KIM TRAINOR began writing poetry in the spring of 2009. Over the years she has worked at a campus radio station, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, a biomedical library, and is currently a sessional lecturer at UBC. Her poetry has won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and has also appeared in the 2013 Global Poetry Anthology and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2014. She lives in Vancouver.
About this book
At the heart of Karyotype is the Beauty of Loulan, a woman who lived four thousand years ago, her body preserved in the cool, dry sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Karyotype’s poems range from the title sequence, which explores the DNA and woven textiles of this woman and her vanished people (a karyotype is the characteristic chromosome complement of a species), to the firebombing of the National Library of Sarajevo, from an abecedarian hymn on the International Red Cross “Book of Belongings” to the experience of watching the televised invasion of Iraq in the dark of a Montreal night. The Beauty of Loulan becomes a symbol of the ephemerality of human genetic and cultural texts, and of our chances for survival.
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to the editors of the journals where some of these poems first appeared: Grain, Contemporary Verse 2, The Antigonish Review, Existere, Event, Qwerty, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and Prairie Fire. “Russian notebook: Voronezh 1935–1937” was awarded Second Place in The Antigonish Review’s 2012 Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest. “Cradle song: Six variations” won The Fiddlehead’s 22nd Annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. “Nothing is lost” was a co-winner of the 2013 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2014.
To Sylvia Legris for her generous encouragement of my work while she was editor of Grain.
To my editor Don McKay, for his close reading of Karyotype and many inspired suggestions, including those for the final ordering of the manuscript.
To everyone at Brick—Kitty, Barry, Alayna, Nick, Sue, and Marijke—who helped make this book.
And to my small band of humans.
Field notes: Arras 1917
I reach for you in the dark.
Tap of rain on the skylight.
My fingers graze concaved skin
drawn over chiselled spine.
You are hollowed out
like the bones of hedge-sparrows
and larks and chinking blackbirds.
No man’s land is written over
in your cramped hand.
The enemy’s plane is a pale moth
amongst shrapnel bursts.
Shells into Beaurains all night
like starlings coming home.
Your orchard dugout
is fledged with yarrow
and any day now you will take
the old grey-green track
that silvers no man’s land,
the old country way to Arras.
*
Artillery wakes me,
a shell-burst of lightning
and the drag of thunder.
The night flaps like a great sail
(in the chrysalis of sleep rain falls
on the blackened arms
of the quince, gashed
with small petalled mouths
and skinned with green).
*
At dusk the magnolia blooms
are strung on bare wood
like paper lanterns
across the bruised sky
or the clothes women hang to dry
on barbed entanglements.
*
My son comes to me
when I’m reading, takes out
the Monarch butterfly
he brought home crumpled
in his pocket.
Its papery wings lift
with our breath.
When I return to my book
dried glue sifts down its spine
into my cupped hand.
*
Your youngest daughter wrote
that the pages of your diary
were curiously ridged
like the scallops of a seashell.
This Walker’s Back-Loop pocket-book
carries the only mark of your death.
I don’t understand
why you went to France.
*
In my dream
where there is no song
no lark or thrush
I bring to your grave
a bleached snail shell
and the roots
of a wild cherry.
Ash
For example, when Serbian nationalists in the hills circling Sarajevo
firebombed the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina
1.5 million books burned
including the card catalogues, all bibliographic trace
including the archives of the Serbian poet Aleksa Šantić
and the Croatian poet Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević.
A few books were saved, carried by hand, and a few,
the sun veiled in a pall of grey from their burning,
could still be read one last time as pages floated down,
black letters burning on grey.
You could, it is said,
catch them in your hand like snowflakes
and read the words as they melted to ash.
“In the long hours of darkness, Baghdad shakes to the constant low rumble of B-52s”
In a hotel room by the Tigris a man writes.
A jar with a clutch of flowers trembles
on the windowsill as the air pressure drops,
while out in the desert
soldiers hide in furrows of night.
A pale red stain appears—
its penumbra blooms
and is extinguished.
The man writes about the war,
about the smell of burnt flesh
along the road north of Nasiriyah,
about this dark sound.
The air pressure drops again. A tremor
runs through the water in the jar,
the thin stalks, the petals.
Membrane of ice on the windows of this room in Montreal.
I cup my hands, peer into the television’s blue cave, and see
pale slivers of tracer fire in the desert,
missiles scattered like black seeds,