Book Review
Four Ways to Make Poems
- Frank Davey (Author)
Bardy Google. Talonbooks (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Karen Enns (Author)
That Other Beauty. Brick Books (purchase at Amazon.ca - Margaret Avison (Author)
The Essential Margaret Avison. Porcupine's Quill (purchase at Amazon.ca - George Sipos (Author)
The Glassblowers. Goose Lane Editions (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Nicholas Bradley
1. Search the web: Bardy Google, Frank Davey’s twenty-seventh collection of poetry, is composed primarily of the results of Google queries governed by a series of complex, rigorous rules. In his preface, Davey notes that The texts are part of my ongoing work to use the sentence as the basic structural unit of poetry—to create poetic texts, as they have always been created, out of the materials of prose.
The first poetic text
(or prose poem), Exceed Your Limits,
begins as follows: Will we lose our tax status if we exceed our limits? How far will we exceed our limits? The sales price of the home does not exceed our limits. Your gross annual income does not exceed our limits.
It continues in this vein for four pages, turning the seemingly innocuous phrase into cliché or cipher. Indeed, the book as a whole renders familiar (and sometimes topical) phrases virtually meaningless through repetition. The texts differ in vocabulary and sometimes structure, yet are linked by their hypnotic effects. The juxtaposition of discrete search results is sometimes puzzling, sometimes droll. But the language itself is often eerily familiar: the texts draw upon the registers of advertising, news, and personal disclosure. In Close Calls with Nonsense (2009), the critic Stephen Burt writes that gamelike poems
hold together if we can imagine a personality behind them.
Davey’s personality is certainly on display in Bardy Google. Some of his titles are cheekily self-referential—namely New Turning Points for Canadian Literature
and Surviving with Paraphrase
—and his love of Great Danes plays a role. But the book equally asks readers to listen to language divorced from persona. Davey observes that the poems are unrepeatable because search-engine rankings change continuously; thus his poems are given exact dates, from 3 June 2008
to 29 July 2009.
Yet the paradigm allows for an infinite number of similar poems. Bardy Google finds meaning in Internet flotsam but reminds readers of the vast ocean of language from which the poems are drawn: call it the digital sublime.
2. Listen to others: That Other Beauty, Karen Enns’s first collection, joins in the ongoing conversation among a host of contemplative poets in Canada. Robert Bringhurst’s Sutra of the Heart
supplies an epigraph for Enns’ The Hand Is a Field of Grasses
and hallmarks of Jan Zwicky’s style appear throughout the book: poems invoke composers and their works (Mozetich, Bach, Mahler, Brahms, Schubert) and certain preferred words (clarity,
wilderness,
light,
loss,
pitch,
resonance
) echo the lexicon of Songs for Relinquishing the Earth and Robinson’s Crossing. (Zwicky has edited Enns’s poetry; both writers are accomplished musicians.) When Enns writes, in Notes on the Angel’s Descent,
that you put your ear to the world,
she brings to mind a phrase from Zwicky’s String Practice
: tune / the ear to earth.
In That Other Beauty,
Enns writes of lying down lovely with
grief,
a phrase with an antecedent in Zwicky’s Aspen in Wind
: What is sorrow for / but to lie down in.
I don’t mean to suggest that That Other Beauty is derivative; the poems gain in interest from their connections to other poets’ works. In Tuning,
Enns writes of apprehending a grey landscape and a glimpse of flicker and hawk: The mind takes it in like a compound eye, / seeing, turning, seeing, / listening for the central pitch. / And resonance. / And form. / And unblinking thought.
Her poems concern such connections among mind, heart, eye, and ear. They are attuned to the limits of language and to the paradox of writing about the inexpressible: You have no language for this cold, / the insidious hands that press the clear ice plate / across your face
(from Pausing on the Icy Step in November
). Enns has set herself the task of finding the words.
3. Watch the world: The Glassblowers is George Sipos’s second book of poems, after Anything but the Moon (2005). (A memoir, The Geography of Arrival, has since been published.) His poems are meditative, often melancholy, and resolutely undramatic: they evoke stillness as the mind dwells on the minutiae of memories and landscapes. Many poems describe coastal scenes; Sipos, who lives on Salt Spring Island, draws upon sea and sky for images of tranquility and unseen motion. In Fulford Harbour, November,
the speaker gazes upon the open water / untenanted by anything conscious
while Above the bay, a cold front from the Pacific / slowly turns on its invisible pivot.
In Mt. McBride
(named for a peak on Vancouver Island), the speaker asks his companion whether anything would have been different had they not once hiked those green mountains.
The concluding lines suggest that the details of the climb have been dissolved by time: Roosevelt elk pink on a marble ridge / all we now remember.
Sipos’ descriptions of natural beauty are accompanied by a sense of mortality. The cultivated flatness of his language reflects a sombre view of the world; the poems express and examine coastal malaise.
4. Break free: Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes. / The optic heart must venture: a jail-break / And re-creation.
The opening lines of Margaret Avison’s Snow
seem to speak clearly and memorably to everyone who hears them,
writes Robyn Sarah in the foreword to The Essential Margaret Avison. Yet even when Avison’s poems are more difficult (as in the rest of Snow
), Sarah suggests, they beguile with sharp flashes of the familiar
¦ and their mysteriousness feels like the mysteriousness of life itself. Sarah’s selection includes well-known poems (The Butterfly,
The Swimmer’s Moment,
Watershed
) and less familiar works from Avison’s last collections, Momentary Dark (2006) and the posthumous Listening (2009). One could quibble with individual choices (where is Butterfly Bones; or Sonnet against Sonnets
?), but the selection is careful and effective. Sarah’s task was difficult: as she notes, Avison’s Collected Poems contains nearly 450 poems and the final volumes add another ninety to the total. Sarah is concerned to rescue Avison from the ostensibly confining categories of Christian poet
and associate of the Black Mountain poets.
Avison’s religious turn occurred in 1963, the same year as the Vancouver Poetry Conference, at which she appeared with Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov—all proponents of the New American Poetry, to borrow the title of Donald Allen’s influential anthology (1960). As Sarah suggests, Avison’s religious poems are never simply devotional, while poems with spiritual dimensions were always part of her repertoire: Is
˜The Butterfly,’ which refers to ˜[t]he Voice that stilled the sea of Galilee,’ a Christian poem? It was written a full two decades before her conversion experience. Sarah’s slim selection clarifies Avison’s distinctive accomplishments and her idiosyncratic vision; it complements the three volumes of Always Now: The Collected Poems. The Porcupine’s Quill’s series of Essential collections—to date it includes Avison, Don Coles, George Johnston, Kenneth Leslie, Richard Outram, P. K. Page, and James Reaney—is a valuable part of the critical conversation about the shape and scope of poets’ oeuvres and of Canadian poetic history. The collections also present an implicit challenge to critics: balancing comprehensive accounts of large bodies of work with careful attention to the intricacies of individual poems is a perpetual test.
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MLA: Bradley, Nicholas. Four Ways to Make Poems. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 11 July 2012. Web. 19 June 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #212 (Spring 2012), General Issue. (pg. 122 - 124)
***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.
