The Antigonish Review
Issue # 122
Adam Sol
Breath and Dust
- The End of Travel by
Julie Bruck. London, Ontario:
Brick Books, 1999, 67 pp.
- The Last Thing Standing by Ann Shin. Toronto,
Ontario:
Mansfield Press, 2000, 54 pp.
- Breath and Dust by Jonathan Locke Hart. Edmonton,
Alberta:
University of Alberta Press, 1999, 68 pp.
There’s a story about a poor man from Krakow
who dreams that a treasure awaits him underneath a bridge in Prague.
He sets out on the long journey, and finally, after much hardship, reaches
the great city. But the gate is guarded by an armed sentry, and the man
has arrived after curfew. He begs the soldier to let him onto the bridge,
but the sentry refuses. "What’s so important that you need to see
the bridge tonight?" he demands. Reluctantly, the man from Krakow
tells the sentry about his dream. "That’s funny," says the
sentry. "I’ve been having dreams that a treasure awaits me under
the bed of a poor man from Krakow."
Three recent collections of poetry explore
ideas of home and travel, of exploration and intimacy. To varying degrees,
each work seeks to explore the self through the relationship to home -
or by the exile from it. And, not surprisingly, each collection achieves
its greatest power when appreciating the details of home, whether they
are longed for or beneath the poets’ feet.
Books about travel are books about searching
" for truth, for a sense of home, for a higher self " and Jonathan
Hart’s Breath and Dust is no exception. Containing poems set in
England, China, and Australia, as well as locales closer to home, Breath
and Dust embarks on an elaborate search for truth and beauty through
exile and cunning.
Hart is a professor of English at the University
of Alberta with a number of scholarly works to his credit. Perhaps this
is why the book, according to the acknowledgments, took twenty-five years
to compile " an incubation period which makes even the book-a-decade
Jack Gilbert look like a veritable Proust. This is especially noteworthy
given that most of Breath and Dust is comprised of short lyrics
modeled after Asian forms. Pound’s "translations" of Chinese
poetry are an obvious influence here. At their best, Hart’s poems capture
a similarly strange beauty and poignancy, as in "To the Northern
Border," which, in its entirety, reads: "If I awaken from my
dreams / I shall never reach Liaoning." The complications of this
simple lyric are rich and provocative.
Unfortunately, Hart’s success with these lyrics
are inconsistent at best. Too often the poems smack of cultural tourism,
and his sometimes over-sentimentalized paeans for the wronged of dynasties
past strike one as precious, rather than truly felt. The great achievement
of Pound’s imitations are their refusal to sentimentalize, to allow the
poetic images to carry the full weight of the emotion. Hart, perhaps
distrusting the power of his imagery, or perhaps in an effort to use a
kind of poetic shorthand, sometimes leads us too blatantly towards the
emotional center of his poems.
Hart’s poems are further disserviced by the
decision to squeeze three or even four short pieces onto one page. The
implication is that the individual poems don’t deserve a whole page, and
while perhaps the brevity of many of Hart’s vignettes might call for some
doubling to save paper and printing costs, three is too much and four
is excessive. To my mind, Hart would have been better served by more
space and more ruthless editing.
Of all fool-hardy endeavors, the establishment
of a new poetry press is perhaps most worthy of praise. The Mansfield
Press was begun this year by Denis DeKlerk, who is best known in Toronto
as the manager of Bar Italia, one of the more literary cafés in the hip
Italian College Street neighborhood. Mansfield has published four books
in its inaugural year, and has generated quite a bit of attention with
its damn-the-torpedoes approach. With fine design by Toronto artist Brian
Gee and an immediate local following, we can hope that Mansfield has only
begun to publish high quality work.
Ann Shin’s debut collection, The Last Thing
Standing, is perhaps the most unassuming of Mansfield’s releases.
Its recurring themes and images revolve around homes - ruined homes, renovating
homes, the minute and often-overlooked details of fenceposts, terraces,
and kitchens. But if Shin’s poetic ambitions are more intimate and in
some ways less far-reaching than Jonathan Locke Hart’s, she is far more
successful in achieving them. Her field of vision may only occasionally
stray further than the doorways of houses, but her imagery is all the
sharper for its intimacy and intensity.
