The call came at 3:40 Sunday afternoon, August 21^st, 2011.

“Louise, your father, he’s not breathing!” It was Lise, Dad’s companion.

“Did you call 911?”

“No, no. You do it.”

Christ. Call 911, explain, give my name and location, Dad’s and Lise’s location. Take five minutes instead of the usual ten to drive from my house in Saint-Lazare to Dad’s house in Hudson. First responders, the fire truck, the police: all already there working on Dad.

“Lise, I think he’s gone.” Call my daughter to call my sister to call my brother to call our uncle. Drive Lise home and help her inside. Terrible night.

The next morning drive down to the house to clean up before my brother and sister arrive. Oh yeah, and by the way, Jack Layton just died.

It wasn’t until I was two-thirds of the way through Jack Layton: Art in Action, reading the  eulogies and, curiously enough, descriptions of Stephen and Laureen Harper’s reactions at the funeral, that I found myself weeping for the man. Because of the timing of my father’s death, there hadn’t been time or emotional strength to process Jack Layton’s – until almost two years after the event. And, of course, reading about Layton’s family’s pain made me re-live that of my own.

Editor Penn Kemp, a London, Ontario based poet and part of Jack Layton’s extended family, is uniquely positioned to anchor the reminiscences, personal anecdotes, poems and songs celebrating Jack the artist. (Her sound poem ‘J’Acktivist’ appears in the book.)

In one of the book’s opening quotes Charlie Angus, NDP MP and Culture Critic says “Jack made politics his art and in doing so made our world a better place.” And Penn Kemp claims that Layton radicalized her and therefore her art, making her and it more inclusive. As she writes in one of her light-hearted commentaries “Art stirs the spring blood, inspired, respired, perspired. Art cares. Art rails, sings, dances, lilts, jigs, plays, laments, pleads, scolds, declaims, claims, debunks, funks. Art is fun. Art is the Heart of the Community. Spring forth! Write on! Act out!”

And that is the justification for the book.

Over and over in the one hundred and twenty-six chapters, Layton’s love of family, music, people and justice is related by a gamut ranging from those closest to him to some who never met him but were affected by his life and the way in which he left it.

Poets, song-writers and artists speak to the process of creation. There are links so readers can listen to songs on line. (Helpfully, these links and others re-appear in the acknowledgements section at the back of the book.) A few original artworks and photographs of Layton are spaced throughout the book, many of them commemorating a special event or just capturing a smiling Jack.

The interviews by Penn Kemp with Olivia Chow, Mike Layton and others make fascinating reading as does Nancy Layton’s blog of the 2011 campaign trail as she managed her brother’s physio, wardrobe and transportation as they criss-crossed the country, riding the orange wave to victory May 2.

At three hundred pages, the book is just long enough; I read it in a few days. But the short chapters make it an equally easy book to dip into briefly, from which to re-emerge refreshed by the knowledge that such a person as Jack Layton lived and is mourned, and that many people consider his life’s example to have been his most lasting legacy.

The source of the title is suggested in “why / eyes like pigeons / i in pigeons birds / pluck the eyes / the eyes of / woe / pluck the e.” As a first book, this one is visually interesting, with the juxtaposition of images from “Truck,” an artist-run centre. Despite a photograph of the author, the book is primarily other-centred, to the extent that at one point in the narrative one of the voices argues, “you listen, Roberta, but you never tell me about yourself.” However, the author is revealed through others and eventually takes on a reality of family and her own experiences.

Much of the text is devoted to “Thi” as a central character; we hear her voice and attempt to understand her significance because, among other things, “Thi” in Vietnamese means poetry (“but what means meaning[?]”). I suppose some of us are past caring about genres, since the boundaries are commonly challenged or blurred. I am not surprised that some sections appeared in Open Letter, or were influenced by Fred Wah, because the concrete, the breath pause, and the language centred and synaptic writing might not have happened without Tish and the West Coast, although Rees is continually drawing on women’s experience and the semiotic.

She is to be commended for her good humor (“multiculturalism is ruining this country said my friend we should / all just be Canadian and be One Happy Family”) and sensitivity, translated from the vernacular into art.

This collection of fifty-three lyric poems spans eons and layers of Pre-Cambrian life.

As the geological formations of the earth’s crust have “Rock folded and refolded,” the poet displays himself “Thumbing and re-thumbing/this dog-eared book” (“Stone Beach”, p. 11) He listens to the beating of his heart “in 10 seconds”, then asks himself “How many more beats, my heart?” (“Bushed”, p. 12) He explores the duality of “your other nature, nature under all.” (p. 13). There appears to always be the immutability of nature, through which reincarnation occurs, however much we might like to ignore history.

At times, he is suspicious and withdrawn (“Soil Building”).  He suffers losses. (“Columbine: for Stephen Reid”) Nature teaches him lessons about anarchy, patience, protection, and “you don’t talk.” (“Across the Line: for Elizabeth MacCallum and John Fraser”, p. 16) He admires a female tern that feeds its young, without the ambiguity of humans, or “these nihilistic kids” (“Noise: for Ken Synder”, p. 17) He rejects “too much history” (“Diary”, p. 18).

