Coat of Arms

Chris Tysh

I'm sure that if I saw what many other critics who have reviewed this book see in it, I'd hate it. Much is said of how Tysh takes the language of heraldry and recasts it into nonviolent feminist text. I don't know fom nonviolent feminism, so I've no earthly idea if this book succeeds on that level or not.

That said, the language of these compact prose poems is put together for sonic resonance rather than meaning (or so it seems to me, anyway), and most of the time Tysh comes through just fine on the sonic-resonance level. The stuff just plain sounds good. To wit:

What was the use of all these interdictions: sour milk,
denim, what ears in the quotidian drapery of a household.
Paraphrasing described as mulish becomes water carrying
the same number of objects which flow without difference,
so think it is a kind of roundel, modern tendency for orphan. Shock margin, their hands stagger to look like terracing poor land. Facts form tents for defeated soldiers
by the light of war. Supposedly this sitting and speaking
has a special status, granting the reader immediate possession,
folding table placed against logic, barely absent from its own
clutch and chatter. All he had wanted, make it every male,
spiked or dawning, arches over a single paragraph.
/The station- master's wife in her garden./

Very nice stuff, what? This is a volume you can just let wash over you. Read it aloud. Don't worry about puzzling out the meanings, just appreciate the way it all comes together.