Review of Camille Martin’s ‘Sugar Beach’ — above/ground press $4
By Jack Goodall
Torontonian, Camille Martin started the
decade with a prolific run of books, chapbooks and magazine publications as
well as her collage work. In her new collection Sugar Beach she further
develops her distinctive style and captivating, flighty approach. With
allusions to music and performance art, Martin charts a series of sensations
with language that suggests the fleeting and sensual. In the case of "More Jars
Than Lids," the anatomy of a plant and it’s growth are presented in tumultuous
humanistic terms through a free fall of kinetic verbs.
This
insular human perspective emerges in other poems, in which Martin almost
feverishly compiles imagery, which though consistently interesting, at times
appears overly busy. No image is dwelt upon for too long before identifying an
existential problem. Martin is far more interested in the extraordinary than the
everyday and there is a distinct reoccurring discrepancy between reality and
the imagined object or self, between how we see and how we’d like to see. When
speaking of the fantastic or undeniably beautiful, she never lessens her
analytical powers. A comic strip hero is portrayed as “the petulant rebel,
brute strength exceeded only by the capacity to whine.”
Martin’s
references to different artistic mediums in many of the Sugar Beach poems
suggest a life not lived but imagined through art. In "Ddoppelgänger Lament," she portrays herself as a detective who, perhaps through her intellect, is
entirely without mystery, continously covering “already- solved swindles” and
living “a life of unbroken crime.” As with the superhero in "Requerimento" and the birds of "Birdless," Martin writes in
terms of reality impregnated with human cynicism that seems modern and
unromantic. But the combination of the sacred and human is the key to Martin’s
originality and is perhaps at its best demonstrated in the melting Antarctica
of "Endless Regressions of Heavens." It’s an involving , beautiful and unnerving
piece.
