Sarah Tolmie is the author of three collections of poetry: Trio, shortlisted for the 2016 Pat Lowther Award, Check, and The Art of Dying, shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize. She has published eight books of fiction, embracing short story, novella and novel, including The Fourth Island, All the Horses of Iceland, The Stone Boatmen, and The Little Animals. She is a medievalist trained at the University of Toronto and University of Cambridge. She is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo.
Judges’ Citation
A modern danse macabre in eighty-nine parts, Sarah Tolmie’s The Art of Dying conceals a multifaceted meditation on mortality beneath its deceptively simple lyric surface.
A modern danse macabre in eighty-nine parts, Sarah Tolmie’s The Art of Dying conceals a multifaceted meditation on mortality beneath its deceptively simple lyric surface. An irreverent feminist in the tradition of Dorothy Parker and Stevie Smith, Tolmie leverages the subversive possibilities of doggerel to upend our assumptions about everything from abortion to the Anthropocene. Wickedly funny, this is work of great intimacy, too, introducing us to a mother, concerned citizen, social media addict, bookworm, and bon vivant who wants nothing more than to remain ‘Here on the quiet earth that I still love, / Where the last humans are.
Selected poems
by Sarah Tolmie
It continues fashionable to mourn the death of ritual.
We miss the Neolithic ochre, smoking censers, silly hats
Cthulhu and Harryhausen prayers, all the mystic flap.
No one has ever owned death much better than that.
Still, ours are not that bad.
Hospitals have strict norms,
Specific times and tricky forms,
Rotting fruit and flowers.
We say conventional things at canonical hours.
Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Tolmie, The Art of Dying, McGill-Queen’s University Press
10
Spam is dead, great Spam is dead —
Will be the epitaph of the internet
The day it powers down and we go back to skinning goats.
After it goes rogue and kills us all, almost
And we huddle on the ping-pong ball of the burnt world
And re-invent the printing press.
Poets and cave painters then will rule
Holding fast our simple tools.
Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Tolmie, The Art of Dying, McGill-Queen’s University Press
51
We are scared to death by the words for things.
Even yet, when we should know better.
I know my father’s teeth will chatter
If I say pneumonia about my son.
Suddenly it is World War One
And influenza, H 1 N 1
And doom and liver flukes.
It’s Bay of Pigs and waiting nukes.
And me? I am a heartless bitch
For saying he should get a grip.
Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Tolmie, The Art of Dying, McGill-Queen’s University Press
67
In memoriam Tennyson said
Nine years of things about his friend
Who’d died. He brought him back by slow
Degrees, from sunsets, wind in the trees,
Gathering pieces painstakingly.
Tennyson, in his purity,
He never lied, never missed his line.
Grief became him metrically.
It made him blind. All he could see
Was Hallam’s absence: the whole world
A cancelled cheque, crumpled and furled,
Unspent inside his pocketbook.
There its yellowing edges curled
Until his friend crept out, imbued
Everything and made it new.
At second look, he saw it through
Lost eyes, and it was dearer far
Than it had been before. A borrowed
Death does that for you. Your own cannot.
We each will miss the lesson that
We’ve taught. Compassion is what we learn
From those who die and don’t return.
Grief gives us that hitch in the eye,
Catching on things as they pass by.
Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Tolmie, The Art of Dying, McGill-Queen’s University Press
74
Tonight the fattened mermaids sing
To issue in the internet of things.
Let me tell you what you can do with that misnomer.
I sit here gloomily and think of Homer,
On the dimming beach, as drifts of trash
Clatter softly against my ankles,
The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
Of everything a humanist holds dear.
Skyward the sad elite have all withdrawn,
To their electric world. They’ve pulled it on
Over the old like a transparent plastic glove.
I hear them pinging dismally afar.
Here on the quiet earth that I still love,
Where the last humans are.
Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Tolmie, The Art of Dying, McGill-Queen’s University Press