Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling
by A.F. Moritz
Waterloo, ON: WLU Press, 2012
82 pp., $17
The Essential Robert Gibbs
by Brian Bartlett
Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2012
64 pp., $15
Since 2005, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, in its Laurier Poetry Series (LPS), has issued selected poems, intro’d by an editor, with an afterword frequently by the subject poet, thus producing a multicultural roster of studies of poets ranging from Dionne Brand to Fred Wah. A new LPS entry is Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling, selected and interpreted by Griffin Poetry Prize recipient A.F. Moritz. Halifax’s own Brian Bartlett helmed a choice of Cape Breton poet, Don Domanski’s work for LPS in 2007.
Now Bartlett has done the same for Br’er New Brunswicker, Robert Gibbs (1930), but for a rival ‘canon,’ namely, the Porcupine’s Quill-published Essential Poets Series (EPS), which has assembled verse from the likes of Don Coles, James Reaney, and P.K. Page, a fairly Establishment club (with incipient nods to Margaret Avison and Richard Outram). However, The Essential Robert Gibbs selects a poet who is not as anthologized as others in the EPS, but who is also not as avant-garde as are several of those in the LPS (cf. Steve McCaffrey, Nicole Brossard, etc.). Yet, his work is remarkable; Bartlett’s choice allows us a fresh auditing.
A prize-winning poet himself, Bartlett presents Gibbs as a metaphysical poet with earthy touches, with a ken for the dense, intense nature scrutiny of Brit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and as one who is kin to U.S.-U.K. egghead, T.S. Eliot and homeboy bard, Alden Nowlan. Bartlett highlights Gibbs’s pursuit of “grace,” but misses his interest in “understanding,” human experience, with an ear to the Bible and an eye for the world. In cadence and content, Gibbs recollects the ex-cathedra naturalism of Yankee poet, Robinson Jeffers as well as the Anglo-Saxon ‘Beat’ impulses of Canuck poet Earle Birney. Let’s let lines speak for themselves: “Light trims the white edges of the bay, / Limestone licked clean by salt-loving tongues”; “Whatever the lighthouse means … flaring round / off-beat with the foghorn … / in this watery envelope / where black-backed gulls work their wings / indifferently….”
Also powerful are people-portraits: “Littlejohn Tow tramping the dockyards / caught a Liverpudlian cold from a tart / in a Merseyside house … wished himself / home in Lincolnshire eating suet / pudding from his mam’s hand or selling / bullseyes to nippers in his dad’s shop.”
While Bartlett reads Gibbs as a land-and-sea-anchored intellectual (yes, a Maritime cliché), U.S.-born Moritz looks at fellow Yank-by-birth, Fetherling (1949-), as an outsider belle-lettriste, as an “alley cat” or flaneûr. Moritz’s characterization recalls Norman Mailer’s notions of the “White Negro,” but also Robert Browning’s surreptitious poet, his “recording chief-inquisitor.” In his Afterword, Fetherling links African-American jazz musicians and Russian occultists to his own subtle subversiveness as an urban hermit, one who is dangerous because he is invisible and liberated because he is poor. Yet, there is a strain of George Grant-derived Red Toryism in Fetherling’s work, a worry about jingoistic warring and consumerist whoring, ills worsened by mass ignorance of art and history. In his jittery poet’s prose, Moritz sees affinities between Fetherling and the Beats, Baudelaire, and a set of bookish scholar-poets more obligated to libraries than to life. Yet, Fetherling also resembles the U.S. ‘Hippy’ poet Richard Brautigan, but with a lot less zaniness and a lot more zeal—for examining art and archives.
Fetherling has many good poems, but Singer, An Elegy (2004), is a Patersonian masterpiece. Moritz grants excerpts: “He stopped when the music stopped / stopped when the night stopped”; “Memory is the last surviving document. / Hearsay evidence is all I hear said”; “his style was more like Whitman, a machine man / who liked to get his hands dirty learning // how things worked”; “I’ve learned from myself by myself”; “I see him stoking the furnace at five a.m. / sending the heat of Hell up through ducts to the hell above, // then using the handle of the shovel to slam / the cast-iron door in the face of circumstance.”
