Wedding In Fire Country
by Darren Bifford
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2012
96 pp., $19
The Other Side of Ourselves
by Rob Taylor
Markham, ON: Cormorant Books, 2011
63 pp., $18
Darren Bifford’s debut collection, Wedding In Fire Country, features lyrics that are somehow deliberately recklessly ramshackle with odd juxtapositions of danger or ugliness, set against the beautiful and the romantic.
Take the title poem: An image of water bombers as “buffalo / bellying the lake, which they slurp sloppily,” leads to the speaker’s recognition that a forest fire is encroaching on a wedding: “Smoke chugs into more of itself darkly enough to scare / my little cousin who wonders about our safety.” Soon, however, rain damps down the distant fire, but also the bride, “huddled in your white fine dress,” and “our friends /… throwing wet confetti.” This moment is chased by a Native-sounding rumination about the metaphorical linkages among skies, hills, deer, and buffalo. Then, the poet finally relaxes into lyricism: “the wind is the fury and the author / of the way your hair flirts by not staying in one place // but flits above your eyebrows and ears. / I wish … / to be the courter of your hair // and the comforter of your whorled ears.”
The narrative poem is full of shifts that dare disconnection—and sometimes achieve disconnection. Thus, the last two-line sentence of the three-page poem fails to resolve the various metaphors that the poet has indulged: “For tonight we’ve sojourned / close in that place where the fire’s herd freely roams.” But one likes the risks that Bifford runs. He’s a breathtakingly break-neck poet, trying to achieve the right combo of easy-going expression and startling image, out of declared homage to the late, great Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, but also some undeclared absorption of U.S. poets Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens (who also fuse plainness and strangeness).
Raised in Summerland, B.C., and residing now in Montreal, Bifford also reminds one of the similarly rambunctious lyricist Irving Layton (1912-2006) and his technique of marrying the cantankerous and the graceful.
Perhaps the most successful passage in this first book is the poet’s intense imagination of horses (a recurrent animal image in the collection): “Sagebrush and the bony-legged horses. / The night sky and sloppy black moans of horses. / Clear morning and dew-shine. Wet hides of horses. / Sudden summer storms tremor through horses…. / The long brown hair of the girl and long brown manes of horses….” This lyric moment “rocks”: it has gusto, but also concentrated accuracy of recollected observation. The poet has looked at horses and thought of horses and knows what he is celebrating. Other lyrics where he is just as sure, offer the same zing. Late in the collection, Bifford’s persona muses on “whatever great leap forward I attempt”: One trusts that he will make those “leaps” continuously, for when they are realized, they enthral.
Rob Taylor’s debut book is The Other Side of Ourselves. Issued in 2011, the collection establishes Taylor’s wonky fusion of the plain vernacular voice of Al Purdy and the funky, anti-conventional stance of U.S. poet Richard Brautigan. Even so, Taylor—like Bifford—ends up sounding a bit like the late, great Jewish-Canadian poet Layton. This likeness is most apparent in the weird, grotesque, darkly comic poem, “Nothing against Art [Garfunkle]”: “I’d sucker punch the guy / if I ever got the chance, / really rattle his skull / and send what’s left of his / ridiculous, frizzy hair / skittering into the air.” The problem is, Garfunkel’s “career is the echo of / someone else’s song….”
Layton’s satiric ire is usually inspired by greater dislikes. Still, it is good that Taylor attempts a similar attitude. Then again, his poem, “The Diver,” seems to shout out to a famous, early Layton poem, “The Swimmer”: “Perhaps he is looking down at the pane of water / and imagining what his body will do to it. // I don’t know or ask or gasp as he falls.”
Born in Port Moody, B.C., and now resident in Vancouver, Taylor won the 2010 Alfred G. Bailey Prize for an unpublished poetry manuscript. This resulting book is rich with promise. He’s still finding his voice, his way. But anyone who can write a good poem—as Taylor does—about writing bad poetry—is a poet of talent.
