John Stoke’s Horse
By Peter Sanger
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2012
128 pp. $22
crawlspace
By John Pass
Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 2011
80 pp. $19
Peter Sanger’s eighth verse collection, John Stoke’s Horse is a series of painstakingly sculpted meditations on memory, mortality, and myth; the life of letters (which begins, not with writing, but with spelling, speaking, and reading); and the decline of civil discourse into pious shilling for plutocracy.
There’s a lot here, but the poems never feel too dense. These lyrics have been just as whittled as the toy horse—and the ideas of the poet-as-horseman—that serve as a motif for this book.
The first part of this four-part book presents ‘object’ poems, wherein the Nova Scotian poet considers various items, describing what they are, yes, but also attempting to define what they mean for him. So rhubarb is “Somewhere between fruit and vegetable” and fists “red knuckles through mud / during snowdrifts.” In winter, the edible plant is “abandoned pipes” that, “Breathed through,” sound elegiac.
A nice ‘object’ poem is “Sea Horse.” Sanger weaves science and art deftly in this tongue-in-cheek portrait of the animal: “You are said … to make a monotonous sound / akin to that of a tambour / which becomes … more / intense and frequent in breeding season / when a female deposits one hundred / and fifty eggs in a male’s / ventral brood pouch. This marsupial // solution makes you fish, bird, / mammal.”
In the “Civics” section of his book, Sanger attacks Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “Con speak” and dubs him “our man in the tar pit.” He observes acidly “That tyranny is only // a transitional necessity,” and “Evil / a market commodity.”
His despair at our shabby politics—democracy ‘sold’ with a double-double photo-op—is poignant.
There’s a tinge of Douglas Lochhead in the ‘object’ poems and Dennis Lee in the “Civics” section. But Elizabeth Bishop emerges as an influence in the suite of poems descending from “John Stokes’ Horse.” In this section, the poet rambles nimbly from allusion to memory to observation, joining together references to autobiography, favourite poems, and notions of myth.
“XII” exemplifies the method: the memory of being read-to as a boy ends in a nod to the Japanese poet, Basho: “O, I’d ride such a canter of words / until and my horse / were one / pond, frog, splash.”
These lyrics are very fine and very compressed, even if, occasionally, too compressed.
The fourth section, “Leaping Time,” is a brief memoir sketch of childhood, especially, and it seems strongly reminiscent of Bishop’s prose piece, “In the Village.” So? It is gracious in its revelation of the origins of the imaginative and exacting poet who has given us this book.
British Columbia poet John Pass shares Sanger’s confrontation with mortality, and he is as equally learned as Sanger, while also being a tad more playful. Crawlspace sees him volubly, garrulously, and expansively, and also carefully, limn his sorrow for the turmoil of our time, plus the passing of time and the dying of loved ones. But there is also a defiant recognition of beauty.
“As the Markets Fall” shows Pass’s skill at interweaving and juxtaposing the pain or pressure of news events with the beauty that survives in nature and in art: “As the markets fall… // I go down / the 959 points, dropping // in at the overstuffed supermarket / for milk, lettuce, yogurt…. // And can you believe Kafka: // ‘Anyone who keeps the ability to see Beauty never grows old.’ / So who needs that pension plan to hold // its own?”
While Pass is adept in many forms, the free-verse lyric sectioned off in two-line stanzas is, I think, his forte. It moves musically along, as in his hymn to “Sparrows” who have found their way inside of Vancouver airport: “Trapped, they loop and weave their ways among the fixtures // in a magnified grace, with aerodynamic verve / and slide unseen in sparrows outside.”
One poem is a proverb: “If you miss the point / don’t worry. You can be sure // the point won’t miss you.”
Other lyrics are done for fun, such as Pass’s revision/translation of a poem by Ronsard that does stand, finely, as its own achievement: “Zeus, with a bull’s grand certainty / took his Europa, lightly, over ocean and the vast / discreet undulations of her gorgeous belly….”
Pass plays Pound.
