Libélula Dragonfly: you can have roots and wings too by Donna Allard

A Poetry Review by John Oughton

Donna Allard is a New Brunswick poet who has issued several collections. She mentions as influences both Canadian icons like Al Purdy and Milton Acorn and, more generally the Beat poets. In fact, she was named Beat Poet Laureate for Canada for 2019-29 by the National Beat Poetry Foundation.

So, before looking at her new book it might be useful to ask what, exactly, defines a beat writer. Historically, it was the group of writers who befriended Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and shared a similar approach to literature. They also had in common a quest for transcendent experiences outside the bounds of conventional society. Robert Inchausti, in Hard to Be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats, wrote: “To be beat is to live a spiritual (i. e. cultural) life in a civilization increasingly deaf to its own ideals – a civilization gaining in worldly power but losing its character and its soul.”

More lyrically, Allen Ginsberg explained, “Everybody [is] lost in a dream world of their own making. That was the basis of the Beat Generation. That was the primary perception. The idea of transience of phenomenon – the poignant Kewpie-doll dearness of personages vanishing in time.”

Donna Allard’s website tells us poetically that she

“resides down a long dirt road
and lives in a 1909 homestead
where muses fill her world
with flowing visual poetry.”

To the Beats’ spiritual and experimental tendencies and consciousness of transience, Allard adds a strong sense of place. Poems in her new collection like “war musket grasses (bay of fundy)” and “acadian rose” anchor her voice in southern New Brunswick.

Many of the poems in Libélula Dragonfly surprise the reader with a sudden twist or insight, like a dragonfly (libélula is Spanish for the insect) taking off and hovering. “Grape Notes” which at first seems an exercise in writing for fun after a few glasses of wine, does this, going from the mundane to:

better a pen and wine
       under stars
       under sheets
       under a lover
life has no room for shame.

Another poem, “shorthand,” has a similarly explosive effect, ending with:

the forensic true self with arms outstretched
capturing an unborn thought
the static universal language
bombarding the natural word play
of everything around us.”

There’s some clever experimentation with symbols like the repeated tildes and circumflexes in “island,” and with spacing, fragmented lines conveying the feeling of a “blasted” mind in “having a nuclear Monday.”

Overall, the collection is a bit uneven. I found some of the odes to other writers not as strong as the more personal poems, and it could have had better proofreading, as the punctuation is inconsistent. But there’s enough of the freedom, playfulness, and soulfulness of Beat poetry to make this a book well worth enjoying.

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About the Author

Donna Allard A.K.A Acadianrose resides in Beaurivage, New Brunswick, Canada, down a long dirt road in a 1909 homestead where muses fill her world with flowing visual poetry.

About the Reviewer

John Oughton lives in Toronto and has retired as a Professor of Learning and Teaching at Centennial College in Toronto. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Universe and All That (Ekstasis Editions), the mystery novel Death by Triangulation, and over 400 articles, reviews and interviews. John’s studies include an MA in English Literature, where his teachers included Irving Layton, Frank Davey, Eli Mandel and Miriam Waddington, and non-credit courses at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he worked with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs and Robert Duncan. John is a long-time member of the Long Dash Poetry Group. He is also a photographer and guitar player.  https://joughton.wixsite.com/author

Book Details

• 60 pages softcover

• Canadian Beat Scene Publishing

• ISBN 9781989573013