Matthew King

A Review of Maya Clubine, Life Cycle of a Mayfly.  Vallum, 2023.

Heraclitus is best known for saying you can’t step twice in the same river. Canadian poet Maya Clubine’s astonishing debut chapbook Life Cycle of a Mayfly, which won the 2023 Vallum chapbook award, takes as its epigraph a more truthfully ambiguous formulation from Heraclitus: “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and we are not.” This is a fitting indication of what Clubine’s book is about, beneath its subject matter of a daughter’s relationship with her father and grandfather as framed by the love of fly-fishing they impart to her: what stays the same and what changes; the flow of time and the endurance of eternity; the complex interplay between being and non-being, life and death. In one of this book’s more obvious poetic ancestors, Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook,” it is said that while “some say existence … stands still and dances,” in fact it “seriously, sadly runs away.” But really, as Clubine shows, it does both. Death—whether of mayflies, trout, rivers, ways of thinking, ways of life, or family members—is never far away in Life Cycle of a Mayfly, but here death is not fully other to life, nor are the dead to the living. The forms of things and of people endure, and they are made manifest in new ways, recurring seemingly without limit.

Frost’s speaker in “West-Running Brook” asserts that despite the fleetingness of existence it has “some strange resistance in itself,” and that this “tribute of the current to the source … is most us.” Our recollection of things keeps them gathered with us in the present, above all in poetry, which makes things present to us like no other kind of writing or thinking.[1] Recollection is a means by which, as Plato says, we arrive at the form of a thing—the seemingly incorruptible what-it-is-ness by which “the mind’s eye” knows it, its “essence”, to use the more modern word. We are misled when we take literally the myths Plato has Socrates tell about the soul having been in direct, disembodied contact with the forms before birth, so that it may somehow be prompted to remember them in embodied life. The real point to be understood about recollection is much less mysterious: just as we know things by comparing them to other things at any given time (collecting things according to their likenesses and dividing them according to their unlikeness, as Plato has Socrates say in apparently different contexts), we also know them by collecting in memory all the ways they have been over time.

As Clubine repeats, recalling the concept of Gelassenheit or “releasement,” passed down from Meister Eckhart to the Anabaptists and Heidegger, “I catch and I release.” A fish released is a fish that didn’t get away. The poet hooks things from the flow of time, holds them in the light (“the sun flicks rainbows on her skin”) so that in memory they will re-iterate indefinitely, and then lets them go again. Once in a while, the same fish reappears on the hook, recognizable from old markings, now with new ones. Clubine, the presumable narrator of the book, at different points in her life (following the life stages of a mayfly, as juvenile nymph, adolescent sub-imago, and adult imago), sees her father in her own reflection, and she re-embodies him, doing as she has been taught and mimicking his habits; Clubine the poet brings all of it to life for us in writing.

She writes, she has written; we read, we have read; we remember and we forget: this too shall pass, but having passed it will always have been. I think Clubine comes closest to letting the reader know what it’s all about when her narrator says to her father: “You told me once / these days would all eventually converge / into a time of rest when time is spent.” “Spent” is a word that repeats through the book, and it is striking that what is spent isn’t wasted but transformed: feathers, shed from birds, are collected in spent bottles; spent bottles are collected in an empty hat. Of course, the question of a final spending looms. The figure of “figure-eights” appears twice in the book; what goes around comes around, but surely not forever, and then what? The nature of the “time of rest” is not specified, and though it may be hinted at, the hints are ambiguous. The book’s prefatory poem says that “congregations sing / and live and end” before being “built again around / these rivers.” Church bells echo through the book, but from a distance, and rather than praying, per se, Clubine twice casts wishes on the moon. The word “imago” makes us think “imago dei” but whatever Clubine (whom one can easily learn from other sources is Catholic) might mean to suggest in that connection is elusive. For a clue, we may consider another fragment of Heraclitus, which goes like this: “the wise, which is a singular one, both does and does not want to be called by the name Zeus.” By the same token, perhaps it does and does not want to be called by the name God. “Nature loves to hide,” Heraclitus also says; Clubine’s God, we might suppose, hides in nature, the better to be seen. And maybe, to invoke Heraclitus once more, it’s all the same one way or the other: “listening not to me but to the logos,” he says, “it is wise to agree that all is one.” Logos is the word which is familiarly translated in the Gospel of John as “word,” and which refers, ultimately, to the great overarching logic of everything, how everything is, how it all hangs together and how it’s knowable to us. Of course, if Heraclitus is a prophet of Jesus Christ as the logos incarnate he is an unwitting one, to say the least. On the other hand, if John is read in light of Heraclitus, what might we think of redemption? Clubine’s book doesn’t answer this question but perhaps it’s not too audacious of me to venture that it invites us to think about it, and to risk the thought that eternal life and eternal recurrence may have more in common than many proponents of either idea might think.