Nature is receding, even as some of us are more attuned to it, than others.  (“Bush Blues: tuning Vestapol”)  He mocks the platitude: “It’s all good” (“Pink”, p. 20) The emotional outbursts of the Id conflict with the ego and the superego (“Object”) The erotic interplay between nature and humans is compared with the oscillation between the solitary and companionship (“Gratitude”, p. 22) In “Prey”, he recalls his “first kill”, like the reptilian birds and insects, “hunting’s hardwired into me, love and need/united.” (p. 23)

In “Fountain”, the interplay of light and water expresses the poet’s strong emotions, “white water/flying, vanishing, becoming sky.” (p. 24) The subconscious comes shooting to the surface.  The act of covering the mirrors signifies death, as well as hiding the ravages of one’s ageing.  (“Here: for Jimmy Donlan, 1901-1982”)  Geologic formations do not disclose the age of the earth (“Survivor”) He addresses an “Inner Voice” in the daily routine, echoing “call” and “recall”; the known and “unknown”; appearing silent and steady.  (“Influence: for Elizabeth Bishop”, p. 27) The polluted ocean becomes “sea and sky are black, invisible” (“Lo”, p. 28) Spirit adopts the pose of “white crystal” (“Solstice Song”, p. 29)  A canoe ride resembles the heroic salvation of the infant Moses (“Canoe Meditation”, p. 30)  Emotion is written in nature personified.  If only drinking “could dissolve/past and future” (“As If You Knew”, p. 32) The life force rushes through opposing forces, such as: “up” and “down”, “here” and there; “life and death”; light and dark. (“Two Heavens”, p. 33) He is only an “amateur”, existing on a pension, being “employed” as an acute observer of nature (“Torso”, p. 34)  Wilderness conflicts with civilization (“I’ll Fly Away”, p. 35)  In a  domestic tableau, he family emerges as “sister” and “Mum”, but he seems to care the most for their pet “Scamp”, in mutual stories. (“Within My Head on Upside Down”, p. 36)  The template of “tempus fugit” appears ironically unvarnished (“Nostalgia”, p. 37)  He is curious about the economy (“Scavenger”)  He feels as if he has lost his mind (“Written in the Dark”)  He explores the axiom   of “If only.” (“Snapper”, p. 40)  Like the beavers, we believe “we’ll have work every day”, followed by “”If”. (“Wiggisey”, p. 41)  He endorses “CBC Radio Brave New Waves” (“Looling: for Rachel Saunders, 1984-2006”, p. 42) Like a beaver, he is “Long in the tooth”. (“Bank Beaver”, p. 43)  Some aspects of nature appear “irreducible”. (“An Economics of Happiness”, p. 44)  He demands “the mind’s/silence, for just one fucking minute?” (“Inenarrable”, p. 45)  He points to Tom Thomson’s art and the fallibility of school teachers (“Person of Snow”, p. 46) In “War Baby”, “We revel in having more than we deserve” (p. 47).  Nature taught him its language (“Post-Industrial Landscape”, p. 48) He helps nature, by leaving it alone.  (“Bedford Social”)  What does he have in common with forest, muskrat, or galaxies? (“Empire”)  In his boyhood, he was ignorant of nature (“Wetland”) He envies the spectacular displays of nature in the changing seasons. (“Indian Summer”)  Birds mimic song, but he knew the truth of his mother’s deteriorating medical condition.  (“Catbirds, Mockingbirds, Starlings”, p. 53)

He masquerades “like a bogus boiler inspector” (“Devil’s Paintbrush”, p. 54) There is “one way” or “one delay”. (“In Loco Parentis”)  He enters the cold water, fully expecting winter’s coming.  (“The Elgin Angular Unconformity”, p. 56)  He envisions the end of his life, while contemplating work and love, as antagonistic elements, to endure the pain.  (“The Secret of What Is Important”, p. 57)  It is important to “teach”, “repeat” and “defy”.  (“Galactic Dynamics”, p. 58)  An insect’s “animal energy” tends to say “So fucking what” to the inevitability of death. (“Stable Base”, p. 59)      An insect is capable of evolving into a literate and thinking being, if given enough time.  (“Garter Lake Gazette”)  The ecological development of mountains made possible an orphanage.  (“Babies’ Cottage”)  In “Mother’s Day”, he composes a letter of regret, with the salutation of “Dear Nature.”  He detects the movement of frogs, turtles, and a fawn, before looking at the activity of the stock market (“Lily Pond Margin”).  Humans are as insignificant as a wasp, in the scheme of things.  (“Rivers and Mountains”)  The “big bang” theory of creation is set aside, in favour of “something began remaking itself.”  (“Minnows”)

Over four pages of note accompany the poetry texts, which are useful, but not essential to aesthetic enjoyment of this lattice work piece of reconnoitered wildness, wilderness, and magnification of living beings which are invisible to the naked eye.  The poet envies and cherishes a way of life which is inexorably escaping our grasp, due to human invasion and occupation of animal and plant territory.

Donlan is a poetry editor at Brick Books, who also works as a reference librarian at the Vancouver Public Library.  This is his fourth book of poetry, after Domestic Economy (1990, 1997); Baysville (1993) and Green Man (1999).

This is an essential addition to Canadian poetry, in general, and to readers of Szumigalski, in particular, not the least because it contains a Preface by Hilary Clark, an Afterword, by Mark Abley, with both an Author Biography and an Editor Biography.

