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Past Imperfect: Poems
Recalling Hopkins or Dickinson in their urgency, these poems seduce the reader into experiencing life's darkest moments while revealing unexpected shafts of light. In a voice that is at once confident, elegant, and doubtful, the author scans the world as if through the wrong end of a telescope, employing recurrent images and exploring obsessions to produce a remarkably exact account of remote, intimate dealings. "I will have to explain myself to myself," she writes, but in doing so communicates a great deal about all of us.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
1 person is currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Suzanne Buffam
6 books18 followersSuzanne Buffam is a Canadian poet, author of two collections of poetry. Her first, Past Imperfect: Poems (House of Anansi Press, 2005), won the Gerald Lampert Award in 2006. Her second, The Irrationalist (Carnarium Books, 2010), was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including Poetry, Jubilat, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Books in Canada, and Prairie Schooner; and in anthologies including Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets. She earned an MA in English from Concordia University in Montreal, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.
Buffam was a judge for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Buffam was a judge for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
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December 12, 2019Another amazing book. This one has some of the most aesthetically pleasing of all her work but I also found myself getting lost in the beauty. There was a kind of mental athleticism in these poems and some were so beautiful I stayed with them for a long time, while others were fun to roll around in my mind but didn't stay with me. Her optimism is heartwarming. Make no mistake that some of these poems are my favourites of hers. However, you must read her other books as well and see where her style evolves. Thank you for writing this book, Ms.Buffam.
April 24, 2023
I picked this up at random, mostly because I liked the cover. And this is a case where judging a book by its cover was absolutely the right decision. This is one of the greatest collections of poetry I’ve ever come across, and certainly the best in the past year or two. I can’t pinpoint what I like about it so much, so I’m just going to buy it and then read it again and again until I can properly enunciate what is so amazing about this. But it is amazing.
February 25, 2010
Sorry, Suzanne Buffam. I didn't remember your poems being so BORING when you read them out loud.
May 30, 2017
Such a delight. What an interesting mind to spend time with
January 23, 2022
They've found another moon around Jupiter.
News of this reaches me too late
to get out of bed and arrest it
with my bloodshot and glowering eyes.
Instead I will just lie here in my slippers
and listen to the hourly reports.
Also, I will listen to the sound of my teeth
which is how I imagine the earth would sound
if you could press an ear to the dirt
and hear the heavy plates, grinding in their sleep.
What, in the final analysis, isn't imminent?
Or, for that matter, immanent?
Even my lumps have lumps.
My lovers, lovers.
* * *
Empty, the dresses in the window are more beautiful.
In a stillness between thinking she remembers
thinking: if not waiting, what then?
Before darkness, after sunset, there's a window
in the day through which light passes. without
shadow, an shadow simply happens
where nothing blocks the light. The dresses
in this window ear a stillness
she thought to call its opposite.
Now she revises: she wants
to touch them. They want not to be touched.
* * *
There is a bridge across the river
built entirely of light.
Here swallows thread the middle distance
insects quicken with delight.
Delight because I say it is, because
it might be nothing but their hunger
buzzing dully into less. I sit among
the reeds. I read your note.
On the far shore now a carnival begins
to spin its burning wheel -
* * *
Rain taps little circles in the pavement that glisten, briefly,
then vanish. Your fingers
tap along my spine.
A slat wind. Eavestroughs.
Far off, the sound of a train
forging into its whistle unspools
a wake of old longings. The box
opens in on itself
like a dream inside which a crouched
animal is awaiting
release, recognition.
Its little teeth glisten.
* * *
The committee met on the first of the month to decide once and for all which of this black planet's myriad sights most honours the bold, high peaks of the human heart. A young man brought down his fist with a thud. There is nothing in this world, he cried, more stirring to the soul than a good parade! Sun striking the trumpets, the flash of batons, wind licking the flags into blazing bright sails. . . . Just then a fleet of gold jets roared past the high window in tight formation. Everyone looked up and gasped, stars in their eyes, and seemed on the point of consensus. A frail old man in a pale grey suit and matching cravat cleared his throat. Slow ripples moved through the room as he spoke, firmly, and not without eloquence, on behalf of the twin Spanish replica tall ships that had sailed that spring into harbour, bringing sailors and replica guns, firing replica cannons into the salt-sweetened air each evening at nine o'clock sharp. Some smiled to themselves and looked at their hands, some gingerly closed their reports, leaned forward in their seats and eyed the heavy wooden gavel in the chairman's hand. But I, who had been listening at the door for some time, distracted from my task (as happens often, and for which I am often sternly rebuked), slipped down the dim hall and out into the night where I joined the parade that had swallowed you.
News of this reaches me too late
to get out of bed and arrest it
with my bloodshot and glowering eyes.
Instead I will just lie here in my slippers
and listen to the hourly reports.
Also, I will listen to the sound of my teeth
which is how I imagine the earth would sound
if you could press an ear to the dirt
and hear the heavy plates, grinding in their sleep.
What, in the final analysis, isn't imminent?
Or, for that matter, immanent?
