Preview
THE SINK HOUSE
Julia Williams
Thursday, October 28
McNally Robinson
Writing about the weather intrigues Julia Williams. So much so, in fact, that natural disaster has become a key element in her love poetry.
Her first book The Sink House is, among other things, the story of an unassuming Calgary suburban house’s stalled love affair with an alluring Oxfordshire riverbank. Both natural disaster and their distance apart humorously affect their relationship.
"I started writing these poems one December when I was visiting a friend who lives in Oxford, half a block from the Thames," says the Calgary poet and writer during a telephone interview from another watery place – Niagara Falls.
"There was bad flooding in England that year, and the night I arrived we spent the evening carrying furniture and rugs upstairs and watching firemen and neighbours wade down the street," she recalls. "I can pinpoint the beginning of the book because the flooding in Oxford happened in December 2000. That's when I began making the flood poems."
Williams says some of the poems she wrote then have made it intact into The Sink House – just published by Toronto’s Coach House Books – while others in the collection are so new, they are only a few months old.
Williams built the book around the image of a house gradually being overcome by water, at the same time challenging the well-worn metaphor linking love to a flood of emotion. Williams describes the work as a series of self-contained poems that echo and contradict each other.
"I'm interested in narrative in poetry, especially disjointed narrative that emerges when you rewrite images again and again," she says of her process. "It's like taking a thousand snapshots of the same room, but never from the same place. A reader should be able to open the book at any point and read it in any direction or any order, and still pick up the same sense of narrative."
Climate affects the narrative of The Sink House in a similar way to its affects on a natural disaster.
"I can't imagine The Sink House being staged anywhere else," says Williams. "I lived in Oxford for a while around the time I turned 20. I was homesick for Calgary, and when I returned to Calgary, I was homesick for England.… To me, the connection between the two cities is significant – both are built on rivers and named for water. Yet they're opposites: Oxford is mildew, vines and books; Calgary is dust, sun and ice. The Thames and the Bow couldn't be more different."
There is much humour to Williams’s poems, with descriptions of floating furniture, sandbags for dinner, Calgary’s cul-de-sacs and glacial dust, and flushing toilets. As her poem "five drownings" wryly states, "Sure a person can drown in a half an inch of water, but an ocean makes it easy."
"It's a book about a flood and a love affair – both of which can be pretty funny," Williams says. "At heart, I think The Sink House is a book about memory, and memory is unavoidably absurd. The goal of poetry is to create an elemental experience out of an arbitrary system of signs – this is how the arbitrary system of signs grows and becomes more interesting and useful. The ability to perceive absurdity is among the most elemental and fundamental of human experiences. It's at least as powerful as love, fear and anger, and that's what makes it a handy poetic tool." |
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