wrongs,” an earlier poem in the collection. It is also a direct quote from the opening line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 41 – “Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits." The speaker communicates here once more the allure of dark memories and desire.
Siren is a very strong poetry collection that clearly underlines the extent of Kateri Lanthier’s growth and deepening as a poet.
Siren, Lanthier’s new book of poetry, is published by the independent Montreal publishers, Véhicule Press. It’s quite different in tone and spirit from her previous collection – 2011’s Reporting from Night. That book was generally lighter in tone and more flickeringly ephemeral. It required careful attention before the reader could tune into the light touch, limpid imagery, and play of sounds in its poems. Both books are filled with wit. However, Reporting from Night's word play was far more pronounced and self-conscious.
In the 2011 collection Lanthier combined domestic scenes with the fantastic. "In Arcadia," one of the book’s high points, is comprised out of alluring dark memories and histories of Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. The poem’s wit and language achieved a perfectly pitched tone at once melancholy, wry, and self-mocking:
Where are the radical summers?
The fashions are back.
Platform shoes raise the idealistic
a few inches above the pavement.
Shoulders and hair slump
in eco gloom.
I recall the thunder of Riders on the Storm
in the submarine-schoolbus of hippie camp.
Felt pens for never-finished mandal posters,
paper sunbursts, fingers implicated
by indigo tie-dy.
The agit-prop of story-book theatre.
Et in Arcadia ego.
Ergo…
"Oscar Wilde at the City Auditorium" is another standout. It contains allusions to the Wilde play Salomé, and is at once elusive, dark-toned, suggestive, ambiguous, and yet also admirably understated:
She won’t go in.
She will wear a porcupine quill
behind one ear, or prick a finger to let fall
a red drop on the red floor of pine.
Her secrets are scrolled in birchbark,
posted in the rose bed to an underground province.
An emerald moth has flattened itself on the window
like a set of poisoned lungs.
Reporting from the Night did hit some wrong notes though. Not all of the poems achieve the intensity and coherence of the stronger poems mentioned above. Sometimes the book’s use of the second-person left the impression of being far too ready-made and a little too reminiscent of the default lyrical mode to be found in a lot of contemporary poetry. And at times the collection’s light narrative arcs were a little too coy, the word play a little too precious.
Overall, though, Reporting from the Night’s accumulated impressions conveyed an intensity and complexity of tone that is rare in contemporary poetry.
In Siren, we recognise the same allure of dark memories that we found in the best poems of the earlier collection. But Siren is a lot more ambitious in poetic technique and scope. Though more challenging, the poems in this collection are on the whole more pleasing and finished. Siren is notable for some of the clever things that the poet does with the traditional ghazal form. “My Red Hair,” for instance, provides an example of the way in which Lanthier seems to have made the form her own, making it answer to her particular needs and worldview: “Was it ’70s film stock that first lit the flare? / Blonde-haired babe, auburn kid. Now I choose my red hair. / Small-screen siren comedienne, curled-lip long-stemmed rose. / Unbeliever! Fingers fire-walk through my red hair.”
The ghazal is traditionally composed of five to fifteen couplets, with each of the couplets containing a structurally, thematically, and emotionally self-contained thought. This partly accounts for the form’s intellectual suppleness – as it seems to leap from one image to another – as well as its simultaneous formal control.
The final couplet typically contains the author’s signature, referring to the poet in the first or third person, and often includes a play on the poet’s name. Lanthier’s humorous variation of this is to present us with what seems to be her nickname – “Red Kat, October poet, you’re not immortal Red Tara” – and a repetition of the poem’s refrain – “The fire in snow, the flash in opal: my red hair.”
"Fashion Advice for Eternity" is a good example of Lanthier’s chief poetic strengths – a facility with dense, multi-levelled imagery, a mythological richness, sensuality, humour, and a deft musicality:
The Zuni jeweller takes a fingertip of shards
from a surgeon’s tray of stars
and sets a miniature Thunderbird, Knachina dancer,
Knifewing, Roadrunner, face of the Sun
in spiny oyster, abalone, turquoise, onyx night
ringed by silver kicked from a horse’s hoof
on your finger, by your breastbone, at your ear.
"Guanyin Lamp" and "Emerald Table" both show examples of Lanthier at her most ambitious and cleverly allusive. In “Guanyin Lamp” she takes on the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy Guan Yin: “Here’s the boy, the girl, faces stroked by your robe. / You’re a hollow never filled / And your face is serene.”
Though the poem strives to draw the deity within the ambit of modern life and modern Western concerns, it doesn’t quite seem emotionally convincing: “All the cries of the world! Something to sell, swallow, sorrow. /
Your uncontrolled kindness / Rains on the void.”
