Review
A PAINTED ELEPHANT
Jill Hartman
Coach House Books, 106 pp.
Calgary’s Jill Hartman writes with utter confidence, deliberately giving her book a silly premise that could have been disastrous for a lesser poet.
A Painted Elephant is the story of a Dutch elephant that escapes nightly from the Calgary Zoo to rendezvous with her lover, the wooden Maytag repairman on 9th Avenue S.E. The affair ends badly, but not before Hartman has a chance to weave a sensual mesh of words that is at once playful, seductive and articulate. It is also a deft, intelligent examination of the long poem, both exploiting and challenging that form.
Hartman includes epigraphs and references to some of the most established practitioners of the Canadian long poem – such as Robin Blaser, Roy Kiyooka and Robert Kroetsch – but instead of imitating their examples, she incorporates their ideas to produce a text that critiques its own form. The conventional long poem resists closure; Hartman does not. She gives her narrative an ending, but uses the text to explore ideas of movement, transformation and non-linearity. The text – much like a pile of photographs scattered across the floor – is contained but open, a narrative that depends on disorder. The elephant, unwieldy and awkward yet graceful and powerful, becomes an allegory for the form itself.
A Painted Elephant may be a clever, serious book of poetry, but it is also unapologetically fey. Hartman is playful, pairing seemingly incompatible artistic sources: German opera with Nina Simone, Ganesh with Hecate, mysticism with pig Latin, blazon with found poetry, Victorian Orientalism with contemporary journalism. The result is an intricate, gleeful conversation between eras, ideas and characters.
The pachyderm is traced back through the centuries, applying its mythic and iconographic significance to the lonely elephant that dances across the Calgary rooftops and admires the Maytag man’s oaken thighs. It is a romantic story set in a vivid Calgary landscape and populated by characters whose whimsy, rather than making them absurd, gives them pathos. Nor is Hartman content to produce "prairie poetry;" instead, she sets her narrative firmly in Inglewood, one of Calgary’s oldest and most urban neighbourhoods.
A Painted Elephant is a meditation on emancipation, love, geography and poetics. It is also a charming, silly story about a passionate elephant and a wooden man. It is rare to read a debut book of poetry that is so accessible, bold and good. This one is exceptional.
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