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Ledi
Ledi , the second book by Vancouver-based poet Kim Trainor, describes the excavation of an Iron Age Pazyryk woman from her ice-bound grave in the steppes of Siberia. Along with the woman's carefully preserved body, with its blue tattoos of leopards and griffins, grave goods were also discovered--rosehips and wild garlic, translucent vessels carved from horn, snow-white felt stockings and coriander seeds for burning at death. The archaeologist who discovered her, Natalya Polosmak, called her 'Ledi'--'the Lady'--and it was speculated that she may have held a ceremonial position such as story teller or shaman within her tribe.
Trainor uses this burial site to undertake the emotional excavation of the death of a former lover by suicide. This book-length poem presents a compelling story in the form of an archaeologist's notebook, a collage of journal entries, spare lyric poems, inventories, and images. As the poem relates the discovery of Ledi's gravesite, the narrator attempts simultaneously to reconstruct her own past relationship and the body of her lover.
Trainor uses this burial site to undertake the emotional excavation of the death of a former lover by suicide. This book-length poem presents a compelling story in the form of an archaeologist's notebook, a collage of journal entries, spare lyric poems, inventories, and images. As the poem relates the discovery of Ledi's gravesite, the narrator attempts simultaneously to reconstruct her own past relationship and the body of her lover.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published October 10, 2018
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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September 27, 2019Kim is a colleague and I enjoyed her previous collection. Ledi is more one long work than a collection--I can't see most of these pieces standing on their own--and I found myself eagerly turning the pages rather than dipping in and out as I usually do with poetry. The interweaves the archaeological discovery of an Iron Age Pazyryk woman with the speaker's excavation of her memories of a former lover who died by suicide. Passages quoted from archaeological accounts, from Herodotus on the Scythians, and from a book on desert wildflowers are interspersed through the snippets of the speaker's memory, diary/notebook entries, inventories of grave goods or wildflowers, collections of objects that recall the past. I especially liked the images of tattoos (whether Ledi's or the poet's) as marks of the past on the body, like bruises, visible memories.
March 5, 2021
This book destroyed and saved me. I first tried reading this book first very soon after my friend committed suicide. I tried to read this book in the midst of trauma -- not grief -- and when I tried to read it then, in the midst of trauma, it didn't land. But almost seven months later I tried to read it again and I read it in the midst of grief, coming out the other side of trauma (as much as we ever come out the other side of trauma). And I found a lot of solace in the book: I found a lot of beauty and solidarity, and I think I found them because they were only just then occurring to me. It was only just then occurring to me that this person is gone, that all we have of this person is what they left behind, that all we will ever have of this person is what they were. And that is a horrible thing to be coming to terms with, and I came to terms with it for the first time, and I'm grateful to this book and I'm grateful to this poet. I'm grateful that I am not the only person who has done this.
October 21, 2018
I ordered this book through Bookhug after reading a synopsis of it on Facebook. The concept of an archaeological discovery of a frozen and thusly well-preserved Iron Age woman evoking memories of the narrator's former lover who had committed suicide was compelling to me. Both subjects are rich sources of metaphor and imagery and Trainor weaves a rich tapestry from both of them, evoking emotions and experiences of our own. Through her expressive language and incisive use of metaphor, Trainor connects the richness of the past with the currency of the present day, connects both deaths and gleans lessons from both, charting the narrator's own journey towards healing and learning. Sometimes her metaphors can be repetitive and she seems to make the same point several times throughout the book, but her poetry is still lush and beautiful, making Ledi a sweet and cerebral read.
February 8, 2024
https://poets.ca/reviewing-the-shortl...
At the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 I worked nights at Vancouver’s safe injection site. Part of my shift was spent in the injection room (IR), a windowless space with 12 booths where injection drug users would sit in front of mirrors and inject. My job consisted of data entry (ie. Code Name of User/Booth Number/Substance Ingested), watching the mirrors for signs of overdose and– perhaps most importantly– to clean the booths between uses. Wearing black rubber gloves over thin pale latex blue ones I would approach the booths with a dustpan, a hand broom and a wet wipe soaked with CavaCide™–a miraculous substance that kills most blood borne viruses on contact. One evening, in one of these booths I found a small scrap of paper– a flap used to hold an injectable substance. Usually I disposed of these coke, smack and meth infused fragments without examining them but this one bore a text– tiny white serifed script centered on a black background:
Tall for her time at five
feet six, the woman, with
headdress, needed a
coffin nearly eight feet
long. We will likely never
know what killed her.
