Points of departure
Wanda O'Connor
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Blue Tile : Vulpe's collection in two parts
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Local traveller-poet reveals a personal politics in his Spanish Notebook
Ottawa poet Nicola Vulpe's second full collection of poetry, Blue Tile, strikes a balance between the political and personal poetic, illustrates an assortment of Spanish notation, and transports the reader on an historical trip through the observations of a poet living in Spain. Spanish Notebook, the first section of Blue Tile, is thick with the tenor of foreign spaces. He told me recently the book is essentially travel poetry, involved with "the experience of [my] five years in Spain... the mythology of the Spanish Civil War." Of the second part, titled The Price of Transmigration, Vulpe said it "circles around and comes back ... to the same questions as Spanish Notebook." But reading Blue Tile leaves us uncertain how they tie together as a whole.
Clearly the first section is Spanish or politically focused, but neither travel nor the political bind it with the second. That said, it is a worthy collection with common elements among its parts, and one firmly rooted in the strength of conviction.
For instance, Vulpe draws us into his narrative based lyric through his use of subtleties and familiar threads. Tied together with poignant imagery, affecting moments come from phrases like in "How War was Declared": "We were busy, I suppose / with other matters," or in "The Price of Transmigration": "The lord was working the cash, a pencil behind his ear."
Vulpe's political proclivity provides for specific emphasis on geography and history within the collection, as in "This
Year 2001" where he writes: "In this year, named after a movie / and not yet quite ended / many things happened. // A few hundred species of mollusk went extinct // ... Palestinians threw stones / a few brought guests uninvited / to collective suicide events // ... A woman on Rideau Street / lay in the door of a bank / and howled for clean sheets and breakfast."Vulpe describes a state of being and places the common man in it. The language is so familiar that at times we are tempted to pass over segments that would benefit from a more diligent reading, as he sometimes appears to only brush the surface of a larger experience. However, depth can be found in a poem's immediacy. As the author states, "I don't think a poem should call attention to its language. If you're forced to look at the language you're going to miss the poem."
His straightforward personal-political dynamic is effectively captured in the poem "Epitaph for a Good Canadian" where he writes: "... and the car broke down and we had no cash / and we couldn't pay the cable / and we argued / and we bitched // and we didn't make payments / and were evicted... "
Vulpe may, in fact, be simply sharing moments as one does in a conversation, where intentional, fundamental messaging is not lost.
In the end, however, he is a man writing poems about the world he lives in and trying to affect that world. "These poems are not about me; maybe I even hide behind them," he told me. "They are, I hope, about the world, somehow making some bit of sense of tangled and troubled places, inside and out."
BLUE TILE
BY NICOLA VULPE
BUSCHEKBOOKS, 69 PAGES, $15
