Marilyn Lerch

Lambs & Llamas, Ewes & Me is a cycle of poems published in 2001 by the Springbank Press with illustrations by Maskull Lasserre. It was printed in a limited edition of 110 copies using a foot-treadled, Chandler & Price letterpress. The book was designed and printed by Jamie Syer on French-made specialty paper and bound with wool from the sheep on Syer's farm in Bergen, Alberta.[12]

In her introduction, Lerch writes that she had always been touched by the activity of shepherding even though she grew up in a town with steel mills, chemical plants and oil refineries. Yet, she felt there was something magical about watching over sheep while walking freely and alone over hills and valleys on the Syer farm in the summer of 1998 "accompanied, however reluctantly, by an unforgettable llama named Tarragon."

"Caring about creatures innocent and absolutely helpless was a way, perhaps, of caring for something undefended in myself," she explains.[12]

Every afternoon, retreating from a steamy Alberta sun,

Number 109 and her two lambs come to visit and read

my poems. They nudge them off the bale to get a closer

look, crinkling and smudging the lines. I think:

it is good that poems taste of mud and hot breath.[12]

Marilyn Lerch at her home in Sackville, N.B.

Moon Loves Its Light is a collection of 67 poems published in 2004 by Morgaine House Publishing of Pointe Claire, Quebec. Its four sections feature a wide range of poems including ones of arrival and departure such as "We Move Homeward" and "The Cave Painters of Lascaux: Creating As They Came." "Ceremony For A Friend" describes emptying an urn "tilting into the fast-running current/a stream of ashes like a banner unfurled/ rippling toward the pulling-away sea...beige scarf on dark moving water." "Tantramar Manifesto" warns fellow poets that they are deceived by the flatness of New Brunswick's Tantramar Marshes dyked to hold back the Bay of Fundy's high tides. Instead, the poem calls for breaking through the "obsolete defenses" to "let in the flood" and urges poets to abandon their complacency and restraint: "Let us/slide down the low-tide banks of Tantramar/and risk the sucking red mud,/riot in language, lingua flexa,/ kick-ass syntax, improvisatory,/shake the ground with our eyes."[13]

The book also contains poems about the coup d'état in Chile on September 11, 1973, the 2001 September 11 attacks in the U.S. and the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia. Another recalls the events of August 6, 1945.

A six-page poem called "A Disappearing Act" satirizes the effects of on-screen, online culture with its discontinuity, pornography and commodification where disappearing users become "SURF-ACES," "SKIMMY DIPPERS," "E-COMMERCE SHOP LIFERS" and "AUTO-MATES. An autobiographical poem called "Father Take 1" celebrates "Happy times/by the large avuncular Philco/listening to the Hit Parade, sugared/cinnamon toast and hot tea commingling" when the poet visited her father in "my childhood's second home/not his place, his sister's" and the "Lovely times" as he sometimes walked her home "when the dense, unhurried fall of snow/muffled East Chicago's grind and grime":

when I'd tuck my hand in his, close tight

my eyes, squealing as he led me into snowbanks

Don't stop, Daddy,

walk through our door and stay forever.[13]

But in "Father Take 2," the poem records that he carried off the bag of coins she kept under her pillow when she was five: "He was gone and they were gone" and his denial of what he had done "leaving me a gate unhinged/swinging, swinging back and forth/between his theft and mine."[13]

Writing in Atlantic Books Today, Michael deBeyer notes that Lerch's first poem, "We Move Homeward" expresses the theme of the poet's moving toward, but also away from home. He points to lines in the second poem, "Tantramar Manifesto" that show how to do it: "We live on a curve to somewhere/and must risk dropping out of sight/to follow it." "Lerch takes the risk," DeBeyer writes. "She follows the curve, to Niagara and Toronto, El Salvador and New Zealand. Her journeys are eye-opening, political, and reveal a keen sense of justice." But, he adds, she also returns to her many homes throughout the book. "Each return, each poem, is wrought with resolve and compassion. Behind Lerch, the moon provides its cold light of observation, its romantic light of inspiration."[14]

In his review of Moon Loves Its Light, George Elliot Clarke urged readers to "get this book. Read this poet." Clarke wrote that the book revealed Lerch to be a poet "awake to everything: her locale, her family, her personal experience, all that impinges upon her consciousness. The result is a wide-ranging, expansive, endlessly surprising work."[15]

Witness and Resist, published in 2008 by Morgaine House of Pointe Clair, Quebec, includes poems that call attention to suffering and injustice. "Elegy for Joseph Terry Riordon" describes the suffering of a Canadian military policeman exposed to toxic chemicals and depleted uranium during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. (A note explains that his widow declined a military funeral after the government refused to recognize that he suffered from Gulf War Syndrome.) The poem "Maria Luz Continues" is about a Washington bus tour guide who tells passengers that the Pentagon is the world's largest office building with 24,000 employees, then reveals that the she herself and her son, were beaten, violated and burned during the 1973 military coup in Santiago, Chile "while somewhere in this iniquitous hive, glasses were raised."[16]

The book explores how poetry can "speak for the silenced,/call things by their name,/refuse hate and despair," but it also contains a warning:

I'm no better than

a humanist voyeur

fondling

the wound,

pointing,

with dirt

under my fingernails,

for until I abjure

sympathy as redemption,

until I witness

and

resist,

don't take me

or any poet like me

seriously.[16]