The Lake Diary
by Arthur Bull
Emmerson Street Press, 2011
113 pp., $22.50
Little Timothy in Heaven
by Robert Cooperman
March Street Press, 2012
71 pp., $15US
The Lake Diary is avant-garde and jazz guitarist Arthur Bull’s second homey collection of poetry. It’s a quiet book, full of Zen riffs on “nature / longing / isolation / calm.” Bull is from Toronto and travels the world, playing gigs, but lives in Digby Neck, NS. He’s grounded there—and in his experiences of his family home on Lake Ontario.
There’s zero pretentiousness in Bull, no sloppy overreaching for “F/X.” At the lake, the “first thing / dawn does is pour pink / over the whole surface.” On another occasion, on the lake, his speaker loses his hat. The event is ironic, for the hat bears the slogans, “Amistad Freedom,” and so, like a fugitive slave, it has stealthily escaped the speaker’s ownership. Bull’s brief bio states his “love” for nature, “Chinese literature, and jazz,” and these motifs recur and resonate throughout the slim, reader-friendly book. It is amiable because it has no ambition beyond perceiving the self in the moment. Looking at a red maple reflected in the blue lake, Bull’s persona says, “I took those colours / renaming them // vermilion and cobalt / to dress my sorrow in.” Image and thought compact to illustrate profound self-criticism.
In spring, we discover that “sentences / come apart // In our hands // And reveal the hidden / Syntax of our bodies // Scattering // I, garden, thee, / Glove, eyes, brows, // Tender // Everywhere, / between.” It takes a special eye, to see that “The fishplant nestled in the woods / could be a temple.” There’s a Bohemian, Beat sensibility at play in Bull, and it is attractive, suggesting the power of art to establish magical equilibrium: “I have only / to curl the eaves with my pencil, // To bend the tower’s rulered lines / a little toward China.” There is sorrow in his world: “My guitar / leans silently on the bookcase. // Its strings haven’t vibrated / for weeks now.” But there’s also healing: “More and more / I have come to value only / whatever sees us through.” Bull’s simplicity and down-to-the-bone spirituality are welcome inaugurations for MMXIII, The Year of the Snake (in Chinese astrology).
Robert Cooperman’s poetic career has concentrated on the narrative lyric sequence—the book or chapbook that tells a story, in free verse, utilizing multiple perspectives and speakers. The Brooklyn-born, Denver-based, Jewish-American poet is singular in writing accessible chronicles, in vivid verse, canvassing everything from bios of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats to tales of Colorado “gold fever” and the Grateful Dead. His newest narrative-in-verse is Little Timothy in Heaven, which addresses Christianity’s bloodlust anti-Semitism.
Set in medieval Angelsea, presumably in England, the story tells of the horrendous repercussions that befall local Jews when the stabbed and slashed body of a little rascal boy, Timothy, is found in a well in the Ghetto. As is typical in Cooperman’s lyric narratives, “innocence” and “guilt” are both easy to attribute and tricky to establish, so that, while atrocity is righteously identified and condemned, our general, human invidiousness is also witnessed.
Once Timmy’s mother, Griselda, blames a young Jewish woman, Rebecca, for her son’s murder, show-trials and show-executions (lynchings, really) follow quickly.
Rebecca testifies to trying to save Timmy from a town filled with “more cutpurses / than rats, brothel owners / who’d turn Timothy into a rare gift / for a lord or lady of vile tastes.” For her troubles, Rebecca reels from “a fist—a Crusader’s / battering ram / smashing my face.” Upon her hanging, “some wag” rips her shirt, “gauzy / as a spiderweb, to display her nakedness.” The “girl’s writhings (are) / more entertaining than Outremer’s houris.” While her nakedness pleases “the pack’s wrath (that) grows like a thousand / angry beehives disturbed by thoughtless boys,” her father and the rabbi, also hanged, perish too quickly for the mob’s pleasure.
By the end, we know Timmy’s murderer is not Jewish, but the point is also made that religious belief is too often just a ruse to permit deceit, killing, plunder, and rape. Cooperman’s text is just-right in the writing and right-on in reasoning.
