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Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada presents work by sixty Atlantic Canada poets whose reputations have been built over the last half-century, i.e., within the lifetime - more or less - of The Fiddlehead (established at UNB in 1945). Divided according to province (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia contribute 19 poets each, Prince Edward Island 10, Newfoundland 12), this collection offers a generous mix of established and emerging writers, marking the major patterns of tradition and innovation in terms of form, voice, and subject matter over this period. Like all well-timed anthologies, this one is both representative as well as polemical - revisionary (in the sense of re-shaping our awareness and estimation of earlier East Coast writing in light of various pathways being explored by newer writers, some of whom are drawing important Canadian and international attention to the region). At the same time, it problematizes the idea of region, spotlighting many writers who, though not originally from the area, claim identity - however provisionally, experimentally - with it.

Coastlines is, unabashedly, a "celebration" of what the introduction calls an Atlantic poetry "renaissance," imagined as getting underway in the mid-90s, signs of which are George Elliott Clarke's 2001 Governor General's Award (for Execution Poems); the GG Award consideration given to Don Domanski, Lynn Davies, Sue Goyette, and Carole Langille; the appearance of major works by such established writers as Elisabeth Harvor, Brian Bartlett, Douglas Burnet Smith, Harry Thurston, Richard Lemm, John Steffler, and others; and positive receptions accorded a number of first- (Tammy Armstrong, Brent MacLaine, Thomas O'Grady, matt robinson, Sue Sinclair, Patrick Warner) and second-time (Michael Crummey, Carmelita McGrath, Anne Simpson) authors.

It's not a surprise, given the spirited rhetoric, that all four editors are poets themselves, which maybe explains the volume's feeling of kinship, even identity with the unique creative stresses and challenges of re-articulating space, locality, and history (both personal and communal) within a global framework. This, as noted in the introduction, underscores Atlantic Canada's links with other regions and, specifically, other "island" cultures. Overall, the critical-creative overlap translates into sensitivity to the complexity and versatility of the work selected, each writer getting, within fairly severe limits of space, quality representation. One pleasure of this text is the links it establishes between speech and ground, which suggests voice is tactile, material - a movement of inscription within setting itself. Not unexpectedly, the energy of the poetry shows many times - overtly or tacitly - in its self-reflexivity, as if the action of writing, the motive or impulse to speak, is part of the subject. Accepting the requirement to speak, making a conscious decision to speak - resisting while accepting silence - makes the choice to write a crucial element of the drama: this writing in this site at this time records fragments of dialogues (Odysseus hearing the sirens' music) place is having with itself.

Meaning "travels" from the setting of utterance to the process of giving it form, so vast time-spans get shrunk, safe-harboured, inside the time-span of writing: communal and personal histories collapse into stories, figures of speech. Notice recurring images of speech/sound as body, which calls up, synesthetically, words as shape: the visual and tactile - sculpted - aspects of sound. Voice becomes artifact, gets "written" down, becomes - phenomenologically - contour, gesture (Nova Scotia poet Brian Bartlett's "open-mouthed ghost trapped in an iceberg" emblematizes speech as silence). In fact, to take a lead from Bartlett's "A Basement Tale": writing may readily be "housed" under (within) ground, as poetry carves outer worlds into interiors:

Upstairs the next day they read each other's words,
Baffled. Baffled, curled in back-to-back chairs,
They knit their brows into mazes without threads.

That midnight, back on their hands and knees
They crawled down a trail toward each other's dream
From the crossroads inside the blazing mouth.

But accompanying the inward pull is another force, one that shifts the poem's gaze out, away from the writer, puts speech (back) in place, there: however often a world crosses over into words, it can't be embodied as simply or purely language. Something - some possibility, hope of contact, of mediation or balanced exchange of meaning between persons (the twin brothers in Bartlett's poem) - resists conveyance: "baffled." So arrivals become dispersals: "A Basement Tale" ends by opening/into another journey, through "mazes," leading to "dream" via the birth/place of "the blazing mouth." Points of (failed) exchange and/or departure are named painstakingly here: midnights and crossroads, back-to-back chairs - mirror interfaces that recycle and reverse each other.

