Annick MacAskill
[Author Name]
Biography
Annick MacAskill is a poet, critic, and academic. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections—No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020), and Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022)—as well as a chapbook, Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (Frog Hollow Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in literary journals across Canada and abroad and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series. Her writing has received nominations for the CBC Poetry Prize, the Ralph Gustafson Prize, Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and an Atlantic Book Award, among others. MacAskill holds a PhD in French literature and has published several articles on sixteenth-century French and Neo-Latin poetry, as well as dozens of reviews of scholarly and literary works. She was the 2021-2022 Arc Poet-in-Residence and is a member of Room Magazine’s editorial collective. A settler of French and Scottish ancestry, she lives in K’jipuktuk (Halifax), on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. annickmacaskill.com
Poetics Statement
“As a poet, my most persistent preoccupation is to say what I want to say while imitating the effect of music. You could call it envy as poetics, really, since I’m terribly tone deaf and have never been musically inclined.
Whenever I’m pressed for a definition of the word lyric, I think first of this—the ‘song’ contained in the Greek word ode, the Latin carmen, the Hebrew psalm, the Sanskrit gita, and the French cantique. Or the ‘little sound’ of the Italian sonetto; the rhythmic ‘jumping’ or ‘dancing’ behind the French ballade. And, of course, the lyre within the word lyric. One possible translation of the Arabic word ghazal renders it as a wounded deer’s wail, and I always hear a pronounced nasal whine in the name of the French [com]plainte. My favourite poetry of any historical period, of any tradition, is the poetry that finds ways to make music without instrumental accompaniment or a talented singing voice. My writing is an attempt to join the chorus.
While poetry uses written human language to communicate its meaning, it can also convey, to those who will listen, something that is beyond this meaning, in the same way that instrumental music, or birdsong, or a baby’s cry, can speak to us without accessing the means of spoken or written language. In this, poetry achieves, or at least gestures towards, the impossible—an articulation of the ineffable. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
Treasure
In my dream, the friend lost is found
again, comes tumbling
out of my washing machine.
Luckly, I have selected the delicates cycle,
and when I unfold her
it’s as if she never left:
there are no creases in her skin
though her jeans are stiff, cleaner
than ever. The best of both worlds,
like the two of us. She’s hungry
after all these years, so I make
a Queen Victoria cake, serve it
paired with ginger peach tea.
We laugh, and everything
is the same. Before dinner,
I hang her on the inside door
of my front closet, where
I can admire her every day,
polish this emblem
of my unflinching fidelity.
Previously published in No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018).
First Snow
solis ab occasu solis quaerebat ad ortus.
she wandered from the rising of the sun to the setting of the sun.[1]
Ovid, Metamorphoses, V. 445
A white crown appears
on the peak of Mount Etna, frost gleaming
like the twinkle lights
she’s hung before the path. She scales
the choss, and on the way, ties Proserpine’s yellow ribbon
around the slim arm
of a spontaneous birch tree. Her heart gone powder blue,
she sobs the magpie’s bewildered call
where child
where child
where child have you gone
Later she will learn that each sheer crystal
is a world unto itself, each flake without a twin
in the wide night,
though all she sees now is a thick sheet
binding and chilling the soil. She does not open
her arms in greeting, flinching
as the heavens let fall their negative space,
accumulation wet and persistent
quickening the reach of her prayers
what did I do but ask
for what I longed for
what sin is this
the handfuls light
until she folds her fingers,
attempts a fist—
[1] The translation is by the poet.
Previously published in Riddle Fence (2022) and Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022).
Of gold arms, you,
with I don’t know what magic,
reach for me, bestow a shape on my body
I’d never considered. Of warm mouth
and a coffee offered,
the orange mug pressed to my palm where later
your skin will be, you make it so,
make me not just shake but shatter
as I reach back
in equal wanting—welcome you, your name
above the tug and moan of the streetcars.
It’s winter and we must forgive birds their absence,
and I hear them anyway—
finches ringing morning every time
our bodies hit the sheets, indifferent to the dark
or the worlds we leave to tremble
in the next room.
This poem takes its title from a line by Sappho, as translated by Anne Carson.
Previously published in Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020).