“Death shadowed every
step these people took,”
notes the author.
The fragment of paper bears the scars of folding, creases have broken through the black and particles of whatever substance the fragment held– a forensic analysis could confirm whether cocaine or heroin or methamphetamine– have seeped into these creases. The way the text is nearly perfectly centered suggested to me that the dealer had consciously excised the fragment from a magazine; that he was making a commentary on his clientele– shadowed by death, get it?– and I became convinced that there would be more found poems on flaps and for a while I checked each scrap of paper before I threw it out. This was the only one I saved.
This was my first interaction with Ledi, the main body haunting Kim Trainor’s second book. The second was in the spring of 2016 in the Banff Centre for the Arts when– upon my request– Kim placed a nearly completed manuscript in my mailbox during a six week residency. Each letter sized piece of recycled white paper bore a black tiny serifed text. Alone in my room I identified the woman described on the flap from 2013 as Kim’s Ledi– the Pazyryk horse-woman whose body slept intact for 2000 years before it was unearthed by Russian archaeologists and whose “decay began the moment her skin came into contact with human hands and sunlight.” Kim is a poet wise enough to wear sunscreen even when there is complete cloud cover, sunglasses in the middle of a rain slaughtered Vancouver February.
She appears on the page of my notebook like a temple rubbing
A review of Kim’s first book said something like “Kim Trainor is more interested in dead bodies than living ones.” She might resist this characterization of her work but what is true is that Kim is non-binary in her understanding of bodies, of life and death. She knows it’s continuum. I mean it’s heavy, right, and it’s something I couldn’t get away with saying but who doesn’t death shadow? It shadowed Ledi and the Pazyryks, it shadows the drug addict dumping powder from the flap, it shadows us all. We are all these people.
There are two other bodies in Ledi,the poet’s former lover– who commits suicide– and the poet’s own. And there is a vibrancy to Ledi and her spectacular decay that contrasts with the poet’s own attempts to entomb herself
When I lie on my side my knees scape, bone on bone. When it grows cool in the night, I wrap myself in a white sheet. How hard it is to emerge.
I am reminded of how there is a specific police record check required for employment in some sectors that screens whether an applicant is suitably prepared to work with “vulnerable adults” when the poet’s unnamed lover runs into oncoming traffic in his first suicide attempt, as the poet observes her own body’s aging and transformation (stretchmarks–the ‘tattoos’ of childbirth), when the Ledi’s body turns partially to broth and is lapped up by dogs.
The poet knows so much about Ledi’s body, about her burial, about the grave goods accompanying her into her coffin and yet next to nothing about her former lover’s grave site. Thus she has imagine one. While the Ledi’s excavators work backwards: from the unearthed body and the grave site to create a speculative identity of Ledi, the poet has to work in the opposite way with her dead lover: from her incomplete memories of him, which are frustratingly unaccompanied by any artifacts (“I have no letter written in your hand. No photograph”), in order to give him a proper burial. (“I place you here– in the Mojave. In this sere blue.”) What Ledi reminds us is that dead bodies shadow us in our lives and ultimately how little we know about our dead– even those with whom we were intimate.
Isn’t our skin like a photograph? It carries the trace of others. It develops in time. A scraped knee. A tiny scar below the lip. Fingers of a lover’s grasp smudged blue, then ochre.
I’ve checked the internet. The tallest women in the world are in Latvia where the average height is 5 foot 7 inches. Ledi would be tall in our time as well as in her own. She is perhaps timelessly tall.
At the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 I worked nights at Vancouver’s safe injection site. Part of my shift was spent in the injection room (IR), a windowless space with 12 booths where injection drug users would sit in front of mirrors and inject. My job consisted of data entry (ie. Code Name of User/Booth Number/Substance Ingested), watching the mirrors for signs of overdose and– perhaps most importantly– to clean the booths between uses. Wearing black rubber gloves over thin pale latex blue ones I would approach the booths with a dustpan, a hand broom and a wet wipe soaked with CavaCide™–a miraculous substance that kills most blood borne viruses on contact. One evening, in one of these booths I found a small scrap of paper– a flap used to hold an injectable substance. Usually I disposed of these coke, smack and meth infused fragments without examining them but this one bore a text– tiny white serifed script centered on a black background:
Tall for her time at five
feet six, the woman, with
headdress, needed a
coffin nearly eight feet
long. We will likely never
know what killed her.