Szumigalski once wrote: “The bones of women are piled up behind the door.  The skulls speak and are answered by the songs of children.  Is this the invention of memory, the reinvention?” (“Reinventing Memory”)  Born in 1922 and passed in1999, she managed to produce fifteen books.  She was a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets and a founding editor of Grain magazine.  (As a judge, she had some kind words to say about my poems in Beginning of the Sky). She shared with her readers some of her earliest memories, as a child and of her own child.  I edited “Reinventing Memory: Preface to Panel” for the Feminist Caucus chapbook Reinventing Memory (2003) and it was included in Imprints and Casualties (Broken Jaw Press, 2000).

“This child inherits all my memories.  Have I invented her, my daughter? She remembers my childhood as her own, her grandmother’s childhood as though it might be a bedtime story.  Is seeing backwards, seeing into the past, simply a memory? Do we invent the memories of our foremothers?

And can we remember the future?” (p. 147)

The present collection does not include her early poems because the intention was to gather together these “late” poems as poetics of “last things”, or, as what we used to call, eschatology, in theology class.  For a last collection of poetry it, ironically, includes two prose statements, as well as two smaller volumes from Haigos Press.  The question remains: what did she hide or destroy? Fortunately, a final volume is to appear of her miscellaneous writing, containing prose, drama, liturgy, and text for a dance piece.  Her editor refers to this as her “liturgy”, that is, a Eucharistic rite; a rite or body of rites for public worship; a customary repertoire of ideas, phrases, or observances. The University of Regina archives is where her papers are preserved.

In Canadian Books in Print, we discover that Voice (Coteau, 1995) was illustrated by Marie Elyse St George.  Also available is Z: a Meditation on Oppression, Desire, and Freedom (Signature Editions, 2001).  From her first book of poetry, Woman Reading in Bath, in 1974, to her selected poetry On Glassy Wings (1997), Szumigalski was an arch poet, who produced meaningful, enduring work.

In Part 1 “The Tree of Creation”, the youthful queen speaks to old crone, who renews herself in a “new” skin (“Untitled, glory to the queen”).  There follows the ritual of funerals, with black horses and black straw hats (“Pompes Funebres”). Her pebble (her heart) becomes just a ragged hole (“After a Fire on the Cutting-1959”). We are imprisoned in our towers (Yggdrasil”).  She prepares meditations (“Four Mile House”).

Both avarice and “shit” are green in colour, but that colour is redeemed because it also appears elsewhere (“O Greenest Bough”)  She offers an Ode, inspired by William Blake (“Statement for A Matter of Spirit”)

In Part 2 “Light From Light”, the poet compares “The Russia of the Mind” with that in the movies, accompanied by a sound track.  She delivers a lament for “Hadrian’s Dream” and in sequentially-numbered meditations (“You and I at the Rapids”).  Her paint brush defines a study of still life, in “Dried Fruits and Herbs–An Autumn Basket”.  She is clairvoyant, able to read palms, as if they were pink branches (“Untitled, This is not a trick”).  The poet suggests a metaphor of the house as an egg (“Rowan in May”). She reads into the man a catalogue of thoughts (“Untitled The cowman”).  She depicts the relationship between a mother and her son (“Untitled In the park he tosses”), as well as in “A Child and his Mother Camp Out on a Cool Night”.  As a poet, she considers the day of her own birth (“Pre-cursing”) when the mother was already planning her next child, a boy, “my brother should come after me” (p. 39).

In Part 3 “Day of Wings”, she explores the ambiguity of an object, especially the phallic image of “safe in its sheath”, which symbolizes her brother (“Fear of Knives”)  She questions human existence and draws on William Blake, in a series of “untitled” poems.

She rocks a child, as she herself is rocked by the sea (“Lullaby For Mark”).  She confides a fear of heights and of falling (“Kakky Poem Three”).  There is suddenly no access (“Mother and Daughter Dancing in a Garden”).  She expresses her sense of melancholy (“Grief), while she contemplates her own death.  She concludes that, while age renders us changeable (“To a Friend Dying”), we must consider the pupa, which produces wings.  She concludes with an inimitable “Statement on Peace”.

In Part 4 “The Great Crocodile”, the poet plays with poetic construct and the scientific concept of an orderly classification of plants and animals, according to their presumed natural relationships (“Taxonomy”).  There is a dialogue between the self and the soul (“A Catechism or Conversation”).  Further, she uses the eternity symbol of Christ as a fish (“A Herring Lives in the Sea”).  It appears that no change is possible for any of God’s creatures because they, all too predictably, simply transmute.  The male principle is the hunter and the female principle distracts him from the kill (“A Green Hill”).  While she observes the astronomy of her pet cat and the universe (“Untitled How Strange It Is”), the cat answers her back (“The Winter Cat”).   The seasonal pursuits of the animal end with its return.  Contrary to the doublespeak of advertising (“A Conversation”), the natural is preferable to art.  She, explicitly, fashions a shroud.  As an accidental tourist, this woman inspects the past (“To Be a Pilgrim”).

When I met Anne at a reading, I was concerned about schooling for my gifted child.  She said that she could not help me on that matter because she had never attended school. What an extraordinary education she has had, for anybody, but, especially, for a poet.  Little did we know at the time, I would choose home-school for my son.

This is a first book by a professional writer, editor, and academic.  The motif is of building, with an epigraph from The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander (Oxford University Press, 1979). The reference pertains to a recurrent pattern of events which serves to replace inherent chaos by an imposed sense of order. Further, we come back to ourselves, which we have forgotten. The tone, at times, is bittersweet.