Voyages, as dramatizations of writing and reading then, are uncertain in the sense that they stretch relentlessly, if indefinitely, outward, though also - at the same time - back (recursively) into memory through gaps in memory, pointing up how intervals between there and here become increasingly enigmatic. This doesn't mean they are cruel or tragic, despite the imprint in earlier poets (Alfred Bailey, Fred Cogswell) of isolation and exile - solitary, epiphanic images, near-empty landscapes. In fact, counter to this is the ulterior, communal, narrative thrust of the new poetics (evolving from women poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Brewster, M. Travis Lane). This arrives at an opulent and refined comic vision indelibly seen in the work of Nova Scotia poet Jeanette Lynes, with her fascination for on-the-road anecdotes of angst and awkwardness. Otherwise they become signposts, potential energy, underscoring a main feature of this writing - its concern with migration, the unsettledness of place. What remains, many times, is a commitment to bearing witness, to being in the scene in which these words are happening, permitting the anthologist's work of retrieval to be replicated - carried over/into - the archival work of the poet speaking in, of, and to a specific locality.

This in turn may suggest the capturing of place (however momentary) is really an expression/expulsion of desire, something more than (re)collection - call it a will to intimacy: desire/hope become value added sentiments. These are items writing brings to the scene (as a design principle) and leaves behind-they are the lens writing uses to view, and stage, its scene. In short, there's an overlap between poetic intuition, which isn't necessarily a carrier of language, and the more public, rhetorical work of constructing taxonomies. The opening lines of New Brunswick poet Tammy Armstrong's "Presque Isle, Maine": "I want to tell you about the emptiness of Presque Isle: / the potato fields like furrowed foreheads / stretching beyond tin calyxes of garages …."

Wanting becomes telling becomes spacing ("stretching beyond"), in a way that merges landscape and trope, literal ground and, as in Elizabeth Brewster's "land of fairy tales" (in "Return of the native") mythic/literary space. Brewster's sense of origin is transmuted into travel, so even identity is in motion, poised ambivalently between memory and chance: "People are made of places," she informs us in "Where I come from," and the proposition expresses the poem's wish to be taken as statement, that is, non-ironically - without possibility of retraction. Again, the poem's longing is partly towards a fixed point, an unfinished landscape that isn't contained by words but can be "read" (like a road sign) by a reader who is also in motion, who just happens to be passing by - which points again to the rhetorical, accidental character of the writer-reader connection. A reader, like a landscape, stands outside, a placement that confirms the centrifugal direction of the writing, and the ad hoc-ness of the link between persons and places.

Still, part of what language attaches itself to is the impossibility of naming what's there - so we get Armstrong's telling about "emptiness" or Lynn Davies' recollection of "So many wildflowers I couldn't name." Outward motion converges on, eventually retracing, the clutter of personal memory, leading to accumulations of lore, the unofficial/uncanonical data of our lives. The telling, for Davies, is less a positioning than an unpacking: "Like a leaf, the canoe. Unravelled early fall up a lake" (note the prefatory negation: "unravelled"). So: silence, the sense of something scattering, supplies a major incentive to narrative, whether the journey is personal or collective - as, again, in Elizabeth Brewster. "I" and "we" combine in "Where I Come From":

People are made of places. They carry with them
hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace
or the cool eyes of sea gazers.

We've said place is partial, fragile, and like the act of speaking in that it is always rubbing up against the danger - the possibility - of not speaking, of failing to record adequately, which could be called its crisis of starting up/out. So many of the scenes in these poems are miniature, domestic, a distinctive feature of the activities elaborated being that they're subject to recurrence. Repetition thus comes to the fore by "travelling" inside, becoming part of the furniture, and what gets affirmed is a power, verging on eroticism, in the mundane. We need things to repeat because the repeating confirms their possibility; an event that only takes place once is marked by the impossible - it's like it never happened at all. Prince Edward Island poet Richard Lemm's "Perfect Circle":

The crash in the living room is not
your son, his spaceship circles
a hostile planet upstairs, not his baby
sister with the ten keys of her
hands on your face, unlocked
and floating, a full
moon above her near-sleep.

