Inversed
by Jason Holt
Stone Mountain, GA: Anaphora
22 pp, $16
Birds Flock Fish School
by Edward Carson
Detroit, MI: Signal Press, 2013
72 pp, $16
Jason Holt is a trained philosopher, now teaching at Acadia University. His sixth book of poetry is Inversed.
Edward Carson’s third book of poetry is Birds Flock Fish School. Notably, 30 years passed between the Torontonian’s first book (1977) and his second (2008). He deliberates painstakingly his craft/art.
But this observation is also true of Holt. Though he has published twice as many books as Carson in almost half the time (over 20 years in contrast to Carson’s nearly 40), he is concerned to produce what he terms, “experience as poetry, poetry as experience,” and to do so while remaining faithful to existentialism via Leonard Cohen, eschewal of majuscules (as in ee cummings), and repression of punctuation (chez Gertrude Stein).
Holt’s scholarly approach to verse sees him advise, “poetry / is language / masquerading / as itself.” In other words, his poetry doesn’t look like old-school POETRY—but more like whimsical parades of terms and phrases.
Read: “how in this / benumbing / this slickpenned / state / I walk / in april snow / when you abandon / best my counsel / lash and / then / the rain / to all your / sunning hopes / an answer.”
Such a poem may not appeal to the faint of heart or the weak of mind. But its tease—so to speak—is to ask us to make sense of what seems a jumble. To that end, I find myself guessing Holt’s narrator feels benumbed—both my spring chill and a friend’s or lover’s disavowal of his best advice. However, he has revenge, for rain answers the other person’s “sunning hopes.”
I can’t say my interpretation is correct, only that Holt expects me to puzzle my way through these verses that seem like a Rubik’s Cube. Difficult, they verge on the occult.
Yet, some poems are more open than opaque: “the other /not the one / just proud / of her heart / betimes / and oh the shape / such undeserved / happiness / trembled / much as on / sharp appetite’s / glass / a wetted finger.”
Again, I must be indecisive in my deciphering, but it appears to be, a poem about the delicious perils of—well—loving (someone).
Clearly, Holt has little interest in plain speech that is not, simultaneously, slippery. One thinks one has the meaning, the image, of the verse, and then it is gone—as fleeting as the moment of reading.
One might ask, “What is going on?” But, at that instant, the poem is gone. It’s best to savour the linguistic “masquerade.”
Carson is a less insular—or, rather, a less open-ended—poet than is Holt. In other words, he is more traditionally “accessible,” if just as given to a sense of the mysterious.
So, observing birds, the poet states, “We are held in the crisp heyday / of their coming and going.” “Crisp heyday”: Is it autumn? Or are the birds vividly “frisky”?
One also reads, “They are everything we fear / is ours, and cannot say no / to their coming.” But this statement also refuses clarity.
The poem does end well: “How can (the birds) all but disappear / into the ancient widening sky // with only their raucous calling / calling us to witness their vanishing?”
The title poem is more satisfying. Carson recognizes that birds and fish, wrap “the compact cloud” of their movement “in a wave / of their own making.” Indeed, “They move quickly to pass / along to each other a new thought, knowing // nothing of where each random turn will take them.”
Now, the poet argues, we are similar, in detecting “within ourselves, … this bold outline of another / world emerging.” However, despite our topsy-turvy actions, “looking to reclaim an old refrain of / escape,” we still end up, “only to be found out where finding rests.” The more we think we change, the less we do.
Reading Carson’s rhymeless couplets, I’m reminded of the Welsh-New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s ghazals. But the prevailing sensibility is more like Wallace Stevens: What seems obvious at first becomes imponderably strange: “This material light / is an old mystery, remote as conjuring, installing an invocation, / collimated, urgently infinite as the morning sun emptying itself.”
It’s fine to be somber and scholarly; to be dour and dry; to reject visceral ecstasy as a viable mood. But, poets, it’s also okay to shimmer and shimmy and shout!