She catalogues icons and emblems which evoke the past, including photos and rosary beads. (“Wanted”) Instead of fame, she became a common noun, such as “wife, mother, teacher–” (“Thirty-nine”) She issues a “Letter to my Mother”, with words and clauses, in which she compares emphysema with that which “you would/have said, of what you meant/to say, if only.”

The poet recounts a moving event revealed by her great aunt, this hard-won farm-wife”, during the family’s motor trip.  That is, a sister was institutionalized, due to never marrying, as an independent-minded woman “in the pre-feminist millennia.” In contrast with her sympathy in this instance, she shares “a funny story my mother used to tell.”

In correspondence, she seeks to comfort a long-time girlfriend. who has been re-institutionalized.  (“Dear Leah”) She recalls her apprenticeship to womanhood (“Kathy”) in “this list compiled for the pleasure of ticking off.” Her son becomes a hunter (“Late chinook”) and, ironically, is himself wounded and bloody (“Poise”)

In the long prose poem “(Palimpsest”) she structures her contemplations and meditations by means of “true or false” statements.  One of the many underlying assumptions is that “it is dangerous for a mother to expose the root of a lie.” Another is “whether it is appropriate to claim that an event is only meaningful in context.” Therefore she situates some experience in time, for example, “summer of 1942” and age “fifty/love”. However, other themes are quixotic memory, the brain, as well as the wind.  Life is not like a novel but it does unfold like a game of scrabble.

The title poem indicates “five truths”: light, motion, trees, windows, and peace. Houses are personified to approximate the wishes and demands of their inhabitants.  For example, the nostalgia for: “Our home was small, square, secure” (“Atakkavacara”). However, the French language is inhospitable to her patios in Quebec and she embraces her foreignness in Ganesh, “with the forgiveness of a stranger.” Her husband views her as foreign (“Foreigner”)

She offers a “rough” translation of Mignonne by Ronsard in a dichotomy or response-driven dialogue. In a take-off from John Keats, she is disappointed by an artist in a Montréal cul-de sac. (“? la belle soeur”).  A child conceived but never born haunts her (“Phantom”)

The house is described as square, old, and prim, while she feels fear.  Like the house, she “yearns for release” and wants to “fly away towards unknown lands.” (“Quotidian”) She fears hospital life and dying. (“Addendum to Dear Leah”)  Meanwhile, she must rely on her body again. (“Forty-two year-old woman takes tennis lessons”)

She comforts another by invoking, “imagine our home in daylight” (“Second storey”) in order to remind him of “what makes us safe, and what makes a home”.  She fears her mother’s and her husband’s rage.  In domestic matters, there is “only ever a Scene One.” (“Love poem”) Their marriage survives, just one more day, because “now it simply takes too much effort/not to love each other.” (“Dukkha”).

There are violent images; she begins to have “an arsonist’s dreams, the field aflame, [and] the house/poised to combust.” (Atakkavacara”) She is aware of “submarine gun fire” and that a bomb had exploded. (“Observation.”)

There is a multiple choice “Checklist” regarding biology, speech, and gravity.  There are precisely six ways to “sublimate rain”, yet there is no rain, simply one’s desire.  She seeks consensus with reference to a corollary.  Her body is a “mandala”, an Aeolian harp stroked by wind.

In “Learning” she reflects on children learning to read, with this “hand-cranked language” a replacement of Cyrillic by English. Her lower lip, exposing incisors, and clamping down only helps to decode the language, while her son learns independence. Girls learn shame from their fathers and grandfathers, with music from the spheres (“One morning near Boston”) Synapses represent her own learning (“Stillness”)

In “Selected excerpts from the atlas of desire” she enumerates what she calls “the alphabet of the mouth”, namely palatal, glottal, dental, bilabial, alveolar, velar, uvular, which may have been drawn from her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics.  However, I recall learning these at Teacher’s College, by using a mirror, before teaching children to read by means of phonetics.

She concludes “There are certain rooms currently closed” (“Residuum”) and her primary relationship of “Us” is “a perpetual renovation.”  The individual “I” is described as possessing “mellifluous arcana” and “rococo flabbergast”, so it remains necessarily secondary.

A child remains in “the ordinary room” (“First birth”) until it is time (“First child leaves home”).  Even the metal screws are orphaned (“What remains”).

In keeping with the recurring motif, the illustrations for this collection were documentary evidence prepared by draughtsmen (draughtswomen).

The title of the collection has several sources: in Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1685) and The Book of Music and Nature (Wesleyan University Press). One of its meanings is a state of awareness and another is the oriental style of beauty, without order or not easily observed. The title poem comes late in this collection, indeed, subtitled as “The Last Word”.  Furthermore, this beauty takes one by surprise but requires awareness. The aestheticism underscores erudite poetry, otherwise an eclectic mix, generously multi-layered.

According to the poet, many of the poems began as experiments in ekphrasis, reading paintings, “but mutated rather quickly away.” The elements of wind, sand, and light are a composition (“Perfecting Thirst”). Other elements are the factor of time, the future (“The After”); a catalogue or inventory (“The Gleaner”). The definition of form is without distinct outlines, blending one tone into another (“sfumato”) as in the literary and the visual arts or graces. In “City of Heaven”, we witness the volcanic or igneous action of energy on matter.  Thyme eludes the temporal sphere, despite the logged day and month.  In “Test”, although writing devices are not permitted, research is illegal, and the poet ponders the paradox of “a voiceless voice.”  He uses understatement for emphasis (“The Jetty”); juxtaposition of nature with scientific speculation (“The Replicase”); the tide, the ancients, and geological formations (“The Sea, the Valley and the Temple City”).  The night table recurs, as a point of entry, for contemplative and meditative iconography; of departing and returning; Greek myth, Olympian gods made earthly.