“Death shadowed every
step these people took,”
notes the author.
The fragment of paper bears the scars of folding, creases have broken through the black and particles of whatever substance the fragment held– a forensic analysis could confirm whether cocaine or heroin or methamphetamine– have seeped into these creases. The way the text is nearly perfectly centered suggested to me that the dealer had consciously excised the fragment from a magazine; that he was making a commentary on his clientele– shadowed by death, get it?– and I became convinced that there would be more found poems on flaps and for a while I checked each scrap of paper before I threw it out. This was the only one I saved.
This was my first interaction with Ledi, the main body haunting Kim Trainor’s second book. The second was in the spring of 2016 in the Banff Centre for the Arts when– upon my request– Kim placed a nearly completed manuscript in my mailbox during a six week residency. Each letter sized piece of recycled white paper bore a black tiny serifed text. Alone in my room I identified the woman described on the flap from 2013 as Kim’s Ledi– the Pazyryk horse-woman whose body slept intact for 2000 years before it was unearthed by Russian archaeologists and whose “decay began the moment her skin came into contact with human hands and sunlight.” Kim is a poet wise enough to wear sunscreen even when there is complete cloud cover, sunglasses in the middle of a rain slaughtered Vancouver February.
She appears on the page of my notebook like a temple rubbing
A review of Kim’s first book said something like “Kim Trainor is more interested in dead bodies than living ones.” She might resist this characterization of her work but what is true is that Kim is non-binary in her understanding of bodies, of life and death. She knows it’s continuum. I mean it’s heavy, right, and it’s something I couldn’t get away with saying but who doesn’t death shadow? It shadowed Ledi and the Pazyryks, it shadows the drug addict dumping powder from the flap, it shadows us all. We are all these people.
There are two other bodies in Ledi,the poet’s former lover– who commits suicide– and the poet’s own. And there is a vibrancy to Ledi and her spectacular decay that contrasts with the poet’s own attempts to entomb herself
When I lie on my side my knees scape, bone on bone. When it grows cool in the night, I wrap myself in a white sheet. How hard it is to emerge.
I am reminded of how there is a specific police record check required for employment in some sectors that screens whether an applicant is suitably prepared to work with “vulnerable adults” when the poet’s unnamed lover runs into oncoming traffic in his first suicide attempt, as the poet observes her own body’s aging and transformation (stretchmarks–the ‘tattoos’ of childbirth), when the Ledi’s body turns partially to broth and is lapped up by dogs.
The poet knows so much about Ledi’s body, about her burial, about the grave goods accompanying her into her coffin and yet next to nothing about her former lover’s grave site. Thus she has imagine one. While the Ledi’s excavators work backwards: from the unearthed body and the grave site to create a speculative identity of Ledi, the poet has to work in the opposite way with her dead lover: from her incomplete memories of him, which are frustratingly unaccompanied by any artifacts (“I have no letter written in your hand. No photograph”), in order to give him a proper burial. (“I place you here– in the Mojave. In this sere blue.”) What Ledi reminds us is that dead bodies shadow us in our lives and ultimately how little we know about our dead– even those with whom we were intimate.
Isn’t our skin like a photograph? It carries the trace of others. It develops in time. A scraped knee. A tiny scar below the lip. Fingers of a lover’s grasp smudged blue, then ochre.
I’ve checked the internet. The tallest women in the world are in Latvia where the average height is 5 foot 7 inches. Ledi would be tall in our time as well as in her own. She is perhaps timelessly tall.
May 14, 2020
but I'm biased
June 17, 2019
In Siberia, a prehistoric noblewoman’s body reveals itself almost coyly from the melting ice and “For the first time in two thousand years, her body is touched by human hands and sunlight // She begins immediately to decay.” These poems, which minutely describe what happens to Ledi at the hands of scientists, rest in a context of detailed descriptions of the brief summer that offered her up and italicized quotes from the articles written about her. A fascinating tale told deftly and with grace
January 2, 2019
An excellent mix of personal and historical threads.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews