Selected Poems
by Tim Bowling
Gibson, BC: (Nightwood Editions
$23, pp. 160
Chamber Music: The Poetry of Jan Zwicky
edited by Darren Bifford and Warren Heiti
Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014
$19, pp.102
Tim Bowling’s Selected Poems canvasses 16 years of work, 1995-2011. To select one’s elect poems is a provocative act, but so Bowling has done, though perhaps with the advice of an international, poetic brain-trust, including three Canuck “Dons”—McKay, Coles, and Domanski; two Yanks; and Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer, a Swede. Whatever their influence, though, the elegiac strain of Bowling’s lyre seems to conjoin plain-spoken, common-man, U.S. poet Carl Sandburg and the Brit poet and novelist of doom-n-gloom, i.e. Thomas Hardy. However, the focus on region—the B.C. salmon fishery and its baseball-style “runs”—treated in clear, hard diction—yields notes of the Irish bards Yeats and Heaney, but also the dour, Newfoundland poet E.J. Pratt.
Such influences link Victorian and early Modernist poetry, and Bowling is a visionary of the past. His preface admits he favours “a place where the subjects are ancient—family, nature, time, mortality,” though he feels his images are “caul-fresh,” conjuring up “freedom … and joy.” Yet, this “joy” is muted, for these poems regret times past and lives lost, especially a father and a brother and next the widow and mother. Bowling likes to make the morbid limpid.
Salmon figure strongly as an overarching figure: Leaping, spawning, dying. Just like us. This hardcover volume presents Bowling as a poet of distinction, and rightly so. His imagery runs to the classical: a man unknowingly leaves “a line of blood,” as he walks, “a line the pull / of his finger on the salmon’s gill began, a stream / along its scales that drips off its tail and marks / a black spine for the moonshadow he drags behind.” It echoes Homer, as do perhaps Bowling’s lines about “the beautiful flesh of the inside of the throat / going all the way down to the cry of joy and terror.”
The single image catching the essence of Bowling’s verse is, “and night falls / when it falls / like dirt off the sides of an open grave.” Bowling’s work is first-rate, but will set one brooding on mortality. If his lyrics seem one-note, each is played consummately; yet, for some, the thematic monotony will seem dulling.
Another selected work is Jan Zwicky’s Chamber Music, which covers her publications from 1989 to 2011. Zwicky’s work is midwifed by two editors: Montreal poet Darren Bifford and Halifax poet and lecturer Warren Heiti. Their selection of her poetry likely has her blessing; but it does have her “last word,” for Zwicky also appears in a closing interview with her editors.
A philosopher by training, Zwicky is celebrated for her fusion of lyricism and contemplation of the complex worries of self-conscious life. Moreover, her cerebral verse is touched by ho-hum duties and intensively penetrated by music and nature. Zwicky can be read as a perfect exponent of mainstream, Anglo-Canadian verse: Professorial, environmentalist, abstractly sensual. She blends the classical, ironical intellectualism of Anne Carson with the nature-oriented meditations of Thomas Merton.
Her book is thinner than Bowling’s, but more various, if less rich in feeling – I stress that “if.” Bifford and Heiti posit that Zwicky attempts hybridity, showing that “pieces of narrative” or “analysis” can be worked into the (lyric) pattern of the world.” They also find that, in Zwicky, “we witness … a testimony of the primary imagination,” thanks to, in some lyrics, the repetition of specific nouns. The gents argue well, but I can’t help but see the accidental (?) collusion between Zwicky’s “lyric philosophy” and the philosophical lyricism of Ezra Pound’s “Pisan Cantos.” Maybe the Pound infiltration is what, for me, aligns Zwicky with Basil Bunting….
Still, Zwicky has her own strong voice: “On a bad day, you come in from the weather / and lean your back against the door…. // you must believe and not believe; / that door you came in / you must go out again.” “Someone is running / fingers through their hair. / The fingers / are like fish, they flicker / upstream while the current / purls around their backs / and falls away.” Beautifully, “This / is what you do sometimes / because you cannot put your hands / around your heart.” Chamber Music is a fine tune-up to Zwicky’s symphonic oeuvre.