In Part 2, “Night Music”, he rhetorically asks about Passacaglia, an old, Italian or Spanish dance tune, in moderately, slow triple time. (“The Before”) We behold the grammatical and the near fanatical in this isotope of pain (“Half-Lives”). Death becomes an intransitive verb, fission. The decay of the atom is synonymous with synopsis of ash.  The typography of leaving (“Last Note”) is inseparable (“Unrespectable”) a reverse umbilical cord. He plays with enumerating, in units of one, six, two, one, twelve, five, and twenty-four. Time is the controller, (“How to Separate the Past for the Future”). The poet as archer, a conventional enough comparison, is in an unconventional simile/facsimile of a Henri Rousseau painting. At the juncture of parental deaths, he is musing on a photograph collection. With inverse proportions, we discover antiphony, anticipatory grief, a totemic tree.  The venues and snapshots of memory align with tingsha stars, tintinabulary sound of bells (in “Night Music”). There are images of warfare, torpedoed, refugees, bone white cloud a harbinger in what will become. Note the irony of “Well”, of not sick or deep plumps,  the depth of his mother’s hospitalization, images of sleep and mothering of love, like a lighthouse (“The Lighthouse Dreamer”). Canthus refers to either of the angles formed by the meeting of the upper and lower eyelids. Miscanthus is in “What Can Never Stop Having Being”. We witness truths about the extended family; more so in her moans of pain (“The Answer”); with reductive images of her suffering and his helplessness.  The poet personifies the dahlia as capable of imagination (“Returning”), in an address to his object of affection; a Coda (after Anne Carson) of the out-breath (moment of death). He delineates this “sigh” in concrete terms; her husband’s death predates hers, although they symbolically together take a “Last Walk in the Garden”.

To some extent, several of these prose poems have the element of the pastiche (italicized with their sources documented).  The fictio or making of the art involves remaking from existing principles.

Part 3 “Like the Sounds of A Grass Fire” he invokes, “that’s everything/at the beginning of everything” (“Things Beckon”).  The coruscations are glitters and sparkles, as well as a flash of wit.  The one true thing is a distillation of sorts, perhaps from a cloud (whether composed of water or blood acts) which acts as a tone. We glimpse Atlantis on the third day (sans resurrection). Some are effigies stars/scars with a metaphor of sewing, a bone needle, and threads which stitch the poet to “night’s sleeve” (“Early Spring Night by the Lake”). In “Himalaya”, the indigenous lammergeiers are large Eurasian vultures, resembling huge falcons.  They are found in mountainous regions from the Pyrenees to northern China. Their setting is the Tower of David or Biblical Babel.  The poet rejects the technique of simile (“not like anything”) in favour of metaphor.  The movement of water, river, pond, associated with heart which is hummingbird.  The mind and thought are composed of hollow bones.  However, the beloved’s body is “like” water, myrrh.  The personified “words stumble” (“Every Part of You Has a Secret Language”).The sprung rhythm of Gerald Manly Hopkins appears in “Nagarjuna and the Grackle”).  The poet interweaves both strong-stress and syllable-and-stress.  He relishes the irony, “I am overtaken by things/for whom I don’t exist.” (“On the Skyline”).  The analogy of hummingbird indicates, “The objects that found you right away” (“Residual Messages”). The room dimensions revert to water.  The retinal eye consists of a sea floor. Time, in the form of minutes, is churned by a water wheel. Emotion, as in anxiety, is converted into liquids.  The binary of “dos and don’ts” appears in the play of light, which is searing, “spooked”, shimmer, glissando, blue, transparent as glass.  In “the Clearing”, rain is personified as having “thin legs walking”.  The house becomes a lily seen by a beetle “with glistening eye.” Light is ultimately “exploding in the clearing.” The x-ray is seen in negative, “a near infrared verb”.  (“The Counter-Tree”.  The voice of water is “spiked, /until the next oblivion.” (“Two Time”) While the door, in “The Clearing”:

keeps getting
smaller, a secret
passage, as narrow as thirst

later becomes a “portal/to everything we can lay claim to” (“Were You to Walk”).  In Part 1 of “Three Quotations”, a thought is compared with an iris, blue with orange, red tail, among stones.  In Part 2, he abides with a”let’s put one word in front of another.”

It appears that time may become “stuck, a stylus in a gouged record.” In Part 3, hearts become wings, for a Protestant in a Catholic Church.  The souls are birds, be they juncos or chickadees.  The Pentecostal “tongues” indicates at least six languages plus another six languages.  The seventh section honours Christian icons, such as towers, continents, angels, etc.  (“The Book That Can Be Read from Its Shelf”)   According to the Endnotes, some of the phrases were found in a now lost manuscript.

In the final part 4, “Previews”, the poet encounters ruin, rain, and word-bloom traffic.  (“Animal Light”) The ash and the queen are signifiers of resistance.  By the river, gills glisten. (“Apocrypha”) Memory is best served by the current of light which beacons thirst, flooding, at a drip-line, with waves, river, lightning. (“A Momentary History of Time, or, The Sheer.” The image of a house rises like a pelican into the river’s memory. (“Poisoned”) A military setting of helicopters without fuel coexists with fear.  “I am not a woman, I am/ a language.” (“Portrait”) A hotel disappears.  Recognition jostles for position with faulty memory. (“Something to Remember the World By”) There is a refrain of “Truth is peregrine” a recurring motif, “it flies through your net”.  (“Among the Harvested”)   The sense of terror is evoked in “The Invasion”, with the landscape “feigning” his presence.  Memories feel like “cut-by-flying-glass” (“The Last”). Minds belong to machetes and the streets are unsafe (“Then”). The trees are alphabetic but burnt out. (“Time Runner”).

