by Susan Musgrave,

Autumn 2001

 

The Chick at the Back of the Church

by Billie Livingston

Nightwood Editions, Harbour Publishing

$16.95

 

One poet I discovered early on in my writing career--along with Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath-- was Randall Jarrell. His definition of a poet is one who spends a lifetime standing out in thunderstorms, waiting to be hit by lightning. It doesn't often happen that one reads poetry and feels struck by lightning but when it does -- when the skin horripilates, the mouth goes dry, and you feel (as Rilke put it) the past breaking out in your heart, you know this is poetry. Billie Livingston's The Chick at the Back of the Church (Nightwood $16.95) is this rare, lightning-striking kind of poetry. The title poem, the first in the collection (and my favourite) is written in an in-your-face kind of voice that leaves you licking splinters of broken rosary beads out of your hands: "Can't help looking back through sermons/at those lips swollen like they've been slapped, /I think that's how you get them all/like how momma birds play wrecked for cats-- everyone loves a victim."

 

You've got to love the persona in these poems, but a victim she ain't. Livingston's world is one where a masturbator sits on a child's small swing in the park, "jeans undone, smiling, jerking;" a hippy-babysitter offers her LSD when she is four and she survives to write about it: everything that doesn't kill her makes her stranger. There are poems about Children's Aid coming, the kids surrounded by empties on the floor. There's the mother who chews gum like it's sex, a mother who makes her daughter promise she'll do two things if she ever find her dead: put her false teeth back in her mouth, get the dildo out of the house. This is Livingston's first book of poems, following the publication of her first novel, Going Down Swinging.