The Art of Floating
Melanie Marttila’s poetry collection, “The Art of Floating,” burrowed into hollows of my human and feminine essence while reading, rooting down and planting seeds of validation and peaceful affirmation. The magnitude and scope of the range of topical exploration in this collection will most definitely connect with a variety of readers. The mastery of the writing craft and experimentation of language and form renders this collection an exquisitely compelling body of poetry. Organized into five segments, “The Art of Floating” documents and helps heal emotional and psychological wounds we cradle through the adversity of life.
Sudbury’s Melanie Marttila is a graduate from the University of Windsor’s master’s program in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, and Sulphur. Her short fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating Pups, and Home for the Howlidays. Her writing is grounded to the land, solitary walks with her dog while she turns her heart to the moon, and cups an ear to the sounds, or absence of, in nature. “The Art of Floating,” is a repertoire of poetry with some previously published pieces. I enjoyed reading through her endnotes that gave voice to and context of individual poems.
The underlining bedrock of Marttila’s poetry is an interconnectivity with the Earth’s movements. In moving together, there were other themes on domesticity and human relationships that were called on quietly that enables the entry into a sphere of intimacy between author and reader, a soft witnessing that leaves this text memorable. Disconnection and reconnection in motherhood is explored as well as the longing for someone, another human layer of absence that is typically overlooked or taken for granted. For instance, the domestic residue of the spaces we retreat to connect with those who are gone- “in the comfortable part of the mattress/ where it learned to accommodate you.” This intimacy and encountering the ordinary and often overlooked nooks of our living, enables the reader to follow through Marttila’s voice that allows not just an opportunity for the reader to watch or observe, but to slide in and feel out what it is like to move with nature and work through deep-seeded emotions.
The most resounding layers of this collection speak to an inner feminine core that ignited me. My favourite poem is titled, “Avalon.” The poem presented to me as feminist and a reclamation of the sacred feminine from biblical imagery. There is an apple and two apple trees that create a portal. There is the “return [of] a fiery arrow.” Women are not cast out, but are royal, wearing a crown of flowers presumably from the very tree of knowledge and she balances identity by being immersed in nature and attuned to a side of ‘vixen.’ Above all, she is magical.
My favourite section was titled, “Lunar Observation.” This section enmeshed with the celestial and philosophical, and presented surprising imagery of the storyteller’s interactions and observations of a complete moon cycle. How the artist represents nature, how the moon figures into art, these are thematic layers explored and turned out expertly with poetic craft and insight. I love how the poems consistently reach epiphany and achieve wind-spins of resolution. Marttila does not shy away from the experimental, one poem, a concrete poem in the shape of a voluminous full moon, tucks in gently the immensity of cognitive composure and turns the expected associations of our moon’s cycles and sanity on its head. There are also encounters with snow in this section that flex against typical descriptions of poetry and snow. In fact, Marttila succeeds in establishing form of inverse and achieves bringing her readers to facing nature in the absence of sound. This crafting results in a satisfying atmosphere and tone of solitude. This is where healing happens, again and again.
Finally, a poem nearing the end of the collection struck me enough to put the book down and fully contemplate the extent of what I had read. Marttila had risked transgressing a bridge with this piece that both settled and opened up rivers of thought, I deem accomplished successfully with this piece. The author navigates into string theory and relativity, there is play on perception and an inside joke of a cat in a box. We can tunnel through parallel reality and the worldview of thought that each night we reach the entirety of our existence to be born again new each day, laying out the past, present and future in helixes of dreamtime. This play and voyaging through advanced scientific topics, quantum physics and existentialism demonstrated to me the distinction of Marttila as a poet for Canadian Literature.
Thank you to Marttila, Latitude 46 Publishing and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