Henderson is the author of nine previous collections of poetry, among them Nerve Language (Pedlar Press 2007) which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award.  He has a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature and is the Director of Wilfred Laurier University Press.  He co-edited Rune in the 1970s.  He has been President and Treasurer for the Association of Canadian Publishers.

Dennis Reid and Robert Bringhurst designed this chapbook, as the work product of the inaugural P.K. Page Trust Fund Reading, in Victoria.  Published in a limited edition, it is number 1 of 80 copies (sold out).  This is an impressive collection, with fourteen poems by P.K. which span 1936 to 1994; and were republished by permission of Zailig Pollock, Page’s Literary Executor, Tim Inkster and the Porcupine’s Quill, publisher of Page’s Collected Works.  Some of the other published sources are: The Metal and the Flower (McClelland and Stewart, 1954); Poems: Selected and New (Anansi, 1974); Evening Dance of the Grey Flies (Oxford University Press, 1981); Hologram (Brick Books, 1994); Cullen (Outland Editions, 2009); and Planet Earth (Porcupine’s Quill, 2002).

Each of the contributing poets chose a poem by Page.  Bernice Lever’s own poem, “Musings on Sylvia Plath: a 20^th Century Poetic Comet” is juxtaposed with “Mineral” by Page.  Lever contemplates,

we were just young mothers

struggling to find words

for the poems raging inside

Robert Bringhurst chose the classic “Stories of Snow” and counterpoised his own “All Night Wood, in memoriam P.K. Page, 1916-2010,”  with images of “skein, spinning, weaving, and writing on air”.  Dennis Reid selected “Presences” and added his own “The happy little elegy”, an ironic title, with meditations on “And it’s hard being dead”; “and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels”; “a little eternity.  Though the living”; and “all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction.” These lines are drawn from Duino Elegies, by poet Rainer Maria Rilke.   Kate Braid read “Another Space” and added her own “Mumbai”, on a lingering dream of male malevolence.  Cathy Fern Lewis read “A Backwards Journey” and “Personal Landscape”.   Eve Joseph read “Evening Dance of the Grey Flies” and contributed her own “Beginning” 1) on Lorca, Neruda, and Whitman, on “a woman sitting at the night window”.  The male principle a dancer, the torero,

relinquishing form and technique,

tossing his heart over the bull’s horns

over and over again.

Tim Lilburn chose “The Glass Air” and his own “He Looks” about a 14^th century English mystic.  This blurs the genders, “in his sister’s dress and/father’s rainhood”. Cathy Ford selected “Poem Canzonic with love to A M K” [Abraham Moses Klein] a Montreal poet who was part of the same generation as the McGill Group, A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, and Leo Kennedy.  Page was a member of the Preview group, with Patrick Anderson.  Yet, she opines,

This is the poem [Klein]

wrote better, earlier, so why should I

write it again in this so difficult form?

His was a tour de force, a cri de Coeur.

Mine is an urgent need to recombine….

In “After Dostoyevsky, Blake & the CBC”, Ford riffs on the refrain “beauty may save the world”, with her own, “great writers search for words like painters for spirit colour.” It is possible to age backwards, to reverse time, as “female and male walk out of the water.”

Marilyn Bowering selected the signature poem “Planet Earth”, with an epigraph from “In Praise of Ironing”, by Pablo Neruda, whose lines are rewritten by Page, “It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet”; “It has to be ironed, the sea in its whiteness”; “and the hands keep on moving”; “smoothing the holy surfaces.”   In the otherwise untitled “If I knew the horses better”, Bowering imagines herself as a horse, “But when were there such times?” These are the archetypal metaphysical and poetic conceits of carpe diem and tempus fugit.  Patrick Friesen chose “Cullen in the Afterlife”.  His excerpt from “Anna” evokes the visceral and kinetic past, situated in 1958.  His grandmother’s sepia photographs depict her life before him.  His grandfather’s stories envelop him.

I love words in the air balanced between mouths and ears I

love the way they’re smoke before they’re stone

but it’s true I think there’s not much a voice can say there’s a

limit I guess to art there’s no end to desire.

Critic and scholar Sandra Djwa concludes this tribute by reading “Depression” culled from a Poetry Notebook, “Nineteen & Twenty”, Library and Archives Canada, circa November 23, 1936, and “The End” both poems by Page.  The penultimate poem is a curious forecasting of “and worst of all- I’m death in caps!”  The final summing-up draws on “The End” by Mark Strand.  The refrain is: “Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end”; “watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like”; “when he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end”;“ or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.”

The P.K. Page Trust Fund Reading, in Victoria, B.C. on 12 November, 2011, was only one of ten fundraisers, the purpose of which is to establish an in-perpetuity endowment in Page’s name.  All proceeds will be held by the League of Canadian Poets to benefit poetry and poets in Canada.

