Barbara Nickel
“Salmon Cove
Point” was an experiment in form; I used an abab
rhyme pattern over three-line stanzas instead of the usual quatrains, a form I
first discovered in Walcott’s Omeros.
In my musical training, I’d long ago learned the technique of playing
contrasting rhythms simultaneously – i.e. a duple meter against a triple one –
and although I was working “three against four” in stanza/rhyme rather than
rhythm, I still found it to yield interesting content.
A push and pull,
a tug-of-war, grew as I wrote the poem, between the wild and fluid wind and
waves of a rugged Newfoundland landscape, and the measured and methodical
building of a medieval castle; between a construction of the mind and the
realistic detail of an actual house and landscape; between a desire for
ultimate control and protection and a desire to render oneself utterly
defenseless in death.
There’s a tug,
too, in the slant rhyme used at the ends of lines – consonantal pairs such as
“hauled/holes”, “required/quarry”, and “glass/trusses” give a slight friction
of vowels that to me embodies a feeling of impermanence. Nothing is quite
fixed; mind is constantly battling matter, there is no rest until the last
line, when a woman is driven off a cliff to finally become one with the wind
and the waves.
Links to other
work:
http://coteau.unibase.com/index.htm (Follow links to “Awards” and “Books by
Genre”)
http://www.beachholme.bc.ca/ya/grain.htm
http://www.sumachpress.com/swnann.htm