Part of our sense of the privacy - in the sense of the incommunicability - of the personal perspective or anecdote is conveyed by the "un" words ("not," "unlocked") which tells us about the provisionality of everything we long to say. How close sound comes to emptiness, unmeaning: the first thing we hear in Lemm's poem is "crash." But "Perfect Circle" (which could be a hyperbole, a reminder that deft, adequate, well-wrought equivalences between word and thing, sign and meaning, are already excess - they're born as exaggeration and as longing, not to be found in nature), makes sure the words get through, that the wheel - in spite of awkwardness, all chance dislocation - returns things to their starting points: "the outstretched arm / that welcomed it back, message delivered." Against this, a lingering feeling writing is in spite of, not because of, the forces beyond it, but with which it seeks to be in touch. We see this in deliberately ambiguous phrasings such as "somewhere" (as in no place in particular), even when the work is named after a place.

Another example is Bartlett's "Cape Enrage": "Somewhere a wolf spider dances on a white rock." Or, in "The Afterlife of Trees," the sense of emptiness is conveyed by the double negative, "neither/nor": "Neither sheep nor cows crisscross our lives ..." Why do objects, events, recorded in such visual detail - and splendid tactile relief - appear with greater clarity because we or they are about to vanish? With the newer poets this is part of the graininess of achieved effect, part of what the narrative thrust of the line focuses our attention on. We are "carried" away, moved from place to place via the blinded feeling of the poem. In "The Afterlife of Trees," the ending moves us from present perception to past memory, through - notably - a phenomemology of touch:

     We sand
and sand, but under the strain, beyond our pottery
and books, our fallen hairs trapped in the varnish,
something remains like memories of a buck
rubbing its horns on bark. Soaked in
deeper than rain goes: cries, whistles, hoots.

That time shows up as surface changes the way we read the surface: we read it retroactively, through cracks, fissures, stains - through its complexity. Facing out, Elizabeth Bishop inserts the personal as an outcropping of memory. In "At the Fishhouses," we begin with more or less flat description, seeing plainly, simply what is there ("an old man sits netting"). Gradually this description is made dramatic through piling up of contrasting detail: references to the "cold evening" and the "gloaming almost invisible" make him an anomaly in the scene. By the end we have learned his identity: "He was a friend of my grandfather." The archaic, worn down feel of the subject, and the tools he works with, is realized in the insertion of personal perspective.

It is as if the outward force of the scene is replaced by something interior, which gives realization to the ordinary, and especially the recurring routine. Writers such as Jeanette Lynes continuously turn our attention from a present moment to a scene containing the familial past, a family anecdote. Absence and plenitude come together, as Lynes on her travels recalls her mother:

She is eighty-three now, shorter
Than you. With her in the examining room
Your skull fills with the lilacs
She heaped over your birthdays
To cover the absence of gifts.

Memory becomes the safe space, even though it comes with omissions, and a sense of what words leave out. Yet the "absences" galvanize desire in the form of what "You want to say," and desire is what produces the return ("birthdays") to words themselves, such as "Brave": "a word you must grow / into, wait while it sheds its patronizing skin." She unpeels the word to find what is hidden in it (like opening a present).

