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Antigonish Review
# 124
| Christian
Riegel |
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Granite Erratics by Brian Bartlett (Victoria: Ekstasis
Editions, 1997) Paperbound, 74 pp., $12.95.
Song of the Vulgar Starling by Eric Miller (Fredericton:
Broken Jaw Press, 1999) Paperbound, 115 pp., $14.95.
Treading Fast Rivers by Eleanore Schönmaier (Ottawa:
Carleton University Press, Harbinger Poetry Series, Number 8, 1999)
Paperbound, 67 pp., $12.95 (US).
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The titles of these three volumes affirm that nature, as object and
as useful metaphor, amongst other things, still has a central place in
contemporary poetry in this country. It would, however, be incorrect to
call any of these poets specifically nature writers, even if this is an
important thematic concern of their work. In Granite Erratics,
Brian Bartlett's speakers are frequently the objective observers of- or
more precisely, the ruminators upon-the state of the self, curiosities
of social interaction, and various kinds of space, including natural spaces.
Eric Miller's poetic world in Song of the Vulgar Starling is joyfully
playful in its engagement with culture in its many forms, including visual
art, literature and philosophy. Eleanore Schönmaier's speakers explore
interactions with natural and social spaces, and the relationships between
the two, and demonstrate the intricate reliance of the self on these worlds
in the past and in the present.
The title poem of Granite Erratics reveals much about Brian Bartlett's
poetic. This piece is a playful rumination on if, but and and,
working from Hawthorne's passage (which appears as the epigraph) from
The American Notebooks, "To personify If - But - And".
The resultant personification of these parts of speech is exemplary and
is one of the strongest pieces in Granite Erratics. Here, Bartlett
is imaginative, playful, demonstrates a laudatory control of language
and a command of its poetic possibilities. The playfulness as well as
the imaginativeness displayed in this poem is elsewhere most evident in
the second of the three sections in the book, "A Handful of Tales,"
which comprises short narrative poems that focus primarily on a single
event. All of the poems have numbered sections (reinforcing the sense
of story) of multiple stanzas. The first section from "A Best Man's
Tale" serves well to exemplify:
A best man forgot the gold stud for his collar.
Fallen to his knees at his brother's feet
he begged forgiveness, then gazed up:
two tiny nails driven into his brother's neck.
While the ushers barked foul names in his ear
his father, scowling, choked him in a headlock
and twisted gold foil through the collar slots.
Bartlett has done well to limit this section to a chosen "handful"
for the reader gets just enough to avoid falling prey to the repetition
of formula. Interesting as they are, these pieces, as much else in the
collection rely somewhat heavily on narrative at the expense of poetic
effect. The tales work well in this mode, but at times in other poems
the potential of some of his core images is lost to the desire to narrate
and thus explain unnecessarily. In "Skylight," for example,
any sense of the emotion of loss or grief is overcome by narration:
The day my cousin shot himself in the head
I was cleaning the skylight in the hall.
The landlady's loose-nailed stepladder
shook with each step I climbed down.
A good beginning to the poem perhaps, but Bartlett misses the possibilities
of the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary - the fantastic,
even - here and as a consequence the piece does not fulfill its elegiac
potential. The image that closes the poem, which is intended as a metaphor
for some sort of catharsis, fails to deliver the expected emotional force
that is characteristic of elegy:
…The hallway
was like a new world. For the first time
I could see sky through the ceiling.
How do we deserve such an in rush,
such clear watery light?
Clear as the light may be, it is unclear from the contents of the rest
of the poem how this new sight affects the speaker's understanding of
his cousin's death, or death at all.
On the other hand, "The Woods On the Way to School" is the
triumph of the book. This long poem is laid out in measured three-line
stanzas. Bartlett employs line breaks, half-phrases and stanza breaks
(ending and carrying over phrases and sentences as the poetry at times
demands) to great effect, so that the narration seems effortless rather
than weighing down the poem, as in some of the other pieces in the book.
A return poem, "The Woods" manages to evoke both a nostalgia
for a past gone by (I sense the elegiac here) but also fixes that past
as a departure point for the positive connection with nature that infuses
experiences of the intervening thirty years: "he sees the year he
first knew he was/ spellbound." The reverence for nature displayed
in this poem is a common thread through many of the other poems.
The reward of reading Bartlett is to encounter his ability to pass on
imaginative ruminations about the things he experiences in the world.
He does so with control and with a healthy respect for language as a medium
of communication.
Eric Miller, in Song of the Vulgar Starling, demonstrates an
admirable respect for form and poetic effect. He requires of his readers
a knowledge of both painting and poetry. But his work is not pedantic
and thus I found myself happy enough to look things up so that I could
partake of the poems as fully as possible. This cerebral quality is nicely
countered by an effective wit. At times, the humorous in a situation is
made light of, as in "Little English Landscape" (one of a series
of landscape poems):
I've never been there. Alone by a pond sits John Clare while a number
of land surveyors wait with their instruments for him to finish please.
