THE FIELD • by Shane Neilson • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters                         Dionne, Doomscrolling: Nomenclature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2022. Characteristic of the congealed difficulty that Dionne Brand represents, one cannot merely signal to readers that Brand is a Canadian poet, or a Caribbean-Canadian poet (she was born in Trinidad). That would trigger denunciation from a Canadian academic coterie which makes much of Brand’s critique of hyphen politics and her voluminous ‘thinking beyond’ nationality. Christina Sharpe’s introduction to Nomenclature is clear, “Brand is a poet who speaks to Black people in Canada but is not a Canadian poet and not a Caribbean poet, she is a poet who thinks each location as part of a larger geography.” Canada is the place of her geographically concentrated be-prizing, however. As the blurb explains, her work has won the two big national awards (Griffin, Governor-General) as well as a host of smaller prizes, though only one big American prize (Windham-Campbell), an irony given Brand’s identity as a world-spanning poet. But to stress this would be to commit a sin that Shivanee Ramlochan warns against: “You couldn’t separate . . . political animus from Brand’s work if you tried – in every genre, her commitment to her peoples, her places, would shun any smaller analysis.” Hence the need for a huge academic life support system that extracts theory from Brand’s poetry-ing, valorizing academic acts as a larger, true seeing of poetry that is irredeemably academic and only reluctantly textual.     [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Shane Neilson {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]