For all the apparent interest of these poets in outer worlds of landscape and fine-grained incident, then, the focal point is an inner stage. This stage is excavated and reveals history (including personal history) as informed by repetition, by the return of the same - the cyclic order of lives. Theses are conservative forces, which reminds us again of the overlap between the motive to anthologize and the motive to write. Think, again, of Lemm's "Perfect Circle" or fellow P.E.I. poet Hugh MacDonald's "The Digging of Deep Wells," which opens with a breaking in, a "breaking of solid ground," and ends:

Filled up with sudden joy
he risks to look
at what's above
and finds as his reward
a perfect circle of stars

The circle is one of the markers of a rigorously - if gently - probed "world-as-given," which almost doesn't demand the writer's presence at all. There's no doubt some consolation, some affirmation here that what is lost also returns, even if in a different shape. This puts a premium on, again, finely nuanced observation and on seeing the writing self in the mirror of what is, transparently, there. Seemingly the sphinx behind this solidarity, this outness of things, asks no questions, just wants to be looked at.

This prioritizing of writing can take the form of allusion - the embedding of a poem with other poems, as in PEI writer John MacKenzie's "My love is strung with the ancient," which begins "How do I love thee …" The force of allusion is to create a mode of collective memory, of recognition, that generalizes the poem, moves it beyond autobiography, or into a kind of communal autobiography that's always being written.

This turns the poem into a kind of "wisdom" book, reflecting possibly the poem's wish to be taken seriously, unambiguously. It wants to make a statement that is non-elusive, unretractable, all-embracing - to guarantee the words get across. One of the main symptoms of this style is aphorism. David Helwig's "Cape Breton in Autumn," with its obvious, strong place and time markers, opens:

We exist by what is half true
and our astonishment. The gulf
is a long vanishing from cliff
to thin horizon. Cranberries
grow two inches from the ground; whales
breach in the calm water near the shore.

What we get, in such ostensibly flat, non-ironic, sometimes descriptive statements is a shifting and melting of perspective. Far beside near, horizon beside close-up - the feeling is of lines, shapes vanishing in the distance but of particulars observed intimately. This happens in Newfoundland poet Michael Crummey's "What's Lost":

The Labrador coastline is a spill of islands,
salt-shaker tumble of stone,
a cartographer's nightmare -
on the coastal boat 50 years ago
the third mate marked his location after dark
by the outline of a headland against the stars,
the sweetly acrid smell of bakeapples blowing off
a stretch of bog to port or starboard,
navigating without map or compass
where hidden shoals shadow the islands
like the noise of hammers echoed across a valley.

Again, the marking off of an inner space ("salt-shaker tumble of stone") and filling it with detail collapses distance into an intimate home-place. It remakes, in the here and now, an older time. Coastlines, headlands are put against stars; solid, giant forms are put beside tiny, passing things - perspective blurs. "Now" is also fifty years ago, with "acrid" smells - measurable timelines fall apart.

It's interesting how Coastlines conveys the "simultaneity" of the newly wrought Atlantic tradition. Poets are arranged alphabetically, for example, rather than chronologically, so we have the feeling of opening a photo album - any page will do as starting point. For those who want a time-scale, check the brief, useful writer bios at the end of the book. An additional helpful feature is the full bibliographic listing of the authors' publications.

Let's think for a moment of the East Coast as a site of Canada's first, "post-Confederation" writing (Carman and Roberts). The emphasis was less on region than, by synechdoche, on (anglo) nationhood. The national movement presses forward, east to west, arriving in Montreal in the 1920s and, to a lesser extent, Toronto a decade or two later, where it seems to have stopped. In contrast, critical consciousness of region - apart from literary activity per se - has travelled (geographically) backwards, beginning in Vancouver in the early 60s (Tish), hitting the Prairies in the late 60s and early 70s, and Southern Ontario (excluding Toronto) in the late 70s and early 80s. No doubt an overly generalized - stylized - map, but it points to the reversible timelines underlying Canadian perceptions of generalized literary space versus locality (with the latter enjoying a tachyon-like career retreating from end-spaces back to origin). In this sense it is ironic but natural that Atlantic Canada, as a starting point of Canadian writing, should be the last to attain regional status. But Coastlines' articulation of the uncertainties of regional identification draws from outer, and earlier, experiences. In doing so - by acts of re-gathering and recollection - it creates rich encounters between old and new.