Even the cover photo of the book is indicative
of this. A close-up of a woman’s calf, the image becomes strange, almost
unrecognizable, because of its proximity. Similarly, the poems of this
collection examine the home so closely that it begins to grow strange,
and reveal new secrets, new beauty.
If poems concerning travel are usually poems
about searching, poems about home are often poems about love or its dissolutions.
A number of the poems in The Last Thing Standing are titled for
different locations in a house, such as "entrance," "bathroom,"
or "hallways," and still others treat houses in different states
of repair, as does the title poem. Implied in the descriptions of houses,
though, are the emotional states of being which are reflected in our houses
and homes. As Shin asserts, "like resins in a tree place accrues
in our bodies" ("quickening"). She provides an example
in "entrance": in a stable home, a husband can enter a room
and then be "gone again / to the living room or the yard, I don’t
know / somewhere near." The unspoken intimacy that defines a home
is evoked to great effect in many of these poems.
One might find fault with some of the erratic
punctuation in Shin’s poems - sometimes commas are used, sometimes not,
and the general lack of capitalization at the beginning of sentences does
not seem to have any real purpose. And the poems in the second half
of the book are on the whole a bit less consistent than those in the first.
But Shin’s precise imagery, her familiar but refreshing descriptions,
and her ultimately daring focus on the intimate make The Last Thing
Standing a worthy debut, full of promise. We wish the same for Mansfield’s
other poets, and for the press itself.
Where Ann Shin’s poems might be described
as psychological, and Jonathan Hart’s, at their best, as spiritual, Julie
Bruck’s poems in The End of Travel are highly social - there are
easily more people in any twenty pages of Bruck’s book than in either
of the other two combined. Sometimes the connections between people are
indirect, or tenuous, as in the opening poem, "Sex Next Door."
Sometimes, as in the moving elegiac sequence "Kate’s Dress,"
the connections are deeply felt and often painful. And yet, as the narrator
declares in "Sex Next Door," "I want it to continue."
This search for social connections - between lovers, neighbors, and friends
- dominates and elevates this collection. While Ann Shin constantly makes
us aware of the rooms and corners of the houses in which we live, Bruck
makes us hear the neighbors.
Bruck is a Montreal native whose first book,
The Woman Downstairs won QSPELL’s A.M. Klein Award in 1994. Currently
she lives in San Francisco, and her portraits of urban wonder are perhaps
a bit familiar to those of us who have friends in that self-loving city.
And yet, Bruck’s poems manage to surpass the clichés of this genre through
a sly sense of humor. "Confection," for example, describes
the city through the eyes of a painter as a series of sweet delicacies,
"something you want to lick." And Bruck’s urban affection also
extends to her native city, which she describes with similar affection
and humor in "Greene Ave.": "Montreal’s blazing in tufts
/ of acid green and crabapple pink."
Centering The End of Travel is the
elegy sequence entitled "Kate’s Dress," a series which gives
an extra poignancy to the title of the collection as a whole. If journeys
undertaken help Jonathan Hart’s persona further appreciate the home he
has left, then death, the ultimate end of travel, teaches us to further
appreciate travel’s inconveniences and minor pleasures. After describing
various passers-by, the speaker in "Greene Ave." would offer
"Anything to be that girl, turning," rather than herself, enmeshed
in grief.
Bruck’s work is not without its missteps:
a poem imitating Elizabeth Bishop does little with the pilfered lines,
and there are moments when her desire to complete poems with a resonant
line leads her into forced, therefore false, profundity. But these are
only a few false moves in a collection which is often full of wit and
emotional depth.
I’ve heard two versions of the ending of the
story of the treasure-seeker from Krakow. In one, he returns to his home
and family to dig and discover the promised treasure awaiting him. In
another, his home and family are the treasure, and it is only after his
arduous journey that he is able to come to this realization. In either
case, the man learns to do a better job looking at the ground beneath
his feet, something each of these three poets, at their best, achieve
with compelling results.
|
