The Bridge that Carries the Road
Published to critical acclaim, The Bridge That Carries the Road (1999) is Lynn Davies’s first poetry collection. While many poems feature the daily experience of life in the Maritimes, Davies also draws on her own travels, setting poems in Asia, Amsterdam, and Western Canada. However, many poems poeticize New Brunswick and the Bay of Fundy, in the space occupied by “flats, / exposed mud shiny as a giant’s mirror” in “Cape Enrage.”
The collection displays Davies’s preoccupation with everyday experiences and the use of the natural world to illuminate life. Containing work that had been published in a variety of literary magazines, including The Fiddlehead, TickleAce, Pottersfield Portfolio, and The Antigonish Review, the collection deals with numerous subjects. Yet the poems are bonded by Davies’s striking perceptions of the world around her, rendered in highly stylized verse. Davies reflects a penchant for short, haiku-like lyrics, but she also uses the prose poem to advantage. While some poems rely on a casual narrative voice, most are elliptical, condensed into lines that travel a long distance in a short time, such as “My Silent Days”: “On a ship bound for Portugal, months later a postcard from Ice- / land.” The condensed diction of the poems, as well as Davies's complex similes and metaphors, at times makes The Bridge That Carries the Road a challenging read, and some poems are quite oblique, such as “In The Beginning,” as the speaker “dreamed sock but knit a hole / in the tire.”
The collection is divided into two sections, the first entitled “The Onion Mountains” after a poem detailing the speaker’s experiences in central Asia, climbing a mountain that wears wild onions. Nature becomes a mirror used to reflect on life—for example, the stars in “Time Change.” The speaker can only see spaces between things such as stars, and the emptiness that resonates more than existing things. Davies depicts luminous moments, such as children transforming a dishwasher into a racing machine in “Dishwasher” or the waiting-room magazine photograph in “Ancient Child” that makes a dead child’s face seem a mask; the speaker thinks she might be able to “Find the edge of the mask / my daughter saw and peel it off.” Davies’s gymnastic imagination jumps to bathing cats discussing work ethic and God’s breath in “Briefly, Abelard Tries to Understand,” which underscores Davies’s humour, as she names a philosophizing cat Abelard. Her award-winning poem “The Flamingo” draws on a child’s malapropism in calling mangos flamingos, as she asks for a “piece of flamingo please” and sets off a fanciful contemplation: “I poke holes in hollow bones for my breath, float / soft down in my bath, plait feathers in hair / I could never grow to my waist.” Several poems in this section are preoccupied with the dangers lurking at the edge of life, such as "Tonight the Violent Wind," which links the discovery of a teenage girl's body to the smell of "old ashes in the bucket by the stove." The poem "Two Corner Stores" depicts the drowning of a neighborhood boy and ends with the image of shelves holding menstrual products that are linked to "the price of things, the pool of blood at birth, the bar-/ gains made with God." In "Mr. Phillips" the speaker imagines the crushed hopes of a music teacher who cannot interest the schoolchildren in music, for they are more interested in "Folding / pink sheets of bubblegum into our mouths and sorting Beatles / cards."
The second section of the collection, “Songs for Marion’s Daughter,” is a cycle of poems that provides a fragmentary narrative of the speakers’ forebears, particularly Henry and Marion, the speakers’ great-grandparents. The title of The Bridge That Carries the Road arises from the poem “Marion” and its line: “Marion rolls oatcakes in a small house not far from the / wooden bridge that carries the road across the river.” While the significance of the title is open to interpretation, it does suggest strength, support, and bridging waters—perhaps even a comment on the ability of poems to carry one across rough waters. A subtle questioning of gender roles occurs in the relationship between Henry and Marion. The medical treatment of women by men in the Victorian era surfaces as a theme in “Spring” as the doctor tells Henry not to work Marion too hard, for she is a “dainty filly” rather than a “workhorse.” Yet Henry does not lighten Marion’s domestic responsibilities willingly, as in “Getting Out” he does not like Marion bicycling around. However, she does not listen to “his complaints of work not done.” Loss occurs in several of the poems, including the deaths of Marion’s son by drowning and Henry by the castor oil she gives him as a remedy for gastrointestinal illness, though, as the surgeon informs her, “castor oil / was the worst thing she could have given / to a man with ulcers like he’d suffered.” The speakers in this section do not extol the merits of the good old days, but merely describe them in honest terms.
Though it was her first collection of poetry, The Bridge That Carries the Road garnered Davies a Governor-General’s Award nomination, as well as the Gerald Lampert Award. She has been heralded as an important addition to the poetry scene, because of her adeptness at mining gold from simple things and everyday objects. The poem “What Stopped Me” captures the eloquence of the ordinary for Davies, as “These days / even the shower curtains have potential, / could speak to me at any time.”