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Hi there, my name is Stuart.
I'm 41. I have brown hair -
at least I used to have brown hair,
it's grey now. I have brown eyes -
well, I used to have brown eyes,
but I poked them out.
I'm 5 foot 9 when I'm standing straight,
though normally I'm hunched over.
p. 1, “Invitation To Love”

A third major collection of poetry by Toronto writer and small press magnate, Stuart Ross has been writing and publishing since he was a high-schooler, in the mid-1970s. Strange and productive, Ross could be described as a Toronto surrealist, although it wouldn't describe it all, along the lines of Lillian Necakov, Kevin Connolly or Gary Barwin (although, far more productive), and occasionally, David W. McFadden. This new collection, his third as well in ECW Press's misFit series, is dedicated to his father and brother, both of whom had died in the time Ross worked on these poems. Razovsky at Peace writes of the tormented everyman searching for meaning, peace and love, where there might be none, at the heart of much of Stuart Ross' writing, heightened somewhat in this collection. The title is also a reference to the name his grandfather was born with, shortened somewhere along the way to the current suffix, Ross.

These poems range from odd to simply bizarre, such as the first piece, written as a personal ad, or the letter Dear Dr. Farber that begins “Dear Dr. Farber, / You killed my dog Edward / two years ago, and I never / said thank you. I am sure / you were gentle, because / Edward has come to me / in dreams and has fond / things to say about you. / So I wrote to you in case / you are feeling bad.” (p. 62). The piece, written as a letter of forgiveness from “Ben,” also references an unnamed Jewish holy time at the end (“My regards to your / family at this holy time / of the year. Ben”), old films, and German doctors during World War II. Ross' Jewish background is something not often referenced, but mentioned every so often, and seemingly moreso in this collection, as though it's not just Razovsky working to find peace, but the author with the name, and his own history regarding it. Even in the choosing of the name “Ben,” not only a traditional Hebrew name (Benjamin, the youngest and most beloved brother of Joseph, interpreter of dreams), but used too as prefix, meaning “son of”, as much as the Irish “O'”, or Scottish “Mac.” (The name of Christ, Joshua ben Joseph.) So then, does this become a poem not of awkward forgiveness, but ironic hostility, the son of the doctor keeping a distance through formality?

Perhaps I am reading too much into it. Perhaps, as Freud wrote, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.

For all their innocence, these poems are not, walking that fine line. Ross' humour is sly, and often deceptive, covering up some deeper meaning or purpose, but just as much, disconnected and strange for the sake of it. Ross' poems are filled with meaning and meaninglessness, but exist, still, in those possible impossibilities, of disconnectedness that offer explanation, such as the end of “Ithaca Poem #1” (p. 20), as a man watches a waterfall - “He counts how much water / pours off the top. / He loses count.”

So much of Ross' work, and this collection, is about perception, between Ross and Razovsky, or the character Razovsky, the poems establishing a version of the world and then altering it, as though there is no steady ground. It reminds me of a quote by British comedian Marty Feldman, who once described British humour as starting a scene with five guys in carrot suits. When someone walks on without a carrot suit, the action then works to explain why he isn't wearing one.

In the first of the four Razovsky poems, “Razovsky At Peace” (pp. 25-26), the character Razovsky finds a small bit of peace, as we encounter perceptual twists, such as “Razovsky talks, shouts: / in nature, he can't understand / his own words. They disappear / into trees, behind rocks, become / dew. Razovsky's shoes slide / along the slick leaves that carpet / this enormous living room. / A squirrel comes round a tree trunk, / its head stretched out, its nostrils / twitching.” Later on, we catch Razovsky's dreams in “Razovsky At Night” - “Here are his dreams: / He dreams he is being pursued. / He dreams he is being pursued. / He dreams he is being pursued. / He dreams he is a small child / and he's climbed a set of monkey bars / so high he cannot get down.” (pp. 68-69).

What I find interesting about this collection, that after years of making chapbooks, pamphlets and magazine publications, this is the first of his three major collections that feels like a full collection, as opposed to a grouping of previous smaller parts. There is a narrative running through here, as the author and anti-hero Razovsky find their peace in the end, or as close as it gets. And Ross, ever the trickster, even plays with that sense of narrative, leaping off occasionally with poems such as “Meanwhile, In Costa Rica” (p. 51), or “One Afternoon In The Pharmacy” (p. 58), suggesting that there is something more, that needs to be stepped out of briefly, or even the three pieces in the “Ithaca Poem” series (pp. 20, 49, 66). My favorite aside is in the poem “50 Of One, Half A Dozen Of The Other” (p. 16), that references, slightly, an earlier poem that made Ross almost famous, from The Inspiration Cha-Cha (1996), called “Minor Altercation,” reprinted even in a Saturday Night article on Chretien. As Ross wrote in the acknowledgements of that collection, the poem “is taken vertabim from comments by minor Canadian poet Jean Chretien after he roughed up a protestor in Hull, Quebec, in February 1996” (p. 5, The Inspiration Cha-Cha). Ross has a way of cutting through the bleak by being bleak, and by mocking it, and by being bleak by mocking the mocking of it, too.

The prime minister is on the radio.
He will not comment on the terrorists.
He says if we don't re-elect him
he'll kill himself.

p. 16, “50 Of One, Half A Dozen Of The Other”