Midnight Grocery
— Terry Abrahams
I’m particularly interested in poetry about the usual-turned-unusual. Despite their subject matter, I wouldn’t call the poems in Midnight Grocery domestic—they’re anything but. They’re about how strange entering a 24-hour grocery store at 12am feels. About being stuck in the suburb where you grew up. About feeling connected to others, however briefly, through food. The poem ‘white ceramic bowl’ takes readers through evocative images of eastern European foods like pirogues and cabbage rolls before ending with the line:
your family brandishes food like a cross from the old world.
This poem is one of many that Couture includes that reference the tradition of food in her family and the family of others. She knows some of the most important memories are made over a shared meal, especially when that meal is laden with the very history of the family itself. But in contrast with this heavy theme, this collection includes poems with humour. The poem ‘midnight grocery shopping after watching days and days of the viking week on the history channel’ begins with:
grocery carts
would not make good longboats:
too many holes.
The colloquial nature of her poems lends to their almost observational-like quality. I realized through my reading and rereading that Couture is aware of her mundane surroundings, her normal family life, but again, she takes it all in in an exceptionally unique way. Due to this, her poetic style is simple, but still charged with a palpable energy. These poems read easily only because they are written in a way meant to bring only a moment’s worth of enjoyment. There is no need to linger on the poems; they are all immediately satisfactory.
Even though much has changed in contemporary Canadian poetry since 2004, Couture’s voice still holds itself aloft in this chapbook by having a relatable quality. The domestic is hard at work in these poems, but equally as productive is Couture’s clear effort to present daily life, highlighted by the fact that she includes a few pages of recipes bearing close resemblance to a friend relaying the method in person, perhaps in your own kitchen, makes this chapbook all the more pleasant to experience. Though easy to consume, this collection wasn’t always light and airy—there was a bite to a few of the poems. In ‘the details of breakfast,’ Couture sets up a simple scene between the narrator and another—someone the narrator’s close to—over breakfast. But the details of the making breakfast (drops of oil pearl the walls
), pouring over the newspaper (sometimes reading / the same line fifteen times over
) lead the poem to the conclusion that there is the religion of small things
at work here. This idea is present throughout this collection, even when not explicitly stated. Each poem made me feel as though I had more faith in its subject matter—however simple, however usual that it may be.