Explore the LPS and the EPS; sample Moritz’s Fetherling and Bartlett’s Gibbs. Set excellence against—or beside—excellence.
Undark
by Sandy Pool
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2012
80 pp., $19
Marrow, Willow
by Maureen Hynes
St. Johns, NL: Pedlar, 2011
96 pp., $20
Subversive Sonnets
by Pamela Mordecai
Toronto, ON: TSAR, 2012
112 pp., $18
Sandy Pool’s second verse collection, Undark is an “oratorio” about the thousands of women employed, 1900-1960, to paint luminous—and poisonous—radium on time-pieces, dials, etc., to set them glowing in-the-dark. The industry crippled and killed its workers. Once ingested or absorbed, the radioactive paint dissolved bones and tissue.
Pool’s elegy for these women is a narrative lyric suite—and, given the poet’s background in theatre—a series of poems for voices. Her women (and one man—the inventor of the radiant, deadly paint, namely Sabin Von Sochocky, 1882-1928) are not just spectres of workers, moms, lovers, trial witnesses, and patients. They are also legends (Sappho and Hatsheput) or myth (Nox). Radium itself is personified as Undark, “a propaganda radio personality.” Nominated for the 2010 Governor-General’s Award in poetry, and interested in experimentation, Pool is taking a doctorate in poetics at the University of Calgary. Three styles dominate this book: square bracket-studded pages that seem to represent static-interrupted speech; 2) choppy lyrics utilizing unrhymed, enjambed couplets; 3) italicized prose-poetry that allow for sensual breaks from the more intellectual or studious writing.
Images are startling and effective: “Here is her / body, elegantly tired. Stomach // full of flashlights.” Statements can be insightful: “In the end we do what love tells us— / we get up again and again and again // until we can’t.” Some lines, though striking, want a graduate-student readership: “Who says we want to live in this / world anyways? Ruinous lexicons pounding // our ears.” Another difficulty is, the women are never differentiated. They seem a single iridescent, (undead) cadaver.
This book should be received as its subtitle suggests—as a performance work. Staged, with the appropriate John Adams-style music, it could be magnificent. (One design note: the book cover deliberately imitates the dangers of working with radium. It uses traces of a glowing substance that will rub off on your fingers. Handle with care!).
Marrow, Willow by Maureen Hynes, is a plainer work of contemporary Canadian verse than is the case for Pool’s Undark. It is standard free verse, intended to communicate the imaginative transformation of everyday objects and doings—including sightseeing. There is no thesis to this work beyond visual presentation and narrative explication.
“Lupin Pods” starts strongly: “Just remembering the Atlantic island, the strange / coldness enters my chest again. All night / a wild keening over the tunnelled and treeless island”: Hynes gives us the flavour of the place succinctly. But the next lines waste this intensity: “my hotel door rattling in its frame, the rain drumming / at the window, the wind let loose and wailing….” The problem with losing a sense of cadence is that verse turns into prose—and prose has more room for cliché than does verse. Hynes’ ghazals are more successful, for she is forced to be spare in diction: “Last night, the single broken howl. O wolf, / where is your pack? As numerous and inaudible as the stars. // No stove, no music except my own tuneless hum and bang. / two feet and a sore thumb.”
The late, great Welsh-Canadian poet John Thompson touches on Hynes’ ghazals (just as he does a couplet or two in Pool’s work), but that’s laudable, for it engenders helpful Dichtung—or Concentration: “Claim this lake for a week, encircle it with footsteps, / wood smoke. If fear arises, let it be autumn-lit. // Mid-afternoon, the leaves’ green glow veils the bedroom window, / Promise of amber and red before full fade.” Hynes has a lot of talent, but may need a little editing, to author poetry of consistent strength.
The very fine Jamaican-Canadian poet Olive Senior has written a lyrical endorsement for sister Jam-Can poet Pamela Mordecai’s newest book, Subversive Sonnets. And so have I. But here’s what Senior says: “Subversive Sonnets is clever, witty, insightful and linguistically acrobatic…. A courageous, affirmative, and—yes—entertaining read.” Senior is right, and Mordecai’s sonnets are subversive in both form and content—and exultantly so.