Brick Books remains a Brave New World, dedicated to the genre of poetry, but with some notable exceptions.  Let the buyer beware: “Anthology is a metaphor.  Nothing contained is complete.”  Further, “There is no Brick Books’ aesthetic articulated from the inside.” (p. 11)

On the occasion of Brick’s Twenty-fifth anniversary, this is a compilation of every writer Brick published to date.  The editor acknowledges that, rather than choosing a few poems by the strongest writers, he opted for a single poem from each poet in the Brick canon.  The poems, organized by author in alphabetical order, range from Bert Almon, Barry Dempster, and Susan Goyette, to Carolyn Smart, Derk  Wynand, and Jan Zwicky.

The selection will surprise some readers who identify Brick Books as a publisher of region, based on their location in southwestern Ontario.  Of those poets identified by place, Bert Almon, Karen Connelly, Marlene Cookshaw, Joan Crate, Marilyn Dumont, E.F. Dyck, Cornelia Hoogland, A. R. Kazuk, Robert Kroetsch, Kim Maltman, and Roberta Rees are in, or have been associated with, Alberta.  Couple these with poets from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia and one draws the inescapable conclusion that a good proportion of imprints by Brick Books are by authors from western Canada.

There remains a project for someone of bringing together criticism about all of these titles, with supplementary materials, such as author biographies and interviews.  An interesting plan would be to update the anthology with more recent materials by these authors and others.

With an Introduction “For the Reader”, by the editor, “Brick Books readers cannot help but be good citizens.” (p. 13).  The  addendum of “Brick Books in Print” does not represent a complete publishing record, since some, presumably, are out of print for 1975-2000.  For a brief history of the press, check out the publisher’s web site and archives at: www.brickbooks.ca.

At first glance, this  compact selection does not appear to be a song or hymn of praise or gladness.  However, there is an antiphonal quality to the writing, and, perhaps, the reader response is meant to be the alternation.  At some level, the work operates as a secular version of the Divine Office or canonical hours of prayer to be read (or said) daily.

The title poem, in six sections, deals with a shared secret, such as erotic wordplay of ligature, “untie me.”  The lover’s body is a river, on which the beloved walks, “holding up the sky.”  The human heart contains waters and stars “leak from the skin.”  Though the dead forgive us, it is necessary to leave them.  The only italic is “Love.  Love.”

In “Chinchillas”, the animals were unimaginable, “A fur coat cut and sewn back into an animal.”   Her close friend is nearly illiterate (“For Jackie, Who Will Never Read This”). Who are her heroes, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf; “Goodbye, goodbye.  Jane, Virginia, Anne.  Language / is the shelter you prepared for me.” (“Reading”)

As in music, she is interested in fashioning variations on a theme, such that the narrative weaves, slides, and rains down on the unsuspecting reader.  (“Narrative”)  The natural world is a landscape of the mind.  Both shape and shadows survive without us.  Memory must stand the test of time (“Reunion”)  Even naming is relational (“By Definition”)  Childhood friends meet their deaths.  A woman produces poetry as prophesy.  As each lover is a thief, “Who that rescues doesn’t also / dream of being saved?” (“False Alarms”)

It has been said that imitation is the best form of flattery.  An example of this is imitation in style of a previous literary work.  Of course, a literary composition may be made up of selections from different works.  The poet cites multiple sources (not all of them literary) as inspiration, influence, and echo, rather than strictly  a pastiche.  She chooses to emphasize what is changed in outward form, rather than what remains the same.  This act saves the result from becoming a potpourri.  According to the poet, she achieved these compositions by means of transformation, “using most of the same words…but subverting the order and meaning.”

In “Architecture of the Everyday”, the venues are: “House”, “Factory”, “Port”, “Suburbs”, “Stairwell”, “Roof”, “Window” and “Arch”.  The buildings are merely bricks and “measured glass”, etched in memory.  Light is personified as “shy” and able to “tumble”, (“August”)  A woman is both the rolling sea and the ship (“Body Double”).  Breathing and the breath pause are essential factors.  The mouth enunciates.

With three previous books of poetry, Gods and Other Mortals (1986), Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios (1990), and The Perils of Geography (1995) all from Brick. she completed a novel, Leaving Earth (HarperCollins, 1997).  According to Books in Print (2005), we can add: Afterimage (HarperCollins, 2000), The Lost Garden (HarperCollins, 2002), and Wild Dogs (HarperCollins, 2004).

Given the title of what is Reid’s fourteenth book of poetry, he practices the fine art of meiosis, that is, the presentation of a thing with under-emphasis, especially in order to achieve a greater effect. What the poet has done is to draw together, or cause to converge, the material world with the spiritual one, beginning with an ironic epigraph, “Nothing can be reduced to anything else.” by Bruno Latour.

This consolidation results in epigrammatic statements, poems physically diminished in size, amount, number, and extent.  Relative to this decrease, is the resulting concentration or distillation of his work. He narrows down the scope of the poems, restricted by the economy of words, abridging the time-span of his primary relationship, from years to moments.  In the archaic sense, he restores those moments to righteousness, saving them for posterity from the swirl of experience and being.

His specified state or condition of despair is moderated by self-expression, the exodus of emotion, acting as a cathartic.  Much as he ultimately must capitulate to circumstance, he manages to systematize natural events, by writing them down in written and printed form.  Through sheer force of will, he is able achieve a correction, as in a chiropractic manner, by bringing displaced and broken parts back into their normal positions.

