Sue Sinclair
Biography
Sue Sinclair (she/her) grew up in Newfoundland on the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, and she is the author of six collections of poetry, including her latest book, Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems (Goose Lane Editions, 2022). Sue’s previous title, Heaven's Thieves (Brick Books, 2016), won the 2017 Pat Lowther Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman; her other books have also won or been nominated for a variety of awards. Sue has a PhD in philosophy and wrote her dissertation on beauty and ethics. She currently edits for Brick Books and teaches creative writing at the University of New Brunswick on Wolastoqiyik territory, land of the “beautiful and bountiful river.”
Poetics Statement
“I love poetry for its willingness to bring on its own failure, for its willingness to work language in such a way that it falls vividly short of the world beyond it. The material world, with its ungeneralizable haecceities or “thisnesses,” outstrips language every time. And there’s the (moral and epistemological) problem of foreground and background in language, which is, as far as I can see, unresolvable: to say “this” is always to fail to say “that” (and that and that and that…). Or even if “that” appears somehow in the halo of unspoken words around any utterance, it remains backgrounded. We’re always neglecting something when we speak/write, just as we’re always neglecting something when we turn our attention here rather than there. It’s a real dilemma!
The poetry I love best has no illusions about its limits, brings us to the furthest threshold of what’s possible in language, then lets us go. This kind of poetry is maybe not exactly expressing the inexpressible, but it does bring us to awareness of the inexpressible. It skirts the mystery of what-is, and in its patent inability to name the world adequately, we feel the power of what lies beyond the poem. I like poems that hold space for silence, that sound a note so you can hear how far it travels through the silence, feel it carry you into the currents of the unsaid.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Reprieve
At first I confused purity and authenticity.
I aimed true but ungodly high, didn’t know what I was trying to do.
I could have died.
A person can try too hard, even if it’s in their nature to try too hard.
In school lunches, I couldn’t tolerate under or overripe fruit. Then I couldn’t tolerate fruit at all, the scent, the sweat.
Synonyms for purity: tyranny, lack, forfeiture, immortality, safety, self-harm.
For authenticity? Home, I think, where home is any circumstance from which one doesn’t flee—at least not willingly.
For years I pursued my heavenly self, its odourless trail. I had been determined to make it serenade me, yield its perfect measures.
There’s no such thing as a lack of consequences.
I got sick, then I got better.
Every separation is a link[1]. I don’t quite believe that, but it feels closer to truth than it used to.
[1] from Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace
Published in Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems, Goose Lane Editions, 2022
The Invention of Beauty
The swan especially doesn’t
seem real anymore, so we ignore
his arched neck
beckoning, inviting us to slip off
the noose, asking us to swoon
like we used to
as he glides undialectically along,
dipping his sovereign head
into the mirror
and emerging again, unchanged,
unfathomed,
trailing past in invisible quotation marks
as if hundreds of versions
of himself didn’t float
in his wake, a retinue of man-made
images catering to vagaries—as if he were truly
just a single
swan a-swimming on a sunny
summer’s day.
(originally published in Heaven’s Thieves, Brick Books, 2016; reprinted in Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems, Goose Lane Editions, 2022)
The Dead
This morning, the obdurate, golden-green grass, blurred with dew,
buried in the house’s shadow.
Deer, their faces softened by sleep, raise their heads and look through you,
draining you of motive.
You become as still as they are, waiting,
as though under it all lurked another, more comprehensible world,
carrying itself so slowly
as to go unnoticed.
*
What if the dead don’t leave,
not exactly,
what if instead they’re what orients you, the sixth sense that turns you
this way and that,
tilts your face toward the light? What if they are the light?
That would explain, wouldn’t it,
the strange clarity after someone dies,
the peculiar radiance things acquire, even the least of them,
your loss everywhere transformed,
your suffering grown impersonal, self-sufficient.
Each item buzzes with the vibrancy
of the one who’s gone—
an inherited light that is no longer
his or hers, that only you still recognize—
so every time you close your eyes something of that person
leaves again.
*
Let’s be clear:
about the stillness you felt in the deer this morning—
and yes, you’re still staring, still feel the lukewarm glass against your forehead
as you think of the dew and of the grass and of the deer themselves,
now vanished from the lawn:
it had nothing to do with the dead.
The dead don’t stop
with their hearts in their throats; to die
is not to wash through the body of a deer like a ghost;
it isn’t to skulk under a living skin.
It’s a change in the value of things.
There’s no such thing as “the dead”:
when the dead die, they don’t hold anything back.
Otherwise, a bitterness, like the sediment
in wine.
It’s pure alchemy:
the world pours itself into the vessel of the new day,
and the liquid runs clear.
And that’s what hurts.
The clarity. It leaves you staring out the window,
wondering what to forgive: the lawn more beautiful than it should be,
the blades of grass all
bent one way, silvered and utterly coherent,
like a mirror with no face in it.
(originally published in Heaven’s Thieves, Brick Books, 2016; reprinted in Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems, Goose Lane Editions, 2022)