Closer is an examination of the act of looking itself—of looking at the world, of looking at time, and, ultimately, of looking at ourselves. At its centre are two sequences that offer the longest gaze: on 18th century botanist Ellen Hutchins and her passionate but tragic career working on Ireland’s remote west coast, and on a single photograph secretly taken by M. M. Grossman in a Polish ghetto during World War II. Intercut with Hutchins’ own drawings of seaweed, these wide sweeps through time and voice are framed by more intimate pieces of seeing and, inevitably, failing to see. Using tools of erasure, ekphrasis, and microscopy, Clare Goulet manages an astonishing feat of attention.
Closer had the unique privilege of cutting its teeth all the way over in Ireland. The first 15 copies went with Clare to visit Ballylickey and Bantry back in August, where Clare participated in “Learning to love lichens” at the Ellen Hutchins Festival. Clare collected some photographs for us of the trip:
Photos collected from Clare’s trip to Ballylickey and Bantry, Ireland. Bookshop, tools of looking, Ellen’s family property, an original letter, and Karen Minihan reading letter excerpts
How did you discover the work of Ellen Hutchins? What drew you to her, and how did that turn into poetry?
Discovering her was a Stop-the-presses moment at the end of my previous book, a lichen poetic alphabet—L for Lecania Hutchinsiae —named for this 18th-century self-taught botanist working from a village on remote west coast of Ireland, young and kept from schooling to care for ill family members and run the homefront. Ill herself between bouts of botanizing, spoon-fed mercury as a cure, she was dead by 29, already prolific. Botanical painting, writing voluminous letters to naturalists in London and Dublin, finding and identifying specimens—new species—she barely left one place but her discoveries went everywhere. I followed them to the School of Botany at Trinity for wax-sealed cross-hatched letters, 1808 algae still sewn into them, to Kew for her botanical art (a few in the book as colour plates) to Ballylickey where she’d lived. The first reading I gave in Ireland I booked the cheapest possible place outside town reached by bus, and by utter accident it was across the stream from her home field where she’d pushed off in her boat to collect specimens.
One batch of letters—1811 spring through autumn—had a strong undercurrent of something, so I peeled back 19th century mannerisms to find what was left—so fresh and raw—and Ballylickey Fugue began to accrue around that. A fugue is a kind of multi-voiced musical composition circling a subject, with a repeated phrase that reappears in different ways–here it’s the ‘My Dear Sir’ of the letters in that intense year when she lunged at the world for a life larger than the one she was permitted. A workshop led by the brilliant Anne Simpson played with elision, which helped open a way through. Incredibly generous living relative Madeline Hutchins co-runs an annual Ellen Hutchins Festival in the area, where I could see and handle Ellen’s old books and notes, like her leather copy of Burke on the Sublime used in the Fugue, which Madeleine loaned me to have for the launch, to my immense terror.
Could I ask the same question about the boy from Łódź?
Ah. Hard. The unknown boy in the chopped shorts in the photograph by Mordka Mendel Grossman was taken secretly and hidden in a walled-off Łódź ghetto before the Nazi’s 1942 Gehsperre Aktion took away its children (the same year my mother elsewhere in Europe was born). I first saw the photo before the COVID pandemic; I’d spent some years working on a book project in Hungarian and Romanian and geneological archives, while separately editing an older woman’s family holocaust memoir (Irene Oore’s The Listener). If you steep yourself daily in that darkness its weight even at a far, safe distance can drown you—it is absolutely the abyss. What lifted me out was writing this piece, a rope grabbed. The image of this boy held everything, and a response poured quickly, surreal and angled sideways, a sort of afterimage (a distorted illusory image that can appear in your eyes for a second or two after looking at a real image.) Or maybe plain human response. It wasn’t planned. By instinct I asked permission of survivors to even continue writing it, let alone publishing an earlier version (in a fiction issue) or this one here; I asked permission also of a Polish-Canadian descendant who’s a scholar of holocaust literature, and of generations of a family connected to events. The boy is all that mattered, and a photo negative is the only trace left. It seemed distant history, that fascistic urge, but here it is rising again now—not quite repeating but in horrific historic rhyme. I’m sure we’re all thinking about it in our own way; I reached back.
If you’ll allow me to speak in broad terms, your poetry feels so full of influence, drawing richly from both science and history. Are there any other channels of influence that may be harder to detect in the text?
Tove Jansson’s Moomins. Always! Snufkin is lurking behind everything I write, with his pointy hat and boat and solitude on some remote coast, harmonica in his pocket, in case the longed-for bars of song finally arrive—while Fillyjonk unravels with anxiety back in the house at the desk, paper chaos everywhere. Jansson was brilliant in her way of laying the world out as if it was simple. Influences for Closer: a lot of Arvo Pärt and Grieg are running under it, the spare stuff, the lines that carry you across snow. My last book felt so rambunctious to make; this book is full of quiet.
I’m interested in this concept of non-brain memory you introduce in the poem “Through the looking glass in the E.C. Smith Herbarium”. What’s up with that?
Yeah, the wondrous physical world, including embodied memory, pulls me—how smell can open the past, or muscle release unlock grief, the unstoppable contortion of bursting out laughing when we see something, really get it. We’re animals pretending we’re not animals, dying and living in our bodies, which mercifully limit us. Somewhere my teenage self is delighted by how biology daily shows how wrong Descartes was and I am and we all are, about so much. Cellular cognition outside neural systems? It’s heartening.
What is next for Clare Goulet?
Virginia Woolf once said “I always conceive of my books as music before I write them” and I’m working on something that’s structurally a kind of jazz trio where each narrative thread gets a turn at the front. That’s all I’m gonna say about that!
Clare’s writing setup at Ballylickey
Clare Goulet will be launching Closer in Halifax on Tuesday, December 1st at Trident Booksellers & Cafe (1256 Hollis St).
Jamella Hagen will be launching Perfect Weather on Friday, November 13th with several special guests.
Aaron Rabinowitz will be reading on Friday, November 13th for the Planet Earth Poetry series at Russel Books (747 Fort St).
If you didn’t know the Afterwords Lit Fest. is mid-swing! A few Gaspereau poets are making appearances, including Clare Goulet tonight, and Sue Goyette on Sunday, both in excellent company.
gillian harding-russell reviewed Perfect Weather by Jamella Hagen for The British Columbia Review.
In September, Ocean by Sue Goyette was chosen as the Dal Reads title, the first ever poetry collection to be selected.
That’s all for now!
—Yours truly, Freddy Hyun Smith
This post first appeared in our Substack newsletter.
