Sonnet’s Shakespeare
Sonnet’s Shakespeare
By Sonnet L’Abbé
Penguin Random House, 2019; 192 pages; $21
Reviewed by Kevin Spenst
Glasses are good reminders that we all read through lenses of one sort or another. Sonnet’s Shakespeare has us rereading all 150 of the bard’s sonnets as though they were a series of eye-charts whilst a phoropter of varying themes clicks back and forth over our gaze. Through the changing lenses of history, capitalism (“a phallic economy”), pop culture, patriarchy, blackness, feminist kill-joyism, and the Indigenous lands upon which the work was written, we squint and focus on the legacy of Shakespeare (the bro-ism of Bardism) and begin to see the “spirit of gorgeous conversation and charity” from other centres outside the canon. Spreading the letters out from each of Shakespeare’s original sonnets, L’Abbé adds her own words between and with the original text in a process of trans-erasure. When it gets hard to focus, close your eyes and listen.
A multiplicity of voices, discourses, and registers interact throughout Sonnet’s Shakespeare from the buried text of Shakespeare itself, which frames each work conceptually in a rethinking of history, authority, and authorship, to the slang and high diction that L’Abbé plays over the page. “What lord solicits nuptials? Who needs consent to untie the cockblocking strings? Chattel need to loosen up and quit the hysterics.” In placing contemporary phrases next to the archaic, L’Abbé shows how the sexism of yore still rings familiar in contemporary ears. “Threading culture through Shakespeare,” the author (among the many discursive paths) both “follow[s] a story back to guesthood on this land” and the Amerindian Carib tones that “nuff nuff be ring in me hed steady na.”
According to the “Index of Entry points” at the end of the book, “Sonnet 3” starts with Wickaninnish, a chief of the Tla-o-qui-aht people on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The poem itself begins with the lines, “I open books, looking for empathy. I find Douglas firs, sand, stellar jays, first languages echoing in English faces.” Here we have an opening up of the very concept of language to include animals, plants, and elements of the natural world. “Mowachaht, how is the first time these Latin sea-farers anchored offshore? You can feel words forming beneath ground.” The First Nations of the west coast of Vancouver Island are asked “how” not “when,” in a move away from the western pre-occupation with dates and time to an empathic movement towards “how.” Within this approach, we enter into this moment of contact with a deeper sense of how the land beneath the First Nations (and the people themselves) will soon be divided under a Latinate and legal framework. Later in the poem, “offshore, islands like selves no man is, are fabled in the Vancouvering. First contact is a story some peoples ghostwrote, interlocking story the arrivers Vancouvered, Alberted, Thompsoned, and Sidneyed.” In a syntactical reversal of John Donne, the poem walks us backwards into the past, a period that saw the decimation of ninety per cent of Native populations. A more accurate historical name for the period would acknowledge that apocalypse, but these historical categories are coined by the colonizers and while it was a time of colonial conquest and naming, by turning nouns into verbs, L’Abbé unmoors us from the inevitability and certitude of these historical narratives. Vancouvering is an ongoing process of colonization and an erasure of lives and identities, but language itself (in an echo and critique of the national anthem) “stands unguarded” and resistance can happen within the structure of English.
Among the impressive feats throughout Sonnet’s Shakespeare is the thematic building that crescendos in sonnets #84 to #88, which hold action points for restitution with Indigenous peoples in Canada. Not your typical book of poetry in any respect. The words of American poet and scholar Fred Molton could serve as a description of L’Abbe’s entire project: “the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton.” In other words, Sonnet’s Sonnet’s Shakespeare is an echoing bomb. You’ll see. »