There’s a snowstorm outside and I’m locked at home recovering from a harrowing tooth infection. It seems the only antidote to this particular type of bad mood is to curl up with tea and half a joint and read poetry.

I’m drifting away in a hazy frame of mind that blends pain and Tylenol 3 together with beautiful, melancholy swirl, half addled by the lack of sleep, the tossing and turning and throbbing in my head. All night, feverish and lonely, I kept thinking of all my dead friends. When I arose after a restless hell and put on the coffee, tears still bursting through, I looked in a mirror and thought, “Wow, girl, since when did you become such a big crybaby?”

Usually anything before ten p.m. is too early for blues, but while the comforting burble of the coffee perking promises a bit of clarity, I reach for the iTunes and crank up some Little Esther.

Esther Phillips was a blues star by age 15, distinguished by a strange, deeply haunting voice that holds nothing back of a tormented soul. I get chills down my spine, fresh goose bumps every time I listen to her stormy, intense, immense vocals. “I can stand a little rain,” she growls, opening her voice up so wide by the end, that she could ‘stand a little love’ I’m afraid I’m going to drown. Listening to Little Esther is like making love in the rain- or making love TO the rain. I picture her swaying in front of a microphone, eyes, closed and glossy-lidded, “I beg you, try me,” from my favourite piece, Try Me. Absolutely exquisite stuff, and my heart is breaking, shattering into a thousand pieces, which feels like home, because though I keep my heart taped up just nicely and functionally, too, thank you, it’s really just a disguise.  This morning is more like the real thing. “If the sun should tumble from the sky….”

At the top of a handful of slender Canadian poetry selections I’d picked up was Domain, a new volume by B.C. poet Barbara Nickel. I wasn’t familiar with her work, but I’d heard of The Gladys Elegies, and given that much of my own work might be elegiac, I planned to read whatever I could find. Domain is what I found first.

You must pick up a copy and savour it, page by page, chew the words and taste them, surround yourself in their atmosphere.  This is wordier than, yet still somehow recalls, the concise vignettes of place of William Carlos Williams.

Indeed, the whole book is something of place, hence its title, Domain. And I’m hoping you’ll explore with Nickel the revelations and recollections of childhood places. But I’m only going to talk about one poem, or part of a poem, anyhow, called Graveyards. I had dreamed of them all night, after all, of my own personal ghosts sifting through the outstretched dendrite hands, the axons, to fill the stories of those half-wake dreams.

To My Cousin, this one is called. It starts out so abrupt. “Phone call. You’d died.” It’s clearly a call Barbara has been waiting for, one way or another.

“How many arms have held you?” Little Esther croons. “I really don’t want to know….” Was she high on heroin here? Esther’s remarkable life and unforgettable vocal anguish was something squeezed out of a lifelong heroin and alcohol addiction, from her late teens until she died just before 50.  Barbara Nickel uses music to mourn, too: she braves Mozart’s Requiem, which is carved into my psyche after the most haunting death scene in all of cinematic history, from Amadeus. “...my mind; thoughts of Mozart, how he’d left/at 35, this music incomplete, /They threw his body, bagged, into a pit.”

“I thought, what price, /desire,” she writes. I shiver, picturing exactly what she says: “and the precious/years slowly wasting your body.”

This bottomless, eerie grief she describes is relentless, but salvaged by a memory from her wedding: “…(I was honoured you’d come/at all), whispered that I was fucking beautiful.”

After Graveyards, I put Domain aside to finish later, and go over to the window and open it wide. The wind is howling and snow is drifting behind the building into the Don Valley. Months of tears I was loath to spend are unleashed: Esther is ferocious, imploring that we let her go. My cat leaps up on the sill, frantically pushing his little orange head against mine. And you could call it all nothing but a toothache, but poets know better. The air is filled with spirits: they are everywhere.

Domain by Barbara Nickel
Anansi Press, Toronto, 2007.