The river Clubine fishes in with her father and grandfather is the Credit (presumably in Ontario); her grandfather reminisces about fishing the Eden in England, where it “hardly snowed” and the “bugs aren’t bad”—it was better, in these ways, but not perfect. Eden here is a river and not a garden; the world of the Credit as measured against it may be fallen, but not too far: paradise is recognizable in this world, and vice versa. In the last section of the book Clubine goes back to fish in the Credit and it seems like it has fallen further: she says it is “murkier than I remember, / too shallow now to fish”; mirroring her grandfather’s comment about the Eden, she says even “the bugs are bad.” But the trouble is it’s simply not the right time of year for it: “the migration has / already passed through.” Clubine is now an adult, an imago, herself, but she is alone; this section of the book is called a “postlude” but it is also, obviously, the prelude to a further prelude—like her father before her she has a ring on her finger (to be precise, “a ring of gold / around [her] skinny finger”, delightfully recalling his “skinny ring / of gold around [his] finger”) as the only indication of other family members, and other stories to be told about them and by them.

Speaking of which: a curious fact about this book is that apart from Clubine herself no other particular female human beings appear in it, and the only general mention of women or girls occurs in the prefatory poem, which sets the stage for this aspect of the book by speaking of men, not women, who raise daughters, not sons or children. Clubine’s human imagoes here are her father and her (apparently paternal) grandfather. (The book’s dedication refers to another grandfather, “an artist”, and so rather brilliantly becomes part of the book itself by acknowledging the evident incompleteness of the picture it paints.) With her “curls” and “twirls” she is overtly both female and feminine, and moreover she explicitly identifies with the female in nature, as indicated by her gendering of particular mayflies and fish, while at the same time she resolutely takes after her menfolk in both appearance and manner. The politics, and the personal frustration, of being a woman in a man’s world are hinted at when a glass ceiling appears as a metaphor for the surface of the river through which nymphs must pass on their way to adulthood; most don’t survive. On the whole, it is hard not to read in Clubine’s treatment of this theme a forceful suggestion that while gender is not to be dismissed altogether, the most urgently important matters of human life transcend it.

The steady current of Life Cycle of a Mayfly is the blank verse—again recalling Frost—in which it is written. The meter is sometimes irregular and could easily go unperceived by readers who aren’t looking for it, but it is always clearly identifiable. Within it, eddies of rhyme and alliteration sometimes swirl to the surface and sink away again. Clubine is a poet acutely attuned to the sensuousness of language, but her touch is light and can be stealthy. If I have quoted sparingly in this review, it is because this work, much more than most, works as a whole. Clubine’s many and varied repetitions of sounds, words, and ideas often occur at a distance, so that the effects are slowly cumulative, and they richly reward repeated readings. These may also help to reveal instances of her subtle playfulness, as when her father and grandfather, after a glass of brandy is set down on their shared fly-tying desk, have their “vises” between them. Maybe the pun is intended, maybe it isn’t. With this book one wonders, again and again.

The last thing Clubine says in Life Cycle of a Mayfly comes at the end of the Acknowledgments: “Finally, I am grateful for the Credit River”—Credit where credit’s due!—“which cannot be thanked except by way of attention.” Attention as careful poetic thinking is the truest kind of thanking there is. This review in prose can’t be that, but I hope you will take its invitation to give this book the attention it deserves.

[1] Heidegger spells this out, seemingly referring implicitly to Frost, and referring explicitly to Mnemosyne as the mother of the muses, when he writes: “poesy is the water that at times flows backward toward the source, toward thinking as a thinking back, a recollection.” Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, tr. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 11.

Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville," where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his poems can be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com.