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George Elliot Clarke

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Niche
By Basma Kavanagh
Calgary, AB: Frontenac, 2015
$16.00

All Alone at the End of the World
by Lesley Choyce
Victoria, BC: Extasis, 2014
90 pp, $24.00

Basma Kavanagh’s second full-length poetry collection is Niche (Frontenac House, $16). Herein the Brandon, Manitoba-based, N.S.-born poet imagines a world, wherein Nature tames humans and reclaims our inventions.

This radical, ecological sensibility—rejecting the passive dying off of other creatures because of our pollutants, poisons, and greed—is voiced immediately.

“Call the caribou with miles of open bog, with strands and snarls of woods, / and no black roads to bar their wandering.” Let Nature live, outlive, survive, all our tampering.

But Kavanagh also desires to preserve the small-scale and the local.

In “How to Skin a Hamlet,” she imagines the killing off of a town: “Cut carefully through the skin, around the / butcher, the grocer, the tailor, the cobbler, just behind the polluted harbour. / Remove the railroad, the wharf, and all mature trees. Cut out the / reproductive organs and discard the guts, also any stray musicians.”

The politics revisits E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), but also Rachel Carson’s enviro manifesto, Silent Spring (1962). Kavanagh notes the influence of Campbell Hardy’s Forest Life in Acadie (1869).

The poetry recalls Catherine Owen’s powerful complaint against ecocide, The Wrecks of Eden (2002), but also hews to surrealism, or to touches of Dr. Seuss and/or Richard Brautigan (think Trout Fishing in America [1967]).

“In April, at night, you watch for dark-shelled dinosaurs. They / climb the beach with the tides, you flip them if the waves turn them upside / down…. // Soon, your heart will be red: rust red, mud red, lust red.”

The prose-poem is a favoured device in Niche.

Free verse allows, though, for song: “if we die, if we die, what dies with us? // Will earth be less without our books and huts, our thumbs and cars…? // …. Will all our relations come crowding back, // fill the gap when we leave? Will they grieve us, wish to be praised / and needed, their joyful, greedy, story-tellers finally speechless?”

Decrying our “gadget-rich gallop // to apocalypse,” Niche is rage against the machine, and praise for Nature’s sheen.

Lesley Choyce is not a daunting read. The New Jersey boy turned Nova Scotian Bohemian-surfer-bard-prof-back-to-the-land-publisher-wit is so gracious in spirit, so mellow in attitude, and so welcoming in tone, that he is daunting to review.

Not only does he merit kudos for his gentlemanliness, but his poetry is cheering and love-and-life-affirmative, even when there are rare hints of gloom. Above all, his words seem poignant, honed, and honest.

Full disclosure: Choyce published my first and third poetry books and my first anthology. However, I’m reviewing All Alone at the End of the World (Extasis, $24) because it’s a 2014 book and it’s now early 2016. Too much time has passed—too-quickly—already.

So, to the point: Choyce’s 86th book serves up once more his patented gifts. The neighbourly, disarming voice; the story-backed lyricism that elegizes the wistful—and moving—accounts of life’s indelible passages; not to mention his humility in writing poetry that others might ignore.

As the book’s title suggests, the poet, now in his sixties, is looking back at his life and looking forward to eternity (or oblivion), whatever its architecture.

The meditations sound as touchingly thoughtful as Alden Nowlan’s poems, or as fantastically absurd as Brautigan’s visions.

The first poem tells of the poet’s tumble into a well: “If you were nearby watching, you would have seen / the head and shoulders of a man / whose expression clearly spoke of / his shock / at the decline / of all things, / his toes wriggling / in the cool spring water….”

“Hindenburg Over Halifax” chronicles the passage of the swastika-flagged airship over Halifax on July 4, 1936, and the awe of a Haligonian who will one day kill a soldier sporting “the same stark symbol emblazoned / on the drifting dirigible / above.”

Glimpsing his late mother’s “final, lonely shoes,” the poet visualizes his parents teaching him to walk: “she and my father holding the hands / of my tiny self / and urging my success / step by step / trying to prepare for a world / I was never quite ready for.”

Choyce words again. Well-chosen words again. Good stuff!

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