Witness and Resist also contains poems about Lerch's emotional reactions to gardens and landscapes, her depiction of a vivid sunset and one about the morning light that is dedicated to her spouse Janet. In "Father, Whose Witness I Must Be," she continues to probe her fraught relations with the man who was:

Just Dad

whom I adored, avoided, pitied,

felt ashamed or contemptuous of, sad for,

and whose unused powers frighten

and fuel me to this day.[16]

Lerch pays tribute to Paul Celan and Walt Whitman and engages in an imaginary dialogue with Adrienne Rich's "Usonian Journals 2000".[16]

Writing in the Spring 2009 issue of the Montreal Review of Books, Bert Almon singled out some of Lerch's poems for special praise:

Her nature poems are excellent: a fine opening poem about a sunflower celebrates its solitary being in brilliant details and ends with a risky image of bees crawling across its oiled eye. Another short poem, “Homeless,” is an unforgettable depiction of the fate of the drones barred from the beehive; it is left to the reader to draw the piercing parallel with the lives of homeless humans. This is an anthology-grade poem.[17]

Almon notes, however, that Lerch has been "a political activist for left-wing causes since the 1960s" and he writes that some of her work in Witness and Resist is more rhetoric than poetry: "When she excoriates her native country, the United States, for redneck attitudes or developing the bomb, some readers may give intellectual assent while feeling that the poems smack of editorials."[17]

For his part, George Elliot Clarke notes that Lerch has a keen eye for politics in all things.

Trained as a teacher and journalist, Lerch is observant of diurnal reality and of the ‘news’ that impinges on it. So, she speaks of how 'A poem may… / couple sunflower seeds encoded / to be wide yellow eyes / with bunker busters / descended from a brandished club.' The fact of flowers—about the house—does not negate ‘the flowers of evil’ that can spring up like razor wire anywhere.[1]

Clarke writes that, for Lerch, politics is "heart-felt" and "heartbreaking" and that she understands it is sometimes not because of quarrels with others, but with oneself: "In “Child of Mine,” Lerch takes this truth to heart, providing a psychological autobiography that locates the temptation to favour liquor over love, or solitude over self-sharing, in unresolved childhood pain...Her poetry holds nothing back; it is all about revelation: that which hurts—and that which heals."[1]

Marilyn Lerch in 2021

The Physics of Allowable Sway is self-published by Devon Avenue Poetry Books, printed and bound in 2013 by Gaspereau Press. Marilyn Lerch's fourth poetry collection takes its title from "Once I Dreamed," a poem that opens with its narrator dreaming about, "a slow, determined climb to bedrooms where,/one by one, I slew the family,/then from the bottom of the darkened stairs, turned and saw/processing down, in single file,/all the dead to be slain again."

The narrator explains that telling the story allowed her to escape from the "abattoir" grasping "a clutch of poems." This poem ends with an image and an idea:

See how the tree tops, like keening women, bend and lift,

the physics of allowable sway,

Ours wider and deeper than we know.[18]

The Physics of Allowable Sway includes descriptions of landscapes and scenes that reveal the beauty and mystery of sea and sky, forest and beach, but, as the poem "Once I Dreamed" suggests, there are undercurrents of anxiety and violence. Lerch prefaces a poem called "Paul" with a note that begins: "A young man I never knew committed suicide." She explains that Paul came to life for her through his writings and later, through a book of his journal entries and a biography published by his father. "Paul haunted me, became my muse at a crucial turning point in my life." The poem, which notes that the poet lived in a house that Paul's "hands helped build", is partly a meditation on suicide and the motives for it: Is it a "decisive" act "fixed and pure" or a last goodbye from "a pent-up soul" and a life "broken in too many pieces"?

Behind all words, behind seeming causes and explanations,

each soul's inexplicable journey,

framed by one question,

between renewal and death

how does one decide?[18]

The book contains poems that explore the careers and ambiguous legends of jazz horn player Bix Beiderbecke ("man oh man,/ if you heard the horn/that's all there is") and the writer J.D. Salinger. In the poem, "Barachois Bay Revisted", Lerch pays tribute to poets Mary Oliver and Theodore Roethke:

I carry Mary Oliver's "House of Light"

and all of Roethke,

one for pure delight,

one for its longing,

and make my own lines

out of looking at sea's edge on Barachois Bay[18]

A long concluding poem entitled "Leaving the Human Behind" contemplates the evolution of technologies from the prehistoric, red-ochre paintings at Pech Merle where the human and animal began pulling away to our own world of sweeping change:

Sinking to its knees, the great bison

locked eyes with our ancestors

and slow-gathering over time

an epiphany

we are you and we are not you

One day (any day now)

will programmed things

fitted with human-friendly sensibilities

tend to newborns, answer doorbells,

conduct wars and finance, pull sheets

over the dead

and will we see in those eyes

we are you and we are not you?

Our ancestors made the grand slow leap

into

the human,

when was it,

that turn

out of?[18]

In their online review of The Physics of Allowable Sway, New Brunswick poet Kathy Mac and former St. Thomas University student Ben Lord write that Lerch aspires to create an artifact for her readers as compelling as the red-ochre cave paintings are to her. "Like the images on the wall at Pech Merle, The Physics of Allowable Sway is a palm-print not just of Lerch’s life, but of the cultures, experiences and histories which culminate in this book."[19]