Wake-Pick Poems (1981)

The year 1981 is not among the more resonant years in recent history. Of course stuff happened in 1981, indeed everything happened in 1981, as it does every year, but it is not a year where many of us are prone to say, Oh, that was the year the AIDS virus was identified, or the year the word "Internet" was first uttered, or the year the UK, under the government of Margaret Thatcher, began the privatization of nationalized industries, or the year the Iran Hostage Crisis ended, or the year of the general strike in Poland, the first flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, Post It Notes ...

For those in Canadian literary circles, 1981 saw the launch of Icelandic-Canadian poet Kristjana Gunnars's Wake-Pick Poems (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1981), which I picked up yesterday at Pulp Fiction Books. How nice to finally add this book I have looked for for so long to another of my companion books -- Gunnars's Settlement Poems 1 (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1980). What is a wake-pick? A wake-pick is a small stick used by Icelandic women to keep their eyes open while knitting. Historically, to fall asleep while knitting is to fall behind on a quota designed for their very survival. 

Here are lines 15-24 from Gunnars's "wake pick 1":

tonight again I pretend

to be salt

i separate myself again

fine from coarse

die another death tonight

 

& when I’m dead

i turn to knotweed on the knolls

to starlings in the rain

i turn to blood, hair, bone

i turn to stone