This poem is one in a series of landscape poems that are much more serious
in their intent, and thus in "Little English Landscape" Miller
indicates that while he takes the poetic voice seriously, a sense of irony
at the interaction of language and experience is at times also necessary.
"The Infant Season" is another poem where Miller demonstrates
his understanding of language as play (and his ability to play in language,
for that matter):
Spring is babyish but what does
babyish mean? Babies
gorge, rapacious to suck
the sun to delectable
tepidity. The cumulonimbus
putti of the sky
sail above cupidinous
blossoms whose open
petals splay neonatal lips
flowery, sap-bubbled.
The opening question self-reflexively alerts the slipperiness of language,
and warns the reader to question the images to come. Cleverly, the forthcoming
images are both silly and at the same time signify the flux of growth-in
infants and in the natural world (where, clearly, spring is indicated).
Since Don McKay has demonstrated repeatedly his ability to write wonderful
poems about birds, it is pleasing indeed to see another poet as equally
adept at evoking through language the characteristics of birds. The opening
lines of "Meadowlark" are exemplary in demonstrating Miller's
abilities with poetic language, particularly with alliteration, assonance
and consonance (tools employed much too infrequently these days):
Meadowlark fills fields with nuanced excitation.
The song smooths and arouses roundings of the hills
which reach and ache their short
grasses, their
goosebumped wind-flickerings...
Less pleasing, and I am thinking here of the book as a collection (the
prose might work well in a different context), are the prose pieces. Miller
amply demonstrates his array of poetic tools in this book and I think
that, while clever at times (especially "In Memoriam: Roger Tory
Peterson), the prose poems detract rather than add to the volume's overall
effect. My strategy, upon second and third reading, was to simply ignore
the prose and stick to what is most rewarding in Song of the Vulgar
Starling.
The title of Eleanore Schönmaier's Treading Fast Rivers is instructive
of the contents: movement, nature, and coping with change are all central
elements of the book. Of the three volumes discussed here, Schönmaier's
is most unified thematically, turning and returning to concerns of family,
connections to others, and of the constant change that is life. That is
the strength of the book, for as much as individual poems at times stand
out and can be read for what they are, the poems together make an even
stronger statement on Schönmaier's poetics. She is at her best with poems
like "The Names We carry," which comes late in the volume, where
form and content work together to create meaning and where powerful images
rely on language, the arrangement of words, phrases and the spaces
on the page. Indeed, the specific configuration is utterly necessary for
anything of significance to be transmitted in the poetry:
The four men: do they
notice
the coast strewn
with abandoned
imagery?
The next poem and also the final one in the book, "Stone-Ginger,"
is equally reliant upon the invocation of poetic strategy. Schönmaier
employs two-line stanzas to great effect here, playing with enjambment
and various grammatical structures to create meanings that are, as in
the previous poem, larger than any other configuration one can imagine:
Winter's late after-
noon. White gold red
gold: this rock
pillar. Beach-stone
slabs. Heave
the layers. The legs.
In other poems, Schönmaier seems too intent on explaining and narrating
the experiences that are the matter of her poems. Where poetic structures
and devices are useful to her in the two pieces discussed above, here
they seem to serve little or no precise purpose. The directness of the
poetic voice subsumes the potential profundity of what is transmitted.
"When Angels Ride Bicycles" begins with a fairly innocuous image.
The lines themselves fail to reveal the principle of their arrangement:
Bearskin Air drifts me through
pillowed layers. The sky's
blue rags are scattered
over the forest. . . .
The fourteen-part autobiographical (I assume) poem "Life Spinning
Thinner" is similar in its directness of expression. While the material
itself, the exploration of the narrator's memories of her relationship
with her father as she was growing up, is compelling, the poetic strategy
behind the arrangement of these memories into lines is not obvious. I
imagine that the opening six lines of part 8 could equally well be arranged
as prose:
The tent sprouts
from the ground,
a pod that will shelter
this vacation.
My father drove us further
north on the logging road.
In the poem "Crete. Kreta. Kriti.," Schönmaier marries form
and content much more convincingly and the directness of her speaker's
narration is well suited to the six numbered brief prose pieces. Thankfully,
as with this poem, Schönmaier's poetic gifts are apparent in most of the
book. Where she is spare in her explication and where she relies the most
on her abilities with poetic elements, the reader is also most rewarded
for the effort of reading.
Bartlett, Miller and Schönmaier demonstrate an appreciation for the
effects of language in poetry. They show that for poetry to be effective
it needs to do more than look like poetry-that the poet must be well acquainted
with an array of poetic tools. For the reader prepared to engage seriously
in the experience of reading poetry, just rewards are forthcoming.
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