Month: July 2024

Something I’ve never seen

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Jason Heroux, Blizzard of None. Kingston: Puddles of Sky Press, 2024, 80 copes.

https://www.puddlesofskypress.com/index.html/

I’ve encountered the self-described surrealist Jason Heroux’s sometimes disquieting poems here and there but haven’t yet taken a closer look.  So I’m glad to have the chance to read this small chapbook of eight brief poems.  Immediately I was arrested by the cover, created by publisher Michael e. Casteels using an a.i. program: a young seagull standing in front of a bleak, slightly distorted landscape of low apartment blocks and parked cars.  Real but not real, created by a human but also by a machine, evoking some forlorn feelings that I immediately distrust.    

Here is the first, title poem:

This reminder of someone never seen gives the poem a dream-like or perhaps a déjà vu quality. It’s meaning seems to hover just beyond my peripheral vision.  The poem seems to work through negation, leading to a seemingly sentimental question (“where is your home?”)—the sort of question that might be asked of Dorothy in Oz, or a lost pet, or even a seagull far from water.  It’s as if a shadow has crossed my path, the cause of which I didn’t manage to see.

The next poem is very brief:

The old broken fence

loves its brokenness.

It’s almost sweet, isn’t it?  As if the poem were about a teddy bear with a missing eye and a drooping ear.  Only it’s about a utilitarian thing, although one often considered picturesque in a rural setting.  The falling-down fence, the abandoned barn.  As a metaphor, it could be in one of those self-help poems invoking our own sense of brokenness and how we need to love ourselves for who we are.  Only it doesn’t feel like a metaphor.  It feels like a fence with a rich emotional life.

Then there is this from “The World”: “I recently heard one of the saddest statistics about the world is everyone in it will die.”  That’s a kind of kind of knowledge that strikes every child at some point.  Yet the poem’s speaker, like a visitor from another planet, seeks more information from the tourism office, which (shades of Kafka) turns out to be permanently closed.         

All of these poems provoked and stimulated and puzzled me in fruitful ways.  So much so that I found myself working too hard to understand the last poem, “Haiku”:

Old rain puddle, rest

in peace, you’re a grey balloon

holding no one’s breath

It took me several readings before seeing the obvious, that a flat grey puddle might actually look like a flattened balloon on the ground, all the breath having escaped from it.  The clever simile made me smile—at least until I began to suspect that this simple reading was a ruse.  Why “rest in peace”?  Why love one’s “brokenness?”  Why so far from “home”?  The inanimate world around us insists on it’s own inner life.  And even its death.

and bluer

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Cameron Anstee, Sky Every Day. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2024, 400 copies.

http://www.gaspereau.com/

Sometimes I don’t want to write a review but simply an appreciation. I want to say: this is so lovely, it made my day better, you should have a copy, too. Not terribly insightful but that’s how I feel about Cameron Anstee’s Sky Every Day.

These poems are so spare they make haiku seem verbose. Their words are like spots of sun on a wooden table, like the first few raindrops on a window. We learn nothing about the poet, but so much about his thought and experience. Here is all of “Dawn”:

even

so

even

now

thinking

of

even

ing

Not evening itself, but thinking of it. Of the thing itself and of the word, too. After I decided to quote this poem, I immediately regretted not choosing “Sparrow” in which a bird flies away “forever” but only to the next street.

If I were going to analyze these poems rather than merely appreciate them, I would look closely at the way Anstee slices his words (“per/sists,” “end/less/ness”), sometimes to make up an entire poem such as “Late March”:

an

en

tire

win

dow

of

win

ter

or how he inverts word order (“L’accent”) or how, by repetition of a word (“blue,” “bluer”) he somehow manages to both intensify and lighten it. I might also think about what Anstee edits out of his view–cars, recycling bins, piles of dirty snow, electrical wires, cellphones–although I would also have to say what a relief it is to leave them all behind for a while.

But instead I’ll simply let these poems raise me into the sky, lifting my heart into the “blue” and “bluer still”.

We wanted rain in our shoes

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Lydia Unsworth, These Steady Bulbs. Ottawa, Ontario: above/ground press, 2024.

https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2024/01/new-from-aboveground-press-these-steady.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawECGWVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcGV8EypxEE9zIEjIV7RJwwU4hY9I-QnOw054fcVUcf3HeOAga4BXsd0xQ_aem_RH1-Mu1xaXDIb02dBtFU5A

When I was a kid, so long ago now, we played unsupervised from evening into dark. We hid in back yards, ran from garden to garden, picked up fallen pears from a neighbour’s tree and hurled them at the rare passing car. That time came back to me as I read These Steady Bulbs, a text that both offers and withholds meaning–somewhat in the manner of childhood itself.

The English poet Lydia Unsworth (above/ground is a rare Canadian chapbook press to have an international list of authors) has an interesting premise here. Her book, as she explains in a note, is a response to Ian Waite’s Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time, which I gather is a sociological/cultural study of British subsidized housing. She tells us that “the concerns and nostalgia are in part abstracted,” although I admit to being uncertain as to what exactly this means. The sequence of prose poems is presented as a looking backwards into childhood, as a visit to places once intimately known, as an attempt to find and understand the past. It is certainly nostalgic, if not warmly so. It is as much exhumation as recollection.

Can anyone else see these streets, their buried gods, the blood from our shins like shadows in gravel, these graves?

Somewhere out-of-focus were the adults, uninterested in such spaces as the empty lot that drew them:

And the adults, they didn’t disobey the signage or peek over walls designed expressly to keep them out. Nothing for them to see but their imagination, creased and left to rot. Wild fear, rumour, grey flowing capes half-seen and blinked away. We lied and camped wherever it looked soft enough. Metal bridges, leftover streams, fat wet furniture, mossy and bright. We wanted rain in our shoes, we wanted to smell damp like the soil of the planet.

This is rather overwrought language, appropriate for an adult reliving the intensity of collective childhood experience. These were places were the dangers were felt, if vague and unnamed, making them all the more exciting. When the poet says “We didn’t want to go home (we never wanted to go home)” it isn’t hard to wonder whether home is now, for the adult looking back, a place that simply can’t be entered anymore.

The voice of these poems is oddly passionate and alienated at the same time. It isn’t always easy to say why one sentences follows another. Near the end we are told that “Everything is here for the taking” but this feels more like a past, a memory, a fiction that has us in its grip whether we like it or not.