The Year of Our Beautiful Exile
by Monica Kidd
Halifax, NS: Gaspereau, 2015
$19.95, pp. 80
Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra
by Elena Johnson
Halifax, NS: Gaspereau, 2015
$17.95, pp. 48
Two new Gaspereau Press titles feature poets responding to Nature. Monica Kidd’s The Year of Our Beautiful Exile ($20) logs a response to the Great Alberta Floods of June 2013. Elena Johnson’s Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra ($18) records her residence at a remote, Yukon ecology station.
Kidd’s collection is her third. Also the author of two novels, Kidd grew up on the Alberta grasslands. It’s easy to see affinities between her laconic lyrics and note-like prose poems and the style of that progenitor of experimental, Prairie poetry, namely, Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue (1968). Kidd acknowledges precursor, Western Canada-based poets of Nature and (more-or-less) Zen, I mean, Jan Zwicky and Don McKay. They have their influence, but Kidd’s whimsy reminds me of Richard Brautigan as well as the folk-blues surrealism of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1975).
The book splits into fifths: Travel lyrics, the flood poems, poems meditating on naturalist Charles Darwin, and concluding lyrics, over two sections, that feel autobiographical. “Here wilderness is biblical,” Kidd writes, and one realizes the Genesis flood as the primeval Apocalypse. So the power outs and office towers stand “empty and dark. / Muddy water (lapping) at their footings.” The imagery echoes news footage of Hurricane Katrina-struck New Orleans: “Bodies appeared in the strangest of places…. / Draped over railings, suspended in cages over the roiling water. A power pole dangling from a crane like / a giant crucifix twirling on a gossamer thread.”
“Nobody thought about the fish. Stranded in parking lots, / ball diamonds…. Backhoe buckets. A kitchen sink. A toilet bowl….” That’s what disaster looks like: Weird juxtapositions. Think Halifax, December 6, 1917: Molten iron raining from the sky. In the Darwin pieces, he’s quoted, but Kidd philosophizes: “remove the / entire residue of man, and the earth would remain, / a husk of twitching bug feet.” “What is a garden but a republic of poppies…? / … I have found that love will grow / amidst the shattered crockery.”
Because Kidd’s preferred form is, by definition, prosaic, it’s difficult to distinguish her work from lushly detailed journalism. However, there is no such problem with the lyrics: “Long after the swimmers are gone, the water / remembers, slapping and slapping against /the walls of the pool, forever going nowhere.” Kidd’s poetry is, ultimately, a half-sardonic, half-joyous, study of life.
Johnson has been an intermittent park naturalist, field ecology researcher, editor and translator. Born in New Brunswick, she resides in Vancouver, B.C. Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra is her debut collection of poetry. As her title suggests, these poems read as notes—jottings—of the observations available to Johnson, during her month among the ptarmigan and caribou, the rain and snow, July 15-August 13, 2008, at an eco research facility in Yukon’s Ruby Range Mountains.
Like Kidd, Johnson seems to follow the laconic example of Kroetsch’s Seed Garden in assembling her spare and/or skinny lyrics about the flaura, fauna, vegetation, and meteorology of her encampment. Like Kidd, too, Johnson has found a kindred soul in McKay, but also in the Black Mountain(eering) poetics represented by Gary Snyder, a style of verse emphasizing openness of eyes to observe, lungs to project, page to accommodate, and words to wander. “Does it cohere?” Ezra Pound asks near the conclusion of his epic Cantos. The answer for him (who sits at the base of Black Mountain works) is a qualified “No,” while the answer for Johnson, for her work, is “Yes.” Then again, because her reach is not so long, her grasp is more certain.
So, there are fine images: “Wildflowers one knuckle high”; “a sheep’s horn / a hook that parts the sky”; “A few spruce scraggle the bottoms of slopes”; hoary marmots are lured ‘with urine,” caged, measured, surrender to research “a piece of the left ear”; and, perhaps in revenge, “eye our backpacks, / steal a sandwich. / Chew our boots while we nap in the moss.” This book is exquisite, imagist, picturesque: “Two sandpipers clear / the brook’s edge, where “I tilt my bottle in.” The book design? Well, that’s awesome, especially the endpapers. And the Mauritius font.
