During her address for the Margaret Laurence Lecture at this year’s Writers' Union of Canada conference, Lorna Crozier shared what she believes is the only thing a poet should ever regret at the end of one’s life: the realization that one has not paid sufficient attention, at key moments, to be able to do literary justice to one’s chosen subject. Judging from the contents of her third book of poems, Leanne McIntosh needn't worry too much about having such regrets. In Dark Matter, we encounter a poet who clearly pays attention and is fully present to her material.
      By “dark matter,” McIntosh is aiming at life’s invisible mysteries, or “the shadow side of what we know and see…the unseen forces and influences (that) inform our lives in ways we can only guess at,” as Jock McKeen puts it in the Foreword. Sometimes, it’s about awakening the subconscious:

During her address for the Margaret Laurence Lecture at this year’s Writers' Union of Canada conference, Lorna Crozier shared what she believes is the only thing a poet should ever regret at the end of one’s life: the realization that one has not paid sufficient attention, at key moments, to be able to do literary justice to one’s chosen subject. Judging from the contents of her third book of poems, Leanne McIntosh needn't worry too much about having such regrets. In Dark Matter, we encounter a poet who clearly pays attention and is fully present to her material.
      By “dark matter,” McIntosh is aiming at life’s invisible mysteries, or “the shadow side of what we know and see…the unseen forces and influences (that) inform our lives in ways we can only guess at,” as Jock McKeen puts it in the Foreword. Sometimes, it’s about awakening the subconscious:
      Before his funeral
      he came to me in a dream as a figure
      stepping through a doorway to say,
      I loved you from the first moment.
      I claimed the words like a torch
      which is to say
      silence and seed are both inexpressible
      and to make loss the place beauty begins
      we are given the brief, frail,
      great-glowing petals of a marigold.
      To make loss bearable we are given
      each other.
Other times, it’s about recognizing how fear makes us retreat:
      Disturbed by the shooting, disturbed
      by two lesbian teens found in knee-deep grass,
      disturbed by war, the price of gas,
      what happens to a dog when it’s given away,
      disturbed by women in Mexico
      slumped on Cathedral steps
      the night of Easter Vigil, as we,
      our candles held high, follow
      the priest into the church.
      How little I know of the edge of town….
      While the poems are untitled, and there are no section breaks to divide the text, Dark Matter is by no means a monologue. Instead, paying tribute to her decades-long friendship with Father Jack Sproule, McIntosh includes a selection of the now-retired Catholic priest's philosophical musings at the bottom of each page, in effect creating an intimate conversation between poet and priest that sheds light on things often left hidden beneath the surface.
      In many cases, the interaction produces fresh insight on matters the Church would prefer not to revisit. Who knew, for example, that celibacy could be rendered with such sensuality and empowerment? Here’s McIntosh:
      A word calls us out of secrecy.
      It's a tone in the mouth,
      a texture on the tongue,
      the voice echoing the frogs' chorus,
      the rain's thin drizzle.
      Drawn one toward the other
      wolf and moon speak with fluency,
      and celibacy, that pact
      between solitude and the startled glance,
      is both primal and perennial
      and what appears to be refusal
      is a conversation already entwined
      with the lover.
      Now here’s Sproule:
      Celibacy is about engaging with the daily struggle and challenge of authentic sexual and relational growth joining with the divine creation, coming together from the same energy to birth universal life. Celibacy becomes the call to human uniqueness, the call to engage with the preferential option for relatedness.
      Elsewhere, the passages by poet and priest do not always match so seamlessly. But for any Island Catholic who ever had contact with Sproule as a practicing priest, the freshness of his self-critical outlook what some liked to call the spirit of the trickster, or playful dissenter comes rushing back with passages like this:
      I see God as a process, a critique by which I am ready again and again to discern the absolutizing trend in myself.
      Or this:
      I’ve discovered that life comes out of death, joy is contained within sorrow, emptiness, nothingness can be rebirth and we can celebrate it.
      Many readers will not know that, in recent years, Sproule has been living with the “dark matter” of progressive dementia. The fact that McIntosh who first met Sproule in 1980 and became his assistant at St. Peter’s parish has lovingly preserved so many of his thoughts and ideas from correspondence, journals and articles, and presented them here beside her own work, seems a kind of poetic genius in itself. When darkness comes into light, the result can be a thing of beauty.

Daniel Gawthrop is the author of “The Trial of Pope Benedict: Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion, and Human Dignity” (Arsenal Pulp Press), excerpted in the previous edition of ICN.