These are the base elements of uniqueness, energy which cannot be destroyed, but is transmuted, transformed, and therefore becomes matter; the angle of vision adopted from particle physics.  Witness the paradox of the physical body which “is never lost./So is never saved.” (p. 60)  The pieces of matter may be obsidian (the smoked glass of molten lava, named for its discoverer); bits of stone broken and reassembled, thence, in this failed relationship, the metaphorical doors close but do not fit properly.  The poet is both master and the monster fashioned from clay in the eye of the creator.  “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which, in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”    The second epigraph, quotes Psalm 139, to the Chief Musician, A Psalm of David, 15, but does not quote verse 16, which I have cited above.  Herein, we find many layers and levels:

a ) the relationship of the poet and his former beloved whom he worshipped; b) the poet as God, creator; c)  the poet who seeks God in the works of nature; d) the poet who reflects the perfection of his Divine Maker.  In terms of time, the poet existed in the moment before he was made, because of Divine power which consists of all time, no beginning and certainly no end.

The poet describes Luskville, on the Ottawa River, as “a phantom settlement” (for which he exchanges his birth in Saskatchewan and his career in Drumheller, Alberta) in “western” Quebec; and, in the process, his partner abandons him.  He endures the post-modernist angst of how do “we know anything”, despite his job conducted in museums, assembling data in archives” and attempting to deal with “the uncatalogued”, such as the natural world of amphibious frogs.  His persona compares the binary of what “is” with what “is not”.  In the process, he defends the natural world:

So my theory is nature is never an answer”/
but a question

just not the question
I needed to ask at the time.

(p. 15)

Further,

language with insects
animals, both wild and domesticated,
and we sent them
wild or just lost
on their way.

(p. 17)

Some of his words convey the surfaces (marble, granite, glass, etc.) which attract dust over time.  For instance, there is a granite wall that outlives their relationship.  He recognizes that a carpenter’s tools are needed to try and repair the world; whether the long-handed shovel or an axe for the kindling; the shovel and the hoe are interrelated, but he avoids the rake.

His persona enters her in lovemaking; by shedding himself, he takes an inventory of their passion.  Unlike his watch, he can remember everything.  There were the musical connotations of a banjo, a mandolin, a fiddle.  While their relationship was unraveling, he believes that what she could not endure he learned to accept.  .A windsock is a symbol of misdirection, as well as the question of who maintains control (of the television).

Embedded in the poem is figurative language, as in the personification of thistles, a zealous fan, to whom appearances can be deceiving.  The dream has a flight path it will not survive, like moths to a flame.  There are the sounds of an anchored boat swinging against the dock or the drops of water from a soulful hose.  This man envies his own hands which have possessed a woman, though Paradise seems simply like déja vu.  He takes fastidious care to record the nuances, the smoke from a neighbour’s pipe;  the fog which conceals flesh and fur. He writes himself onto the constellations and reads the ciphers made by fallen branches.  The trees embrace.  What he rejects is: the candles, memories, all the evidence, tomatoes,

No, it isn’t absence
nothing

is this version
of absence.

(p. 59)

In this ruined relationship, there is the inevitable division of property, including the poems he left on her computer; her copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s complete poems, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.  He identifies with old men fishing, such that he schedules his day in order to avoid rush hour on the bridge.  While the river is unchanged it becomes more difficult for him to keep his eyes closed.  The other is the same, the naked self is not acceptable here.  By measuring bones which still fit in the human skeleton, time passes, summer turns to fall, then the funereal La Morte d’Arthur.

At some junctions, he believes she will return, her loss is temporary, and he still has hope.  He is an incurable romantic, because his poems are songs about her.  However, he negates his love, since it is like a disease, “I always get it//from you.” (p. 73)  Like a child, he counts because she taught him to do so, and what is implied, is that there is not, and should be, the ability to count on her; (or is this his mother, but, no, she is too young.)

The weather in Saskatchewan is contrasted with pictorials of rain, mud, ice, smoke in winter.  In this Greek tragedy, we find the deux machina of the gods; birds “winch”, a heart on pulleys; and he cries out: “stop all the beautiful machines” (p. 78)  He concludes:

“It’s not the fall that kills you.” Rather, it is the act, to “Say the falling.”  He falls in love, out of love, into the dark earth, from whence you came.

Even the domestic items in the kitchen are sanctified with spiritual images and language, such as “prayed”, “Baptized”, “Hallelujah.”

The poet contemplates the horizon, which seems to remain the same but actually is different, in spiritual terms, signifying oblivion.  The lover, he awaits her in “the neutral place you wanted” but she never arrives.  Meanwhile, spring, (February and April in the Gatineaus), comes and he asks :

Does the weather
move to some kind of resolution?

Theoretically, no.

(p. 83)

The immediate relation of dreams is to repairing the roof (which robs the dreams).  The “little black dress” she wore becomes interpreted as the soul, and, in like terms, the heart as her necklace.  He removes boxes for the dumpster, musing:

There is always
the available volume of the world.

There’s always more boxes

(p. 87)

and, by implication, other relationships, or, at least, objects to occupy space.  Yet, he wishes to: “Put me inside you/ again.”

He parses dreams as “deniable”, “collapsed”, “forgettable”, “unrepeatable”, because he feels bitter, and, like the lemon she left behind, he wants to devour everything in revenge.

He rejects mold and invokes ice, “now/while you still can.” (p. 91) The recurring motif of the daylilies she planted, before she went away, forever, embrace and reclaim his soul- weary sadness.

Even the stars are countable but distant.