Literary / Arts
What The Dead Want by Paulette Claire Turcotte
Krysia Jopek
Volume 34 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: July 5, 2020
The poems in What the Dead Want, Paulette Claire Turcotte’s debut full-length book of poetry, are richly multi-textured; gathering a chorus of desperate, often disassociated voices that span ancient times through contemporary experience: the ghosts of the dead, the poet's own personal, emotional vision and transcription of the material and spiritual world.
In this stunning 168-page book of poetry, literary and visual artist Turcotte weaves her poems together in three sections, “Remembering and Forgetting,” “Letters from the Asylum,” and “Songs of Love and Death”. Her hauntingly beautiful visual art adorns the book's cover and interlaces the three sections, or “movements,” of poetry.
The poems in What the Dead Want, Paulette Claire Turcotte’s debut full-length book of poetry, are richly multi-textured; gathering a chorus of desperate, often disassociated voices that span ancient times through contemporary experience: the ghosts of the dead, the poet's own personal, emotional vision and transcription of the material and spiritual world.
In this stunning 168-page book of poetry, literary and visual artist Turcotte weaves her poems together in three sections, “Remembering and Forgetting,” “Letters from the Asylum,” and “Songs of Love and Death”. Her hauntingly beautiful visual art adorns the book's cover and interlaces the three sections, or “movements,” of poetry.
All is present in the articulation of the absent, the lost, the abandoned, those in pain, those who no longer have a voice. What the Dead Want offers the reader a eulogistic experience of witnessing the dead, the death in life, are coming to terms with our own mortality and spiritual identities; the essential reclaiming of the immortality of our souls that art makes possible.
Turcotte dedicates the collection of poems to her two deceased grandmothers and to Sister Kathleen Lyons, a Jungian analyst. The poems are in conversation with them, with all the dead, with history, and with the living, those who are left with their memories of the dead and the knowledge of the transitory nature of our conscious experience in the material world.
The poems also inhabit the unconscious world, the Jungian collective unconscious, and the reality of dreams. The stunning preface to “Part One Remembering and Forgetting,” written in prose poetry ends:
when the waves smack the rock, there is a precise moment, just before the wave turns back on itself, that is like the moment of death. It is like the death between the inbreath and outbreath, that split second when there is no breath, where the breath is deciding whether it will stay or go. That is what humans feel and this is what gives them anguish. There is an ancient memory in humans that is connected to this ebbing and flowing. All life comes and goes here. This is why I love the sea. It gives and takes. It arrives, and leaves. As lovers do. (15)
What the Dead Want also pays homage to the kinetic life of language a presence in our consciousness, a medium that is native, ancestral, cultural—yet foreign at times; meanings are often cloudy, obfuscated by resonant, subjective language and linguistic, poetic construction. The poetic prose preface of “Letters from the Asylum” begins with “the Harvesting of Words: verbs, nouns, speech, lexes, lanugae, graffiti— yes. In this middle section of Turcotte's triptych, the poet meditates on language, the poets medium, and the making of art, literary and visual. In the third section of the poem “things do not happen,”
Turcotte writes of “light” that “spreads quickly—a touch equivalent to language, rolled away from my recollection and dropping into the fog of distant memory, this was madness, eating holes in my flesh“ (21).
The theme of Madness is threaded through the book. Section 10 of “Benediction (30 days in the asylum)” reads, “I am a muscle, an eel, a fish, I am a heart, a woman / the lunatic forum for the marginalized” (81). The persona of What the Dead Want, though lyrical is not merely the personal “I” of the poet; the identity of the poet, as evidenced in these lines.
Throughout the sequence of poems, the identity of the poem shifts, taking on many forms to speak on behalf of the dead, the mad, the marginalized, those burdened with sorrows, Laden with age and memory.
In “visions at the edge of time,” the persona proclaims,
I am a blind woman entering the landscape of sunrise,
reaping a harvest of light. Against all this, there is a sanctified
plentitude, eucharist, nefarious gods dizzy with Mead, running
through the catacombs of the heart where the Saints are still in hiding.
And the dark Angel squats over the lava fields. (137)
Questions also figured prominently in What the Dead Want; The poet asking the reader provocative, open-ended questions. “Part One: Remembering and Forgetting” ends with, “what happened in the garden? / what of the sleeping child? / will she waken? / will she remember her name?” (64 ) In “the voice,” the poet asks,
and who counts the exiles, wanderers, the maimed and cornered,
the hungry, who counts the children drowned at sea
who, who names them, who marks their watery graves,
who counts the dead children in the cold cities, the northern
provinces, dead by their own hand
what is the color of hope
of absence (90)
In the third section of What the Dead Want, “Songs of Love and Death”,m the persona attests, “there is no / forgetting, and memory waxes brilliant, what is it to ask water for life / of the saviours of God? And words, words pulled from the dark / become a clear and intimate rite” (120). This “rite”, the reader’s experience of the poem that unfolds in time like music, is the rite of passage that ends with aesthetic catharsis, spiritual awakening.
What the Dead Want offers readers a beautiful, yet haunting read; an experience of the sublime rendered in the poet’s medium of language, woven with the language and imagery of dream, memory, and emotional experience. Turcotte gives voice to the dead, the missing, the marganalized, those filled with sorrow and terror who struggle to create hope through art. It’s a beautiful collection of poems that leaves the reader wanting to see what Turcotte publishes next.
Krysia Jopek is the Founding Editor of Diaphonous Press and the author of “Maps and Shadows” and “Hourglass Studies”.
Krysia Jopek