It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant and Evie Christie’s
Mere Extinction are the latest contributions to a genre I’m calling GTA pastoral. Each offers lyric meditations on a gritty urban present populated by, in Christie’s words, “bare-knuckled bankers of King Street” and “meat-eating Annex Vegans” alongside nostalgia for a suburban past, filtered through a 21st-century middle-class outlook, in which as Winger puts it, “We can’t really move back / to the last subway station, can we?” Both collections demonstrate the enduring tenacity of the free-verse lyric as the default poetic frame for contemporary experience. While Christie’s book presents these lyrics as discrete events in an ongoing pattern of reflections on motherhood, love, crisis, and poetry itself, in Winger’s collection, these lyrics accumulate at times into longer sequences that pose the challenge of conceiving human existence on a cosmic scale, in which “all the radio signals / we’ve ever heard are still out there.”