Ben Robinson, Between the Lakes Cont. The Blasted Tree, 2024, 50 copies.
A continuation of an earlier chapbook published by above/ground press, Between the Lakes Cont. recounts the author’s attempt to drive the boundary of the Between the Lakes Treaty of 1792. This I know not from the chapbook itself but from the publisher’s website. The web also informs me that the treaty, made between the Mississaugas of the Credit and the British Crown, includes some three-million acres of land between Erie, Huron, and Ontario.
Although largely shorn of personal detail, we do hear that the poet is driving a hatchback, has lunch at a fry truck, and uses the washroom in a Dairy Queen. Is this little chapbook meant as some kind of political statement? Not obviously so, although it has informed me of the treaty’s existence and reproduces the words on a sign noting the “defeat of the Cherokees by the British (no date).
What I like best is the sense of travel, of southern-Ontario sites passing by the window, of moving on that the long lines, lined by hyphens, convey:
The chapbook ends with an unfinished line (“each passing storm”) suggesting that this road trip is not over yet. Drive on, Mr. Robinson.
Word Music 