By Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen, Winnipeg Free Press
In the introduction to Medium (Book*hug, 160 pages, $20), her latest collection of poems and vidas, Johanna Skibsrud imagines the voice as a “bridge between the known and the unknown, between subjective perspective and whatever the subject is not.” Skibsrud inhabits the voices of women from the ancient and mythological to the modern, exploring the oracular mode, where a subject’s voice both is and is not her own.
The vidas that accompany the poems are a play on a medieval form that dates from the troubadours and, in a collection of so many personnae, provide a welcome orientation. When, for example, Skibsrud writes of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna in Memory is a Blazing Thing, she uses the vida to introduce the doubt that the speaker is, in fact, that Anastasia.
The poem, rendered in two columns, plays on this question of identity. In the left-justified column, memory “doesn’t wish to/ preserve anything, but instead// to consume, even to/ extinguish itself.” In the centre-justified column, suggestions at memories and connections to the unknown past emerge. Here, the speaker seeks recognition from the memory of her uncle, asking “Does he see me/ coming?// Does he recognize/ me, now?”
In this poem, and throughout the collection, Skibsrud uses the relation between the vida and the accompanying poem to create inviting mysteries that propel the collection and emphasize the capaciousness of Skibsrud’s thought.