In "Emerald Lamp," Lanthier weaves a mystical meditation on love, artistic conception, and loss: “You fanned my hair in red-gold rays. Bull’s-eye. In one. / Your aim was true. You wrote the code, set flame and fired from the sun, / An elegant sharpshooter.”
It reads like a weird yet strikingly beautiful visionary trance with explicit allusions to Hermetic philosophy and to Dante’s Inferno. Its language is reminiscent of Shelley’s and that of the sixteenth-century Hindu mystic poet Meera Bai. Beautiful though the poem may be, its attempts to combine these various elements does not seem to have been successfully resolved into a coherent whole.
There are several standout poems in the collection. "Those Pretty Wrongs" from Part Two of the book displays an inventiveness and sophistication in its conceits and imagery that is almost at an Elizabethan level: “ My pigeon-blood ruby, my travelling ruby, / my star-of-India found on the street. / I carry you in a fitted velvet case.”
Other standout poems – "The Year of La Jetee," "Night School", "Playmates", and "What Washes off, What Sticks" – are all characterised by their swiftness of thought and assured imagery.
However, the book’s final three poems are amongst its finest. "The Headless Long-Stemmed Rose on a Staircase in the Subway" draws together several of the book’s patterns of imagery and themes – Demeter’s journey to the underworld to search for her abducted daughter Persephone, the Sirens who were sent to look for Persephone, Orpheus’ journey to the underworld, memory, desire, the loss of desire, and the spectacle of the self.
The ghazal "To Kateri" echoes these patterns of imagery and theme. The poem’s speaker invokes the native American historical figure “Lily of the Mohawks,” Kateri Tekakwitha of Kanien’ke ha: ka. The speaker alludes to the various ways this figure has been mythologised – to suit the needs of the Catholic church, North American frontier heritage, and even Leonard Cohen. The speaker’s native American namesake connects the poet’s own personal history to the “Highway of Tears” murders of native women along Western Canada’s Highway 16 – “a continent-wide slash” – and to the long history of women talking to other women, and passing on memory. It is a melancholy and deeply moving poem that resonates on many levels – with the poet’s personal identity, women’s history, contemporary white Western guilt surrounding native cultures, and non-white, post-colonial feminine identity.
In "Only Rain," the final poem in the collection, the relatively simple imagery and strong narrative present an apt and powerful conclusion to the collection. The speaker is Demeter again and also a Siren: “I’ll be rushing, the way I do. Before the door slams. Half in love with vertigo. / You were the unforeseen, uninvited, un-be-lieve-able and now undoable.”
The speaker’s words recall a lost lover, a lost daughter, the depths of love, and the pain of love’s absence: “In the experiment, we are immersed in water. Left on twin hilltops. / Denied electricity. / How many seasons must I wait? This snow tests positive for / crystallized tears.”
This last poem conveys the powerful attractions and pleasures of desire. The speaker is held in place, torn apart, and yet remains powerful – “I could swim there in three strokes” – but she’s also weak since “Pleasure longs to drown, blacks out.”
The speaker is at once the ravished Leda and also the “swan on the bank, dropping red petals.” She is the abandoned lover and the agent of desire: “After you left I took / the hurricane inside. / When I spit it out, it’s only rain. For still temptation follows where thou art.”
The last line here alludes to “Those Pretty Wrongs,” an earlier poem in the collection. It is also a direct quote from the opening line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 41 – “Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits." The speaker communicates here once more the allure of dark memories and desire.
Siren is a very strong poetry collection that clearly underlines the extent of Kateri Lanthier’s growth and deepening as a poet.
January 1, 2018
I love the jazzy allusive playfulness of these contemporary ghazals. A lover's protests are like "wind chimes when the hurricane blows in" while the speaker's tears are "tumble-dried" and her state of mind a "Rubik's mood" to be solved. Whether she's riffing on cliches ("O let me plant my kisses all along your neck of the woods") or creating delightful new terms ("Florillegal"), Kateri Lanthier shows herself to be an elegant elegist for love, that most enduring of ghazal themes. My favourite poems from the collection include the title poem "Siren," "A Colder Spring," "Keeping Up," and the whimsical series titled simply "Haiku."
Read
March 3, 2021I’ve had my knuckles wrapped twice now because my rating of this title deeply offended the author -readers who went to university with this writer are not allowed to have opinions about her work unless they gush and swoon over her verse and I was prepared to do neither so I have now removed my rating entirely and all you need to know is that I read this book and refused to comment- I think it’s the only one of the several thousands that has this privilege
April 17, 2018
Siren by Kateri Lanthier brings desire lost and found on city streets, in late night windows, along the harbour, in history, and in her heart to this collection of poems, many in the form of ghazals (how one speaks to women). They are, in turn, sad, sexy, funny—and I suspect, maybe, wise.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews