Poetry and Film Reviews
The Deer Yard
by Allen Cooper and Harry Thurston
Kentville NS: Gaspereau, 2013
64 pp. $18
Discovery Passages
by Garry Thomas Morse
Vancouver, BC: Talon, 2011
128 pp. $18
Two East Coast poets, Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston, “close friends for over thirty years,” trade stanzas in sequence about their different observations, one winter, when Cooper is at home in Alma, N.B. (“a small fishing village on the Bay of Fundy”), and Thurston, a Nova Scotian, is holed up in Campbell River, B.C. The result is The Deer Yard.
An exquisite work in design and in feel, the book resembles a hymnal. But, here, the religion is bi-coastal nature and the songs are, so to speak, poems.
Cooper tells us that the inspiration for the little book “can be traced back almost 1200 years,” when Chinese poets Wang Wei and P’ei Ti penned the Wang River Sequence, in which, Wei’s twenty verses attract Ti’s responding lines.
Cooper and Thurston are naturals for this collaboration, given that both love nature and both translate classical Chinese poetry. Hear Thurston: “Our poetry—separately—has always been rooted deeply in the natural world. Like many other Western poets, we have looked to the east … as one model to best express our relationship with what we now call the environment… ”
On each page, Thurston pens the initial quatrain, which Cooper takes up in the next quatrain, in italics, not as an echo, but as a reflection.
Thus, when Thurston writes about seeing two B.C. deer, “under (fir tree) branches, / staring (at him), with a question of their own,” Cooper is prompted to wonder, “What is it that the earth asks of us?” Next, he notes, “The big spruce throw long shadows in late afternoon, / deep as the tracks that passed through the yard while I slept.”
The friends are attuned to each other’s tastes and interests, so their verses generate a buddy-buddy, palsy-walsy vibe: Thurston sees “Winter jasmine … / brightening the darkest days. Joy follows light.” Cooper answers, “the crow is the companion of the snow” and that “maple buds” hear “the growing voices of the sunlight calling through the cold.”
Although images can be poignant (think of Thurston’s notion that a “jewelled trout” has “rainbows under its skin”), the relaxed tone of the chums, casting lines back and forth, might be too relaxed.
Instead of pondering nature, they sometimes—sentimentally—pander to nature: “What we take with us / is gathered in our hands, our eyes. / When spring comes, the trout will rise / to the first mayflies dancing above the brook.”
Cooper and Thurston strive to achieve the emotive clarity of Chinese verse in its ability to juxtapose the spiritual and the natural. They do well, but a more stringent work is Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei (1999) by Bread Not Pain…
Garry Thomas Morse’s Discovery Passages was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award in 2011, and rightly so: It is a striking, radical work, one that presages Idle No More, for these poems explore the contest between settler-state culture and language and the attempts of First Nations to preserve their own traditions.
Retracing Cap’n George Vancouver’s “discovery” voyage, from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, Morse maps a saga of settler mischief and native resistance, and he does so in language that is unabashedly intellectual, spiky, punny, and allusive. The look of the pages mirrors those of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1919-70) and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (1946-58).
Morse’s “code” is, essentially, a rewriting of—and a speaking back to—the styles of English that were used to oppress First Nations peoples and abrogate treaties.
The book opens with a politic yearning: “I too want to write those long clean lines like / cedar planks removed,” but there is also the wish to avoid “pale / white/wash / almost / so dreamy / & clean.”
The long poem, “No Comment,” chops up the prose of Indian Affairs agents, a century plus ago and less, who strove desperately to suppress the Potlatch tradition. Morse renders their bureaucratic violence in a savage pidgin: “I realize the evil / of the Potlatch / position / IDLERS ACT… ”
Morse records other documents that show that Canadian repression of the Potlatch was also a cover for theft of First Nations art and implements and their sale to museums.
These poems are smart, masterful and necessary.
Ocean
by Sue Goyette
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2013
80 pp. $20
Ah We Talk: Lan’ Ah Kaiso
by Milton Carver Scobie
Norran Press
Multiple, prizewinning, Haligonian poet Sue Goyette’s fourth book isn’t a collection, but a long poem whose subject is vast enough to swallow up all that Goyette is moved to cast forth.
Ocean is awash in inspiration, aspiration, and ambition. Though it is divided into 56 lyrics whose titles spell-out sequential numbers (“One” leads, one by one, to “Fifty-Six”), Ocean has the reach of epic.
However, it is really a set of Ovidian elegies—or elongated epigrams—that sometimes address the actual geography of Halifax and Dartmouth, but other times meditate on the ocean in outlandish metaphors whose impossibility reminds us that the ocean itself exceeds our grasp.
When discussing Gaspereau Press books, one must reference the design. Ocean is muted in tone—like sea-buffed glass, with a cover texture like soft sandpaper; the title page artwork recalls that of Ralph Gustafson’s collection, Rivers Among Rocks (1960).
Goyette wrings the notion of the ocean for all its worth: “It was the original god of hypnosis // and made us all feel sleepy”; “The art of complaint was perfected when we first took note / of its temperature”; “It was more interested in talking about what we thought / it tasted like: fish or tears, it wanted to know.”
Goyette does an excellent job of thinking about how the ocean might regard us: “the ocean // was teaching us about patience. It was compelling to see it / take its time, stretching its slow hunt, nursing new rocks”; “We could drop // a whole house into it in exchange for what it knew. / It was moving all right but still / it wouldn’t budge.”
Also fetching are Goyette’s lines on Nova Scotia’s capital: “Real shadows were made / across the harbour back then in Dartmouth. The refinery / still stands and ancestors of lurking shadows gone feral // can still be seen in its parking lot and across the street / in Value Village … . // a metropolis of used clothing… . // Fog was responsible / for many marriages and, consequently, when it lifted, // many in-laws.”
Ocean is a rich read, bountiful in its meanderings. One can quibble, though, with Goyette’s penchant for far-fetched metaphors, such as “the raisins of winter clouds”; “walk the uneven ground of our fear”; “We were invalids in the pale hospital hours // of our kitchens”; “When had our hearts become badly behaved / dogs we had to keep the screen door closed to?” There is even “a talk show // of rain clouds.”
If –if—such images seem overdone, it is a minor issue. Ocean’s sweep is as overwhelming as a flood. Dive into this book… .
Milton Carver Scobie is 70 this year, and lives in Toronto, but comes from Trinidad and Tobago, a nation that he continues to revere. He is a grassroots, vernacular bard, pleased to invent nostalgic rhymes or patriotic ditties, to remind other “Trinbago” exiles of the history and the culture of their homeland.
For the 50th anniversary of the independence of Trinidad and Tobago, Scobie has released, Ah We Talk: Lan’ Ah Kaiso, which is self-published by his Norran Press. The verse is so down-to-earth as to constitute, in a sense, “nothing special.”
But that’s not true. What is radical about this book is Scobie’s belief that black writing—in the African Diaspora—is made complicated because black writers need to operate in a “strange tongue.”
For him, then, “Dialect with its pleasant cadences interlocking flow and logical imaginative diction has become for me the PastS sweet sad Survival song.” Not only that, but English punctuation is eschewed in favour of an eccentric grammar of his own invention. So, instead of writing “Past’s” above, Scobie writes “PastS,” replacing the apostrophe with a majuscule “S.”
But Scobie does write well, including inventing verbs like “to Naipaul,” which he says, means, “to live gloriously in the reflection of experienced idyllic time,” thus granting the Nobel Laureate in Literature an extra immortality.
The poem, “Independence,” is musically strong: “J’ouvert coming is almost daybreak / The bouquet thrown The bamboo done break / Towards the town is the road they make.”
Scobie fuses politics and poetics effectively, even when it seems most simple: “Chasing butterfly / Riding see-saw high / KiteS song in the sky.”
