Book Review

Poetic Off-roading and the Roads More Travelled

Stephen Collis (Author)
On the Material. Talonbooks (purchase at Amazon.ca)
Zachariah Wells (Editor)
The Essential Kenneth Leslie. Porcupine's Quill (purchase at Amazon.ca)
Tom Henighan (Author)
Time's Fools. Stone Flower Press (purchase at Amazon.ca)
Glen Sorestad (Author)
What We Miss. Thistledown Press (purchase at Amazon.ca)

If ever a reader wanted four new books and a distinct voice in each of them, these four would qualify. Kenneth Leslie’s poetry, though not new (he died in 1974), is reviewed here with previously unreleased material by three others. The starkest contrast with The Essential Kenneth Leslie is On the Material, by Stephen Collis, and these are the two I recommend. Although one poet is old-fashioned and the other avante-garde, they both work well in their chosen forms.

For Leslie, the Shakespearean sonnet is the form that helps him to be critical of modernity and modernism. Editor and poet Zachariah Wells has made a fine selection of Leslie’s work, including a sequence of 28 twenty-eight sonnets entitled By Stubborn Stars. At the end of that sequence, Leslie’s Street Cry asserts the speaker’s determination to hammer away and shout [his] wares even though no one stops to buy. But Leslie’s stance of non-radical anti-modernism is appealing. It almost never seems stuffy, partly because his voice comes from outside the academy, and partly because he also has a facility with looser forms and tends to use them, instead of sonnets, to express his political concerns. He laments for example that modern schools condition students until they are docile and brainless: their wills are like the blown pigskin that drools / November muck around a soggy field. At his best, as he is here, Leslie is evocative and smart.

Much of Leslie’s traditional values are mostly rooted in the country, not in academia or other elite cultures, yet he never stoops to the Romantic cliché of exalting pantheistic nature above people. As the rather self-explanatory title of Beauty Is Something You Can Weigh in Scales suggests, beauty is earth-bound, / seen, heard, smelled, tasted [...] . . . ; Beauty was my mother’s porridge in a bowl. / Milk, oatmeal, and molasses built my soul. These lines are refreshing because, in rejecting modernism, he Leslie has not uncritically adopted the earlier Romanticism as a substitute. He does, however—and with an ironically modernist juxtaposition—express a strongly environmentalist complaint about industrial practices similar to those that the Romantics objected to: he notices the belching trawler raping the sea, / the cobweb ghosts against the window / watching the wilderness uproot the doorsill with a weed (Halibut Cove Harvest). In our era of idiotic and disheartening exploitation of the Earth, this is a germane image.

My only frustration with Leslie’s poetry is with his occasional tendency to end poems with exclamation marks that try to force a stronger emotional response—but Collis hardly ever uses punctuation, and in various additional ways he defines himself in contrast with traditional poetics. Calling attention to the almost complete lack of punctuation in On the Material, Collis asks, Is disjunctive irony all we can expect / From poets now no question mark there. He uses either line breaks or internal quadruple spaces instead of commas, often also using employing enjambment, fused sentences, and fragments to unbalance the reader momentarily. This effect is superb given that the most prominent section of the book is a long poem, 4 x 4, in which the speaker is doubtful of the vaunted stability of off-road vehicles and the economies they represent.

I have the same doubts about capitalism (sometimes outright disbelief in its sustainability), so I was interested to know that Collis extends his eco-criticism to poetry. 4 x 4 is a series of forty-four poems of four quatrains each—more like 44 x 4 x 4. He is as interested as Leslie in the formal meanings of poetry, but Leslie surely never imagined his poems as superduty trucks with names like Escape, Liberty, and Explorer, as Collis does in ending 4 x 4 with The Ark of Resistance. He argues earlier in the series that We ˜feel free’ because we lack / The gears to shift down to / The articulation of our unfreedom and that The paradox of autonomy is / It doesn’t drive beyond itself. I appreciate the parallels that Collis identifies between the illusions of freedom-loving drivers and freedom-loving poets; language has constraints, too, such as ideological thought controls and quatrains in poetry. When he imagines that the 4x4 poem is stuck, he writes, But maybe we could still winch this rig / Out of the ditch, implying that poetry still has a hope of going somewhere good, as if capitalism might yet save itself, too.

When war and consumerism come together in his series, when on-line trading and wars flash on flat screens / As 4x4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages, it is easy enough to imagine how poems are as suburban and protected as those 4x4s—vehicles of false freedom and hypocrisy that are involved in wasting too many of our resources and lives. It is more difficult, however, to imagine how poetry is as excessive as such vehicles, even if we do cut down 21.5 billion / Board feet (2005) of trees to make paper and build things. Nevertheless, I appreciate Collis’s willingness to be critical of his own work. When each tree is introspection, I also empathize when he says, I want trees a place to plant them. You might say that he has installed a green roof on the 4x4, though off-roading enthusiasts won’t buy it.

Although Glen Sorestad’s What We Miss is not as compelling to me as the aforementioned books, it is more accessible to a non-academic readership. Its poems are less abstract, more narrative. There are also moments of subtle poetic artistry in What We Miss: meaningful rhymes (as with the assonance in The Road to Heaven and consonance in Winter Barn), an occasional iambic rhythm that befits the speaker’s constant walking, and vivid images that help to set the narratives, as in Morning Declaration: Trees shake their leaves / like pompom quotation marks. I especially like the poems Now That I’m Up and There Was a Time, which reflect on younger days with memorable difficulty and matter-of-factness. Unfortunately, some poems seem like prosaic exercises in describing bygone things for the purpose of cultural memory, as in The Ice House. Sorestad reminds me of Raymond Souster in those nostalgic moments. When poems such as A Teen’s First Car and Buggywashers end with platitudes, the sentimentality is too easy.

Tom Henighan’s Time’s Fools is both too easy and too hard. Sometimes Henighan’s metaphors are as direct as bricks thrown through windows: Love, my friend, is the seeing-eye dog of the blind soul (Attention All Passengers). Sometimes, they are too abstract, as when the speaker in Pilgrim compares his mother to a bird of new consciousness / fledged by singular attentions / to the small mercies of give and take. In a related poem, the speaker suggests that his mother-in-law outran / the hoofs of [her] convictions / into spring. Henighan often free-associates to introduce ambiguous new images that do not always become interesting. This amateurish enthusiasm and willingness to take risks is both a weakness and a strength in an established poet. Greater editorial moderation might be helpful, especially in the forty pages of notes and praise for his other books at the end of Time’s Fools.

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MLA: Deshaye, Joel. Poetic Off-roading and the Roads More Travelled. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 13 Dec. 2011. Web. 17 May 2012.

***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.