Midway by Kayla Czaga

Midway

by Kayla Czaga

House of Anansi, 2024; 82 pages; $21.99

Reviewed by Heidi Greco

If there’s a single poem that speaks on behalf of the rest this book, it’s the long (ten pages) one, “The power of Love.” As with many of Kayla Czaga’s poems, place is an important element, seeing her move in the various sections of the piece from South Africa to London, to a train car in Southern

Ontario, then to Vegas, and finally, to the land of dreams, a place where so many matters come together, including the death of her father. His death (as well as that of her mother, whose memory is knotted up mainly in a poem about macramé) constitutes the pith of the book. He in particular is here with her in so many forms — memories (“My father pours an old Style pilsener into his beer mug”), objects (“His Calgary Flames coffee mug”), and often even his ashes, whether stashed in an urn, “inside a glass paperweight” or, most amazingly, “into my mouth. . .”

She’s a poet who knows how to get our attention. And she accomplishes this with simple words and plain speaking, as in this from the aforementioned “power of Love”:

Going away
and having feelings
and writing them all down
is my job. As is standing
in rooms and reading
my feelings out loud
to strangers.

She goes on in this poem to let us know what her wife does, a more practical kind of work than hers, one that leads her to disparage her own job as one that’s less important, one that isn’t “helping people see / the world...”. Elsewhere, she readily admits some of her own flaws, “. . . the hundred consecutive / days you journalled about killing yourself.” Reflecting on an experience at a less-than-wonderful job, she offers “. . .what the apocalypse will look like. . . shining abandoned / shopping carts on cracked asphalt.”

But the work certainly isn’t all grimness or death, even when she’s writing a poem about Emily Dickinson and that old pal of hers, Death. Sometimes she seems to be the girl who rides with “. . . both feet on the dash. . .” watching “. . . the blur of trees...” or the one who wanted her “. . . own private Narnia, days-of-the-week socks, / and the indefinite cancellation of gym class.”

A time-travelling kind of poem, “Self-portrait with pizza pop” tracks memories of her life with vivid imagery while she heats junk food in the microwave: “The pizza pop rotates like a jewelry-box ballet dancer.” And as the oven does its countdown, so does her age. “I am five years old and these are my first-day-of-school / shoes, my sparkly name pencils. I am four, three. / I am two when I press the button. The cow says, Moo.”

Exhibiting similar structures, many of the poems are built upon tercets. but here the restrictions such forms present don’t seem forced or artificial, but rather are natural as breathing. Even in the midst of a prose poem, the tercet is evident:

Smoke doodled on the air
as my father’s cigarette
disintegrated in its crystal ashtray.

This is a highly personal book, with its focus on remembering her parents, people she clearly loved. Czaga’s feelings are most evident in the poems about her father, who comes across — bad habits and all — as a fully realized person. If she chooses to move into writing prose (and I have no reason to not expect this kind of departure from her), I suspect her father will serve as at least a model for a major character in such a work. In closing a poem about a fossil her father found, she offers these words: “I’ve written them down to prove they once lived.” May they live on.