Yield by Jaime Forsythe (Wolsak & Wynn/Buckrider Books, 2026)

Long poems aren't common in Canada. I think of Sharon Thesen, Dave McFadden, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt. There are more of course but not a whole whack of them really. Perhaps the book length poem is viewed as less likely to be published? Certainly as harder to submit to periodicals or competitions than shorter lyrics. 

Jaime Forsythe's third publication doesn't care about this irrelevancy. Yield's musical couplets enact a fusion, slanted towards the gentle surreal, of the land and the body as it mothers and struggles with postpartum discombobulations in which all she can "offer is song." I read this book by the ocean off Bowen Island and again in my Edmonton garden. The way Forsythe sees the world reminded me of how Sharon Olds transformed metaphors of divorce in Stag's Leap. She defamiliarizes the common experience of motherhood, the less acknowledged one of postpartum depression and alienation. Connections are rampantly made between the Maritimes coastline, her healing flesh, her children's tangibilities or even to the constructed world she inhabits. So blinds are a "cartilage" while the baby's hand is "starfished" and drool is a "tide." The postnatal body's stitches dissolve in their "wet forest" and exercise is urged so one does not succumb to the "root cellar." Powerful statements like "Fair: I matter but I don't" and "How we needed each other in the flood" and "Let today not be our only chance" embed themselves within delicious descriptors like "Basalt frowns sag from cliffs,/gypsum bearded with buttercup" and aural fireworks such as "I want to be the guest of asters" and "I read lichens live on the world's leavings." I recollected Basil Bunting's most resonant passages in Briggflatts at times. 

Occasional cliches bubble up such as the "clouds" of mosquitoes and "ringing" ears, and one segment feels misplaced where the speaker goes to the "after hours club/of the ocean floor" with its "man-god/bouncer" and the "bathroom lineup/shaped like an eel." I suppose it reads like it's trying too hard to extend the metaphor (though I liked other attempts to do so such as the one featuring the "boat son" and "Mom boat.") But these are quibbles (which, truly, one is allowed to mention) and the stirring trance of Yield rarely lifts, surging its sonorities, its ecological consciousness that far too often we humans are "crushing something that didn't deserve it" and that our stay on this planet is tentacle-quick; we only "live here today but could easily/wake in a cave or go back in time to a drain." The months after giving birth may carry multiple kinds of turmoil and pain, but they also enable Forsythe's sinking into permeability, the awareness that "Natural forces work/away at us, collect our sediment" until "the edge begins to relent" and we understand more about being in the now of here. 



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