The Lease
by Matthew Henderson
Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2012
72 pp. $18
Here for the Music
by Laurie Brinklow
Charlottetown, PEI: Acorn Press, 2012
74 pp. $18
Mathew Henderson and Laurie Brinklow share Prince Edward Island roots, he by birth and she by relocation, and their respective books share an editor, namely, the fine poet, Richard Lemm. Henderson’s The Lease is the Toronto teacher’s debonair debut. A graduate of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing program, Henderson takes, for a subject, not P.E.I., but the Prairies – Alberta, but mainly Saskatchewan, where his persona labours to drill up oil or dodge sour, acidic gases.
Along the way, Henderson’s tender-hearted hardhat falls in love, often unrequited, or wants to make love, but is too drunk or clumsy. These poems should be prefaced by Edward Burtynsky’s photos of industrialized landscapes that only the blues can humanize and chased by country-n-western ballads about after-work bar hopping. Henderson’s tone is honky-tonk-plain or Tonka-truck-tough. Yet, these lyrics demonstrate an unusual discipline. Many maintain a loose, ten-syllable (gruffly iambic) line, use startling verbs, and honour everyday speech (without studding every phrase with four-letter words). A good example of Henderson’s poetic is a “blank” (unrhymed), curtal sonnet: “The lease is meaningless: a square paced / first by seismic workers, and then your father, / and then by every other man you know. / But you’ve always pulled meaning from nothing, / and when he leads you to an empty field you / tear grass in fistfuls, read the roots like a will.”
“Migrant,” a ten-poem sequence, seems indebted to works by Dionne Brand (a Guelph university professor), and features imagery as visceral as hers (and also echoes her use of second-person address): “You broke branches, kicked old trunks until they bled / dead matter, spilled their secrets to ground in larval letters.” In the same poem, one reads, “The spotlights show moths, / a billion beating wings that make the air so thick and dark / you can’t even make a fist without crushing dusty bodies.” Also fine are instances of homespun, nothing-fancy imagery (or insight): “he can feel / the prairie wind beating his chest like the skinny fists / of a woman who almost wants him to let her go.” Intriguingly, Henderson writes often of Caucasians “coloured” by sun, oil, or gas, but seldom about “the Natives,” whose land is being looted of its resources. “Colour” is pronounced, but it’s class that’s privileged.
The last P.E.I. poet to ponder labouring was John MacKenzie (see Sledgehammer [2000]), and the most famous one to fetishize a trade was Milton Acorn (1923-86). Henderson rivals Acorn and succeeds MacKenzie. He has made his work art.
Laurie Brinklow founded Acorn Press in 1993, and sold it in 2010 to pursue a doctorate on “islandness” at a university on the “Island Continent.” A British Columbia native, she followed her construction-worker dad (shades of Acorn, shades of Henderson) to sites about and between B.C. and Ontario, before settling, ultimately, in P.E.I. Here for the Music is her first collection of poetry. Brinklow’s cover and back-cover feature the drawing of a dancing woman in a red dress, but this female figure first appears as a toddler, then a girl, and next a young woman. The art suits the poems, which resemble journal entries – or, in fact, as prose passages, read like diary pages. The book is a memoir merging free verse and prose.
Brinklow considers the odyssey from girlhood to motherhood, and from heterosexual coupledom to “ex”-hood. Dedicating her poems to her mother and her two daughters, the poet canvasses the anxiety of the feminist generation in trying to establish women’s equality and establish quality relationships. So there’s an elegiac tinge to these lyrics. Parents, lovers, children – all “bewilder and beguile,” and she is as anchored in place geographically as she is adrift emotionally.
A prose passage remembers a brother who drowned, while another recalls a surviving brother who was verbally abused: “I’d say, ‘I wish you were the one who drowned.’” Later, “I ask him if he remembers. He says no. ‘I’m sorry anyway.’” In a poem, a daughter, fearing breast cancer, asks, “Mom, / does this mean / it’ll get me, too.” Brinklow is nakedly natural, utterly unpretentious, and the result is rootsy, earthy, soulful.
For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems
by John Barton
Gibson, BC: Nightwood, 2012
136 pp. $20
The Rapids
by Susan Gillis
London, ON: Brick Books, 2012
104 pp. $19
A book of selected poems reminds one that life is brief, but art takes a long time to master. The mature poet must wish to look back at the work accomplished and take comfort in its excellence. John Barton can. Albertan by blood, then an Ottawa bureaucrat, and now a Victoria, B.C.-based, editor of The Malahat Review, Barton explores, in his verse, his capacity for love, specifically of men. His career spans the years of furtive affection, those of activism and fear of AIDS, and those of “metrosexual chic” and civil union.
R.M. Vaughan’s bravura introduction to For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems celebrates Barton’s “hammer-brutal honesty” and poetry that exemplifies being “brave, stupid, prone to romantic misadventure, and, best of all, alert.” Barton’s selection begins in 1981, when he was 24, and ends with 2009, when he was 52: Three decades on. The tyro poet follows Margaret Atwood and Sylvia Plath, taking up their employ of violent imagery to narrate his sense of his sexual difference: “My doctors will be shocked. / Hitler will be shocked. / They never knew I would give birth / to a new age…. “Nine months after the first jolt, / you mushroomed forth, an icon, a holocaust. / The world melted through my eyes…. / You left me comatose. / It was all new, all over.”
Strong as they are, the early poems are inconsistent, producing compact precision and gaseous diffusion. However, the once-prominent Atwood/Plath influence is more controlled by the time Barton is 33: “I used to wear a suit of cellophane / snug and / clear as a surgical glove.” Barton also takes to W.H. Auden and Constantine Cavafy. Discipline results, as in “Great Men”: “This is courageous. // This makes men / ghetto themselves in the arms of women / they do not love.” Along with rigor, there is also desire, to tell truth, even to speak of where one is and where love can be. “Naked Hearts” achieves these ends: “meeting the first evening, / fingers linking somewhere along Saint-Denis…. // The grief of our bodies / retells the world’s body of grief…. // In this century those like us / refuse like us / to live as if we have never been.”
In his later 30s, Barton is more his own man, with a gift for details: “He is approaching. / The horse lumbers before the milk wagon, / one shod hoof before the other, / the gravel in the alley / grinding like teeth….” In his 40s and now 50s, Barton has achieved an elegant economy of expression and the beautiful freedom to say what he wants in just his own way: “This body: its constitution / beyond amendment and spastically tense, the upper / and lower chambers of the heart loud with perpetually ringing // bells and filibusters remembered from the past: my 60s childhood, premature bedtimes, random Montreal mailboxes blowing / up into the October Crisis….” The mid-career and later poems win canonical status. Bravo!
Once a Haligonian, Susan Gillis has lived on the Pacific, but is now a Montréalaise. The Rapids is her third book of poetry, and it is spectacular in offering cascades of thought, images, the movement of the mind, stating, guessing, second-guessing, re-stating. The book has just this dynamic: A poem appears in one way, and then, many pages and other poems later, it reappears, rewritten. Each lyric is a kind of “shooting of rapids”: one plunges, lunges, curves, swerves, from one eddying idea or scene to the next, on to endings that are only pauses.
These poems are fits and starts and jump cuts. “A blue lake surrounds the house: snow / restored by twilight to a version of its original self…. / Gradually the first stars prick the sky around the moon’s pearled curve. / The last of the year’s scrap wood is ready for burning.” Observation becomes revelation: “The train arrives first as broken light – / utterly, utterly silent – / across the trestle bridge, flashing – / then as a screech and a roar we press toward, / one hundred exhalations willing open the doors.” Gillis honours ocean ports: “Spring makes me sick for coastal cities. / All that burgeoning! Crowds and leaves. / Going for a walk is its own aperitif, / air in the nose like cracked pepper.” The Rapids is as exhilarating as a salt-spray Spring. I end with my own line, from Whylah Falls: “Aprill is the most beautiful month.”