Even my lumps have lumps.
My lovers, lovers.
- In Which All Will Be Revealed, pg. 7
* * *
Empty, the dresses in the window are more beautiful.
In a stillness between thinking she remembers
thinking: if not waiting, what then?
Before darkness, after sunset, there's a window
in the day through which light passes. without
shadow, an shadow simply happens
where nothing blocks the light. The dresses
in this window ear a stillness
she thought to call its opposite.
Now she revises: she wants
to touch them. They want not to be touched.
- Before Darkness, pg. 21
* * *
There is a bridge across the river
built entirely of light.
Here swallows thread the middle distance
insects quicken with delight.
Delight because I say it is, because
it might be nothing but their hunger
buzzing dully into less. I sit among
the reeds. I read your note.
On the far shore now a carnival begins
to spin its burning wheel -
- Postscript, pg. 43
* * *
Rain taps little circles in the pavement that glisten, briefly,
then vanish. Your fingers
tap along my spine.
A slat wind. Eavestroughs.
Far off, the sound of a train
forging into its whistle unspools
a wake of old longings. The box
opens in on itself
like a dream inside which a crouched
animal is awaiting
release, recognition.
Its little teeth glisten.
- Déjà Vu, pg. 51
* * *
The committee met on the first of the month to decide once and for all which of this black planet's myriad sights most honours the bold, high peaks of the human heart. A young man brought down his fist with a thud. There is nothing in this world, he cried, more stirring to the soul than a good parade! Sun striking the trumpets, the flash of batons, wind licking the flags into blazing bright sails. . . . Just then a fleet of gold jets roared past the high window in tight formation. Everyone looked up and gasped, stars in their eyes, and seemed on the point of consensus. A frail old man in a pale grey suit and matching cravat cleared his throat. Slow ripples moved through the room as he spoke, firmly, and not without eloquence, on behalf of the twin Spanish replica tall ships that had sailed that spring into harbour, bringing sailors and replica guns, firing replica cannons into the salt-sweetened air each evening at nine o'clock sharp. Some smiled to themselves and looked at their hands, some gingerly closed their reports, leaned forward in their seats and eyed the heavy wooden gavel in the chairman's hand. But I, who had been listening at the door for some time, distracted from my task (as happens often, and for which I am often sternly rebuked), slipped down the dim hall and out into the night where I joined the parade that had swallowed you.
- Anaktoria, after Sappho, pg. 60
January 28, 2021
“The first time I kiss a boy with my tongue I go home and copy out our names, over and over on the back of a book, until the words become beautiful sounds. Not until he forgets my name two weeks later at a high-school dance, under streetlights and cosmic debris, do I understand the failure of language.” — “Lacrimae Rerum”
August 8, 2020
A delight on every page. Favorites include the opening poem ("Another Bildungsroman"), "Two Hands", and "Intro to Lit". After reading Buffam's three collections (about 5 years in between each release), it's safe to say she takes her time and she doesn't miss.
February 6, 2017
The poems are a little hard to describe but there are at least two approaches. In a poem that rides high on a public, lexically aware tone, the speaker will ask: "What, in the final analysis, isn't imminent? | Or, for that matter, immanent? | Even my lumps have lumps. | My lover, lovers." This rueful speaker, knows too, the lore of dreams and -- a second approach -- equivocates, half taking seriously repression's wild ambiguity: "In the dream I have been fatally wounded | by a shark and wake up to discover | I have only been seriously maimed." The close of this poem ("Open Water") carries a droll and absurd tone that reminds me of James Tate: "I build a raft in the basement out of blankets and string. | My friends all think I'm in Texas, | which, in a way, I am." Each poem fashions an aporia, or blank space inside longing: "[a] space | the story clears | for what comes next." In the first approach the speaker lets it appear as though she's a little behind the reader's apprehension of her implication: "Very likely she is hoping || to forget him the way the wind, | at rest above the garden, will forget[.]" The tone is earnest, and the genre is the epistle to a lover ("The Starfish"). At times, in the book's second section, when the love epistles taking nature's measure find resemblances to the love a flattering ratio, Buffam's craft is canny and conventional, like the derivative work it imitates (so "Meanwhile"'s debt to Duncan's "Sonnet #4"). "Intro to Lit" cops to the literary-person's self-initiation into erotic poetry's twice-told orders, where verse is never necessary to the poem.
March 3, 2015
I don't read too many poems but I love Suzanne Buffam's.
"Inklings VII"
Let three sunlit minutes
on this ridge equal
bliss. Let bliss
be quick. Let it slip
through the rips
in the runnels above us.
Enough
to have lived
without touching one
inch. Let the sting
of my wishing
you with me
be swift.
"Inklings VII"
Let three sunlit minutes
on this ridge equal
bliss. Let bliss
be quick. Let it slip
through the rips
in the runnels above us.
Enough
to have lived
without touching one
inch. Let the sting
of my wishing
you with me
be swift.
August 18, 2009
Reading this book makes me want to write poems-- better poems, poems as good as these.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews