Wound Turned To Light
New songs by James Rolfe


Ah, Auditing the Sins of Commission!
By George Elliott Clarke
These liner notes result from my response to the opening salvo of the COVID Pandemic, which dominated 2020 and decimated nations. Being a tenured prof, I hoped to aid outta-commission artists by bankrolling weaving, painting, calligraphy, bookbinding, and—yes—the composing of songs to Canuck-authored poems. So, on Christmas Day, 2020, my companion Giovanna Riccio was surprised—joyously—to hear her poem, “Namesake,” sung to her by my cousin Sheila White, thanks to James Rolfe’s secretly composed score. Witnessing everyone’s pleasure in the gift, I commissioned many more pieces from James; and then he won grants to record this CD. How fine now to pony up my additional “2¢” by remarking on these compositions….

“Marigold” flows out of A. F. Moritz’s floral-imagery-studded florilegium, The Garden (2021). Pondering the L.A. riots of 1992 and other reactions to anti-Black violence, the American-born Moritz beatifies cop-slain, ghetto saints. In response, Rolfe drafts a passional featuring opening notes heralding rain-kissed petals; next, Mother Mary—evoked in her namesake flower and notions of martyrdom—receives a song chiming a blues aria.

“Wound Turned to Light” is titled after a phrase by artiste Georges Braque (1882-1963), whose cubist expressionism inspires the sermon-poem by Andrea Thompson, an Afro-Scot-Canadian who values “the colours of this jagged emotional palette”: Each soul. Rolfe’s music champions Thompson’s adoration of Beauty, then punctuates the frenetic discord sparked by ideologies, before resolving to shout “Yes” to life (pace Joyce’s Molly Bloom).

“Burning in This Midnight Dream” presents an Indigenous Elder who voices how the Christian crucifix has become a field of X’s for Indigenous People, hexing lives and nixing cultures—as well as a signature prescribing medicine or underwriting schoolhouse sado-masochism. Rolfe sets the poem of Louise Bernice Halfe, a.k.a. Sky Dancer, amid dirge-like piano, while the voice becomes a howl edging toward a shriek.

“Moon” registers the Sufi-tinged, Beat(ific) Zen of Choucri Paul Zemokhol, a Québec-raised poet of Syrian-Lebanese-Egyptian descent. Does his poem marry Rumi and Rimbaud? Plangent, poignant, the piano ushers the voice unto meditative yearning, to conjure amity and comity. A torch song to be crooned between sips of tea….

“For E. J. P.” is Leonard Cohen’s ironic elegy for Edwin John Pratt (1882-1964), English Canada’s renowned, “Establishment” poet of the mid-20th-century. By staging Pratt as a Chinese mandarin, the iconic Jewish-Québécois singer-songwriter, Cohen (1934-2016), spoofs Pratt’s omission of Chinese labourers from his epic, Towards the Last Spike (1952), celebrating the building of Canada’s national railway. Rolfe’s music? Rain-delicate, zephyr-wistful.

“Bombastic” is my retort to paleface critics who deem me a Black Canuck bard who’s all mouth and no mind. Rolfe’s stabbing piano apes the hectic, soundtrack strings of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)? “My” voice? An alienated, Fanonian, Black intellectual, eh?

“After the Love at Victoria Street” allegorizes romantic love as akin to a tidal back-and-forth pleating beach and brine, tempest and trees, etc. A Labrador poet, now resident in E.J.P.’s own Newfoundland, Boyd Warren Chubbs conjoins visionary William Blake and sensual Dylan Thomas. Naturally, then, Rolfe’s keyboard surges waves of notes sounding like Atlantic spray striking boulders.

“v” protests despotism and oil-and-gas pollution in Amatoritsero Ede’s Nigerian homeland. Once a refugee adrift in Germany, Ede reflects on how Weser-River-witnessed Nazi horrors are now staining the Niger River Delta, thanks to “Hitlerite” Abacha. Rolfe’s piano detonates notes like burp-gun play, even quoting “Three Blind Mice,” underscoring how tyrants play blithely with human lives.

“Set me as a seal” is a Rolfe-chosen poem, lifted from the biblical, Hebrew canticle, the Song of Songs (8: 6-7). The joint voices of Rolfe’s setting assure us love is “strong as death,” is also unkillable, and incorruptible: This faith carries newlyweds—intertwined, inseparable—from altar to two graves.

“and then a second dream” recounts the Dali-esque nightmare of Luciano Iacobelli (1956-2022), one connecting “a decomposing whale” to the poet’s depletions of his substance due to a gambling addiction, analyzed in his collection, Dolor Midnight (2018). Melancholic plunk Rolfe’s angst-ridden notes; quavering—almost oozing—is the voice. Italianate Iacobelli penned unconsciously his own consummate elegy, while Rolfe’s score elaborates its heartbreaking, threnodic perfection.

“Namesake”: Rolfe casts Giovanna Riccio’s lyric as a mini-opera about an awakening: i.e., a young woman rediscovering her Italian heritage and reclaiming her birth-name, jettisoning the Anglo-Toronto, schoolmarm dubbing, “Joan.” The rollicking keyboard navigates girlhood labyrinths of alienation, but then maps the émigré’s consciousness-raising tour of Roma, where she feels—at last—at home, after hearing “Gio-van-na” sung as a transporting aria.

“To the Poet” belongs to the Romantic Afro-Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Knowing that Pushkin died by gunshot, I disdain Constance Garnett’s dull englishing of the poem! Thus, I rewrote her 1937-published translation, to cast Pushkin as a “boom-bastic” Africadian bard, eh? Don’t Rolfe’s piano fuse Ragtime and Rap riffs? Don’t that voice shimmy and stomp?

“The way spring jabs” illustrates how spring repulses recoiling winter. Indo-Canadian poet Ayesha Chatterjee eyes how first shoots bayonet through failing snow, signalling that warmth will prevail. Citizens exit and enter homes in tempo with temperatures, while death continues as spiders “set their endless traps.” Rolfe’s notes bebop about in a finger-popping, head-bopping melody that echoes ricocheting shots….

“Phoenix (IV)” delivers an allegorical denunciation of Iranian tyranny that can push victims toward suicide or to homicide, while life and liberty are only sustained via psychological—or actual—exile…. Persian-Canadian poet Bänoo Zan (a pseudonym meaning “Ms. Woman”) inks a metaphysics of feminism, which Rolfe affirms, his notes scheming and plotting to coddle dissent—with “celestial song” as “alluring as pain.”

“Last Paddle” recalls a signal poem by E. Pauline Johnson or Tekahionwake (1861-1913), “The Song My Paddle Sings” (1917), but also salutes the “Cottage Country” ethos of many citified Canucks. Here, Richard Sanger (1960-2022) drafts lines aching with mourning, not just for summer’s demise, but for the cleavage from others that mortality exacts. Rolfe’s notes? His tear-seasoned eulogy for his beloved friend.

“Songs of Joy” descends from Psalm 126. Rolfe’s second offering from Hebrew scripture is again double-voiced—as is “Set me as a seal.” While the former solidifies the transcendent nature of committed love, we hear now how “shouts of joy” accompany entrée unto Zion. The song ferries us from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 to Revelation 21:4.

“Prelude” and “Minuet I” are poems by Swiss-German-Canadian Astrid Brunner, both of which appear in her “Mary Magdalene: A Suite in B Minor” from her collection Raw Silk (1996, 1998). “Prelude” tells of a secular “Mary” seeking friendship with a suitor whose colour code is red, suggesting the Adversary, not the Divine. But “Minuet I” sees a red-haired, au naturel “Mary”—in imagination—promise her epistolary suitor a bawdy reunion amid “white howling wind.” Rolfe accompanies “Prelude” with notes roll-calling ruddy devil (or scarlet-lady) imagery; but “Minuet 1” gifts us with galloping notes echoing an ink nib racing across paper—or a Lady Godiva impatient to ride to her lover, even amid a blizzard!

“Spirit Tree” unfurls Chinese-Canadian poet Anna Yin’s elegy for her inspiration and mentor Priscilla Uppal (1974-2018). Yin’s poem seeks to plant for Uppal a “spirit tree”—“a healing from heaven”; but she also wonders about her own, a lightning-split willow that sprouts “new branches.” Able to press the willow leaves into Uppal’s books, they seem to cling together and whisper a “forest of stories.” Rolfe’s piano unleashes notes like wind-tossed, autumn leaves.