Nerve Squall – Sylvia Legris

Air bubbles orbit your coffee cup. Wind forever blowing the outside in: pollen, pesticide, exhaust. The weatherman, either indecisive or comtemptuous (take your pick), holds out rain in the one hand and migraine in the other. O blustering succotash! O mother of lightening!

Initially a reader might mistake Nerve Squall, winner of last year’s Griffin Prize, as a overly active semantic playground, a text concerned most heavily with the twisting of clichés, of shifting ordinary language slightly off center. But the text is a much deeper exploration than that, addressing altered perception and the many ways of viewing the world.

Legris centers the text around the subject and sensations of the migraine, a nerve storm in the head. Yet, at no point does that main focus hinder the progression of the text: this is not a book that simply explains what it is like to have a migraine or attempts to translate the pain of the suffering through direct adjectives. Instead, the migraine becomes a doorway to re-imagine sight and speech. Through the first section the work rotates around the theme of fish and the underwater: the vocabulary used drenches the reader in a slowness, as if the poems, the movements described, are underwater as well. The reader is given a pathway to the dull edges of consciousness that accompany a migraine, stumbling or swimming through the world.

This image set is placed against the later part where the work focuses itself with the sky. Instead of having the two sections as polar opposites, she links the two wonderfully by finding a similar lexicon between them: fish and clouds have the same names for their formations (which she also showcases in the drawings that scatter the text). While the first section take on the underwater dullness, the sky section is more about the sharp, tiny biting, and bright pain. Legris employs birds here, swarms of them in noise and constant motion. The effect is disorienting as the poems become more episodic, smaller in chunk and focus. This is where the form of the book is quite striking as Legris connects the sections by numbering them, leaving long strings of poetry that are always cut further into smaller poems, smaller lines, smaller words.

What I found the most intriguing was the constant interruption of the text that underlined the fragmentary perception involved with migraines The work is filled with half thoughts and phrases, often broken by ellipses. Legris furthers this technique by breaking constantly in the middle of clichés, altering the end of sentences to break from her readers’ expectations. This is at once the strength and weakness of the text. Too often (especially in the middle of the work) Legris relies too heavily on this technique, transforming the sort of playfulness of the first part of the work into a string of jokes. The interruptions stop being a way to progress the text or explain the migraine and become a showy device designed to showcase cleverness.

But when the work paces the instances out, surprising the reader in small bursts, the work is at its best. Nerve Squall is a very rewarding book, dense and playful and always wonderfully surreal.

Nerve Squall was the 2006 Griffin Prize Winner and sells for $16.95

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