Odes to Mourning Footsteps
Review of Jenny Boychuk, Antonyms for Daughter
by Izzi Holmes
“I have forgiven so much, and still / it’s only morning where I am. / I know nothing yet of afternoons or evenings.” This striking phrase comes from Jenny Boychuk’s “The Long Game” in her 2021 poetry collection Antonyms for Daughter. As the temporal imagery of morning and evening suggests, the collection takes the shape of the mourning process that it broadcasts. Boychuk segments the book into four parts, following grief across the seasons of a year. Though sequential in nature, the poems deviate from linear time to illustrate grief’s unique ability to manifest at any moment, anywhere. The collection includes formal villanelles like “After Life” and the allusive work “The Art of Losing,” as well as free verse and prose poems. Boychuk knots forms together to render the intimate solitude of loss in a universal yet personal manner.
Though Boychuk ensures that within Antonyms for Daughter language functions to make her specific experience accessible, she also proposes language as a tool for processing the complexities of inherited familial legacy. She codifies this lens by attaching symbolic meaning to nouns, beginning each section with “antonym” poems. In “Antonym for Inheritance,” she writes “I died to be my mother’s antonym / but the antonym is never without / that which says you are not me.” Boychuk’s sequencing asserts tension in the speaker’s relationships with both language and her mother. This tension continues in “New Inventory” through the line “Neither antonym nor synonym after all, I put my mother / away, and ask my body to claim its shadow as a part / of the whole.” In these lines, Boychuk employs antonyms as a symbol to engage with the shadow that her mother’s lingering presence casts on her identity. Reflective “antonym” poems frame the reckoning with language and form as real-life concepts and written techniques in the collection.
In “Degrees of Duality,” Boychuk uses strikethroughs as a mode of epanorthosis, physically interrupting the flow of the poem to add dimension to her portrayal of grief. The poem’s discussion of poetry resembles an Ars Poetica, as she mentions constructing odes and elegies: “At seven, I learned the name for an ode elegy, / how its notes cries calmed me like so many hands / polishing tarnishing silverware / no one would ever again raise to their lips.” The pairs of dissonant images call attention to the process of writing poetry. The experiences she renders in her work are poetic before they are poetry, as she explains odes and elegies to be not only a written form, but also a poetic lens to view the world. As a poet, Boychuk sees the world through this poetic lens, then conveys that perspective through written poetry. She makes use of these interruptions to centre the writing process as both a mode for clarifying and complicating these experiences. Boychuk portrays grief and language as gatekeepers of memory, mercilessly exerting influence on the past, present, and future, a narrative perspective that endures across the collection. The collection is about poetry, grief, and language through poetry, grief, and language. Such an artful approach highlights the challenges of rendering grief, specifically navigating the balance between poetic perfectionism and raw emotion.
Elegies and odes return in later poems like “Elegy for What Doesn’t Come” and its antonym, “Elegy for What Does Come,” as Boychuk again uses poetic language to detail complex relationship dynamics. She writes in the former “you write / elegies as she sleeps / above you, / hold your hand / over her mouth each hour / to feel for any strands / of breath.” This comparison endures as the speaker explains how “hours pass / before the light gifts itself / back to you / and you write odes / to her heavy, morning footsteps.” These lines mourn and celebrate a living mother but turn to descriptions of the painful relief that comes when laboured breaths stop and her waking “hour” ends. As forms, elegies and odes are as natural and rhythmic as breathing, but Boychuk illustrates gasps for air to document the less beautiful rhythms of survival. She notes the dimensionality of beginnings and endings, asserting that the two exist as shades of the other, and are worth writing about in the same breath. In “Elegy for What Does Come,” she expands on grief’s relationship to time, writing “you were dead yesterday, too; / if you’re not going to leave, why / don’t you just come inside; / here, I’ve made a pot of coffee; / we’re all still alive.” Boychuk considers suffering as a dimension of solace, framing the magnitude of the monumental as equal to the mundane. By using poetic terminology to categorize grief, Boychuk exemplifies the utter loneliness and total community of both writing and experiencing loss.
Jenny Boychuk’s Antonyms for Daughter looks for ghosts in shadows cast upon the self, exploring both the comforts and perils of feeling haunted. Boychuk navigates the artist’s role in memorializing death while mourning personal loss, posing the summative question “How is it always one thing or and another?” in “Degrees of Duality.” Such a question offers a metaphor for metaphor, the poetic idea that things must stand for one another. She critiques artists for romanticizing death in their art while also documenting a desperate cry to understand the world through that same medium. Boychuk’s work reckons with what to do when words seem insufficient commemoration or revival, though wordsmiths promise a degree of immortality. By working with form and language to render intangible poetry, Boychuk constructs both an elegy and an ode, saying once again grief and poetry are truly “always one thing or and another.”
Works Cited
Boychuk, Jenny. Antonyms for Daughter. Vehicule Press, 2021.
Izzi Holmes grew up in New York and is studying psychology and English literature at McGill University. She is a competitive ice skater and represented Team Canada internationally in synchronized figure skating at the junior level during her second year at McGill.
24 May 2023