Happinesswise: Poems
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About this ebook
Bennetts artistry lies in his ability to create poems that shatter complacency with bricks of loaded language. emQuill Quire/em on emCivil and Civic/em/p pHow are you doing, happinesswise? This is the unifying thread, the casual-sounding but slant and penetrating question posed by these poems as they interrogate what we tell ourselves about happiness, about its opposite, and about ourselves in the process./p pemHappinesswise/em is both cacophony and chorus: its the voices of palliative patients and physicians, and the place where the dream state of a young pregnant woman clashes with the online reality of daily life. Its personal too: a suite explores a five-year period of Bennetts autistic sons childhood, charting a journey of love and misunderstandings, of anxiety and celebration as the wonders of neurodiversity unfold./p pThere are elegies too. And confessional poems, like On the Occasion of Her Swearing In, where Bennett witnesses up close his friends remarkable transition from Afghan refugee and grassroots activist to member of parliament and cabinet minister. Other poems demarcate the gaps (literal and less so) found every day in rural Ontario, or consider personal, political, and cultural history within a series of loops and twists./p
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Book preview
Happinesswise - Jonathan Bennett
Happinesswise
Poems
Jonathan Bennett
for Haley
Contents
Palliative Care Reflective Portfolio
Patient No. 1
Patient No. 2
Patient No. 3
Concession Lines Signs
Unassumed Road
Vegetarians Use the Back Door
Traffic Calming Ahead
Fresh Cut Fries
Free Metal Drop Off
Third Concession Line
Neurotypical Sketches
Now We Are Six and Sure
They Will Take My Island
His Charge
Sunrise with Sea Monsters
In Relief
On Occasion
Notes After Fort Worth
Notes After Glasgow
On the Occasion of Her Swearing In
Audley Elegy
Let Me Speak Softly of Two Days
Analogue Analogies
Loggerheads
Manual
Reasonable Assurance
Comply or Explain
Swallow the Toad of Disgust
After St. Ignatius
Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Bad Government
Happinesswise
Notes and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Palliative Care Reflective Portfolio
Patient No. 1
Do I? Admit to the neighbour I need help?
She’ll offer impatience, weak Earl Grey.
So instead I admit myself, impatiently,
thrown into that time-worn, off-grey ward
whose Hospitalists chart my chest rattle.
I suffer no fear. I am the recipient
of patient-centred, evidence-based care.
This promise made to me all alone,
on a wipe-able poster that’s reinforced
by a tenderly chosen stock photo paired
with a font inspired by Cézanne’s cursive.
I curse the machine drone, the urine sting,
the sour C. diff smell, the pump throb,
the infection control, latex-free signage.
Only last March, the lake icy, gin and tonics,
tinkling wind chimes, your still-beautiful clavicle.
I presented to the ER with severe pain
in my lower—well, does it really matter
where this began? Things have evolved.
Let’s keep up, I say. But he taps my gut.
Read the chart, I bark. He does, mumbles
left flank. I am deemed incapacitated.
Last summer I was myself. That recently,
really, independent, with plans in place.
I golfed. Was a snow bird. I hear this,
my diminished life as a chart note,
a biography no one considered worthy—
is it ever too late for morbid thoughts?
You dear, are elsewhere, gone in that
peculiar way—off the wall, in a facility
with advanced dementia. At the lake
last summer your dress removed one