Brilliant Falls
by John Terpstra
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2o13
64 pp. $18
Pickled Dreams Naked
by Norman Stock
New York, NY: NYQ Books, 2010
112 pp. $15
Hailing from Hamilton, Ontario, John Terpstra is a poet who never strains for effect. His work is what it is—an enunciation of perception, an annunciation of feeling.
His latest collection, Brilliant Falls (Gaspereau $18), features the mature poet mourning the sickness, loneliness, and loss of parents, that is to say, the ultimately terminal nature of seniority.
(Strange how parents pass away just as their adult children begin to understand their fineness and to accept their faults—the progenitors of their own affable afflictions.)
“Brilliant Falls” is not a place, but a phrase describing the diving of gilt and crimson autumn leaves to their rests, where they’re eventually “ground to sodden mulch.” The image is a picture of the vanishing light of our elders as they ebb to rests beyond our grasp.
But their mortality—their frailty—is also ours: “There is the fact of our fragile enormity / upon the landscape.” Fainting is its own little death: “It’s as though a variation on [Genesis] / is being played out. I brush particles of soil / from her face. She rises and goes indoors, / a slight bruise on her cheek.”
An elegy for “Dad” takes as subject the dearly departed man’s “king-size mattress” or “matrimonial half-acre,” recalling how, “as kids we ragged you folks about / … how vast it was, asking … ‘how do you find each other,’ // appalled at the very thought of your intimacy—and where, alone, / she found you, on the night that all the fight left you.”
Terpstra’s clarity is reverential, closer to magisterial dignity than it is to folksy tent-show. Yet, he is wonderfully plain, with a style that recalls both homespun, whimsical Alden Nowlan (1933-83) and the shock effects of Irving Layton (1912-2006).
His “Nowlan”-like poem imagines the Queen wheeling a “classic ’53 pickup, souped up, / … itching to pass.” The Laytonesque poem sees the speaker shoot a man “last night / but only in a dream… . // I was so surprised he fell / that I didn’t fire again // when he stood and stumbled on / favouring the shoulder I must have hit.”
The Pete Seeger pacifist tune, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” lends its title to the final poem. Clearly, it is a salute to that other “Great Generation,” not the generation that vanquished Hitler, but the generation that stopped the Vietnam War.
They are beginning to leave us now, and must be celebrated for their gifts to us of greater social equality, environmental awareness, and anti-war protest.
Norman Stock is a Jewish New York prize-winning poet who is, like Terpstra, nicely comfortable in his skin, dedicated to non-fancy but playful utterance, and a pleasure to read. He is quite openly indebted to Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and Ogden Nash (1902-71), taking from them a talking style related to tall tale and folk song.
But there’s more than a dash of William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), and e.e. cummings (1894-1962) present as well in Pickled Dreams Nake.
See the lyricism of “can I untangle your hair that is so beautiful or must I wait / can if I want to do as I want to.” It’s so superbly musical and simple.
Stock’s 9/11 poem, “What I Said,” captures the contradictory moods of remorse and revenge: “after the terror I / went home and cried and / … . I said and I said this is too much to take no one can take a thing like this / after the terror yes and then I said let’s kill them.”
But a companion poem establishes the resilience of a great city: “fall on the floor New York, get up and be beaten again / you expected everything and you sure did get it all / New York of the towers, of the homegrown idiots, of the torn flowers.”
Stock is particularly good at satirizing creative-writing classes: “I have a problem with this poem / and my problem is you you miserable person / sitting here in this godforsaken poetry workshop trying to become famous /don’t you know that only the teacher is famous… .”
Sweet, too, is “Again”: “that was good I said hey let’s do / it again she said ok let’s / do it again if you like so / we did it again it was good… .”
The Canadian poet closest to Stock’s style is Ray Souster (1921-2012). He is also a poet who rewards reading and re-reading.
Fireship: Early Poems, 1964-1991
by Peter Sanger
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2013
190 pp. $26
Shakespeare’s Nigga
By Joseph Jomo Pierre
Toronto, ON: Playwrights Canada, 2013
$17
I like to read poetry because it is compact and incisive and fits well in knapsack, briefcase, suitcase, or glove compartment. So, now I consider Fireship: Early Poems, 1964-1991. This title is Nova Scotian poet Peter Sanger’s record of the perfection that he has sought in his chosen art, presenting us thus a selection of his lyrics writ between the ages of 21 and 48. Born in 1943, he is entitled, given his biblical three-score-and-ten, to assemble his examples of aspiration and achievement. In the earliest poems, there is artless art: “Water / hides seams / a keel / uncovers.”
Every writer is an intellectual, as is Sanger, also a retired, English prof. But he is steeped in the local—the agricultural and mineral, the flora and fauna, the historical and the indigenous, all that’s richly provincial. A locavore thinker, he says that, after relocating to Nova Scotia, “I dug in.” The influence of other poets who write about where they live—Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Thompson—is here, but Sanger excels in being succinct and accessible: “A mouse skull, an / unbroken thimble / of bone, whose eye / socket I / copy with finger / and thumb.” Philosophical beauty emerges from precision. A “Woodcock Feather” is “Grey, my love, / shading to rufous, a form / interfusing, allusive,” but it is more: “speckled, barred, streaked, a gather / of mottle and margin, or touch, or / breath we have also drawn together.” The focus on a thing—a feather—becomes a meditation on love.
Short poems also speak volumes. See “Gaelic Cemetery”: “It’s said or almost / all been said, until / the living leave / their living dead.” If you’ve not yet read Sanger’s fine-wrought verse, open Fireship. Sanger locates the roots of poetry itself right here.
Shakespeare is the poet and playwright for all seasons, surely, but so should be the works inspired by his creations. Thus, let us read Shakespeare’s Nigga, for, here, Joseph Jomo Pierre contests the Bard’s treatment of his star “black” characters, namely, heroic-tragic Othello and wicked, Machiavellian Aaron.
Indeed, my use of “treatment” is a pun, for Pierre imagines Shakespeare as a brandy-swilling slavemaster, one who favours Othello, but shackles Aaron. Billy Shakespeare is a patriarch with a wilful white daughter, Judith, who, unbeknownst to her father, has been double-back-beasting with Aaron, to the extent that she is soon prego with a mixed-race baby.
The plot thickens when the “Dark Lady” of The Sonnets is revealed to be Othello’s mama, but Othello is also in love with Judith (unwittingly his half-sister), and bold Aaron decides that it’s time to put the Shakespeare plantation to the torch, ending all these melodramatic, incestuous shenanigans.
Pierre’s play riffs off Blaxploitation cinema, Djanet Sears’s play Harlem Duet (1997), Lorena Gale’s play Angelique (1999), and Amiri Baraka’s play Dutch Man (1964). It’s an African Canadian response to Dead-White-Men’s cultural imperialism, but seems closer to farce than to tragedy… . It does make one think… .
