Ajar by Margo LaPierre

Reviewed by Deborah-Anne Tunney

I have always felt poems in the confessional tradition to be the most generous. Their honesty demands the poet takes the reader into their confidence and allows them to see something of the personal, culled from the poet’s own experiences. In this process, the reader’s perception is broadened, their empathy expanded.

In her remarkable book, Ajar: Trauma Explored and Transformed, Margo LaPierre has accomplished this feat with insight and acumen. My first and lasting impression of this collection is that it is fuelled by a powerful imagination, one determined to transform the trauma lived into a life enhancing rather than life-destroying force. Gratefully, this undertaking is done with the most haunting and gorgeous of language. Once read, it is difficult to forget LaPierre’s unique voice and perception.

Throughout the collection, she evokes again and again the idea of haunting, and in particular how she haunts herself. As an example, in this untitled poem:

when the transport truck went by with the passenger behind the cab, there was not an unknown ghost lost to the long road –

The schism here is that there are two entities, the poet who haunts, who recalls what has happened with an arbitrating intelligence and the entity who is haunted – one is drawn to suicide and her experienced psychosis, one writes about it. This process allows the poet to place the destructive essence into an order that isolates and strips it of its power.

The collection asks: what do we do with trauma? How do we assimilate it into a life? And the implicit answer she gives us is it can be used to fuel the making of art. Nietzsche famously wrote: “We have art in order to not die of the truth.” And we have poetry in order to acknowledge the outer realms of consciousness that are at the limits of what we can know. The poet takes us to that rim where we are privy to the wisdom and unique vision of psychosis. In her poem, “Window View from Childhood Bedroom After Betrayal,” LaPierre illustrates how the memory of an event stays with us, but if we are clever enough (as she is) it can be contained, redefined and used to create a truth that reaches a reader, linking them to a grander, wider definition of what it means to be human.

Thought’s edge, like a claw,

rankles morning’s paisley blanket

of the home to which I’ve retreated

Ending with:

Let’s paint these feelings into small frames

So we can move away with them, easily.

Yes, let’s do that so that the trauma can be contained in words which encapsulates meaning, but also leaves it in a place where we can carry it with us into another time and awareness. In effect, defusing its power to wound. In her poem “Chatoyant” she shares her altered perception of temporality when she writes:

I contain my past, present and future, existing simultaneously. I'm complete. I have access to all my timeline.

Life, she contends, is simultaneous and not experienced along a continuum, as it’s usually conceived. In this way, the past is accessible to the present and the poet’s experiences exist in relation to the many versions of self. With this self-haunting comes the mirror world of art, with its ability to explain and simplify. At its heart, this collection and the imagination of LaPierre is generous and life inspiring, even when the topic is its opposite.

Listen to the beauty of these words from her poem ‘The Forest’

is never like glass

except in winter,

when it is inside us

crackling with a roughness

only trees know.

Can the reader think of anything other than the pure joy of existence when reading them, of communion with a forgiving nature, one that is all encompassing, including the heights of mental turmoil? This sense is what LaPierre gifts to us. Ultimately, this collection renders the pain the poet has felt, and which she still carries with its incumbent meaning, chaos, but ultimately, its transcendence, and finally, its redemption.

Ajar is published by Guernica Editions.