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The complex, dynamic - and cathartic - profiling of "nature" in current Canadian poetics indicates a trickster presence: landscape as trickster. This applies more, perhaps, to Ross Leckie's and Eric Miller's newest work than to Harold Rhenisch's, whose Living Will: Shakespeare After Dark transcribes Shakespeare's 154-sonnet sequence into modern idiom, complete with references to Julia Roberts, Oprah, and the Ayatollah. But let's take nature to mean writing scene, i.e., an outward force in touch with this writing, here and now, that absorbs writing, carries it over to another register - say the material domain of senses and body. Then the task of representation, of putting words in place, linking words to flesh, becomes a problem of translation.

The trickster is shorthand for the paradoxes inhabiting and triggered by language - words not being reliable. They change form, confuse, mislead, attract and repel, seduce and betray, appear and vanish. The trickster, of course, is connected with Native North American mythology. But, as the Dictionary of Native American Mythology attests, the figure may be over-determined. It grafts "Western intellectual perspectives" (310) on primary Native material, the terminal effect being condensation, abridgement. Curiously, the trickster, once coded, gets re-packaged back into Native myth. He (re)appears as "authentic" to it: "We cannot reverse the fact that the trickster has now taken on real being as a figure, at least within Western mythology, and that he is now recognized even by many contemporary Native Americans as their own" (311). The trickster as landscape underscores the uncertainty of the real. He binds chaos and order, treachery and innocence, fool and hero. Critical, for our purposes, is the bridging of nature and artifice (as in pastoral): real and fake. Recall earlier motifs of the "immanent" in Canadian writing: doubles, magicians, outlaws, etc. Featuring the trickster in landscape, as landscape, we recognize a poem's power to write itself. This couples with a longing to retrace, turn back, reinstate. Surprisingly, there's a conservative mindset to the trickster - and, curiously, an absence of violent intent.

If landscape functions as a trope, especially a trope of action (symbolic action in Kenneth Burke's terms), we might pose a link among these poets. Leckie, Miller, and Rhenisch record the inward speech of objects, the earth's chat with itself, which means the trickster has disappeared underground, now acts out a dialogue of elements: the "outer" world becomes contact zone, an endless traffic of textures, ideas, voices, texts. Note, though, that all this movement resolves into a more-or-less simple binary, namely, self-replication and self-cancellation, positive and negative poles denoting power and limit (Milton calls them Sin and Death). The cosmos is marked by rhetoric: it isn't just object, or occasion, but one more surface to be read (see Miller's "Reading").

Harold Rhenisch, sounding, in "Poetry and Magic," the anthem of all three writers, holds "metaphor is real. Correspondingly, simile, image, tone, and verbal colouring, and the correspondences they draw, are equally real" (1). Also, "the world and language are the same thing, perceived differently - the pattern of trees across a slope, or of stones in a field of bunchgrass, are at the same time both the pattern of the mind, and nouns and verbs in a sentence" (1). On one hand, language, by its pure virtuality, is physical - it takes up real space-time. Unlike Milton's Eden, where all phenomena, with one exception, are real (there's that lone symbolic tree!), Rhenisch's garden is full of things whose dream texture is their reality. So, intimacy with an exterior, "natural" order isn't just achieved but inherited - like a gift. But at the same time, nature is peripheral, transgressive, enigmatic, though not necessarily threatening, which may imply a comic vision. A comic vision would dissipate that signature masculine angst, so timid about embracing something other than an aloof, interfering, irony-mediated vision. The onset of trope means we can't talk any more about the grand totalization - the world seen from the outside - but only sustained acts of interchange, correspondence, transference (the world seen/heard from within: sublimity or psychosis?). Rhenisch observes a critical transformation in his poetics: "Whereas in the past, except for rare brief moments of creation, I looked at poetry from outside, I now look at it from within" (2).

Gravity's Plumb Line is Robert Leckie's third book of poems, his previous work, A Slow Light and The Authority of Roses appearing in 1985 and 1997, spacings that suggest the painstaking evolution Leckie's poetics has undergone between publications. Gravity's Plum Line is divided into four sections, the first evoking the landscape of New Brunswick's St. John River. Leckie's landscapes are in double motion, since they're noticed through the "perspective" of one travelling through them, as well as being represented as fluid, shifting, in themselves. It's not that the observer contains the scene, but that his own mobility brings him into closest possible contact with the motions of setting. What Leckie aims at, in short, is a non-aggressive, non-anthropomorphic vision, which allows the object to dwell partly beyond his words, or makes any words he carries to a place also the words the place would use to speak itself.

Amid what seems an extraordinary proliferation of sense data, accompanied by dramatic figurative turns, interesting effects are achieved via negation, as in "Allagash": "The stones are so utterly nameless. / They don't think. Each is an obdurate / anti-philosophy…" (13). Note how apparently clear and direct expressions (maxims, confessions, forcibly propositional language) come up against ambiguity, as if the more transparent the evocation, the more the idea gets away. We keep discovering what can't be said, or arriving at moments when truths, and the desire that moves and forms them, dissolve; here, pointedly, is how "Allagash" ends: "We make / The mistake of thinking only of song…"

that rocks sing or are silent. We don't
notice the incessant splash, the noise of it,
the rocks battling at the sunlight's sparkle

with their flickering paws. We don't consider
the ecstatic hush, this gesture of healing,
its nameless naming over and over again. (13-14)

There's something literal, with the literal's claims of authority/authenticity, in the revelation of the fantastic (in "Baker Lake": "The lily pads shadow and blacken the water, / so the fish can slip by unnoticed, dreamlike, / fantastical, each a distinct theology" (12). In later sections, as the poet's journey expands to other localities and occasions, there's still a sense of the poet's eye directed not only at but into the scene, which makes it domestic (subject to regular routines, or rhythms), and also dresses it in costume. The whole architecture of place and moment is isolated as a gesture - the solidity of place and time becoming a kind of skin, or show - a performance - pointing towards presence and absence equally; in "Downtown Toronto on a Tuesday Afternoon":

Even the word skyscraper is a nostalgia for the urban.
The reflective glass of the towers domesticates
space by giving back the cozy blues and browns of an afternoon walking in the disorienting streets

Leckie's "Variations after a Summer Storm" offers critical illustration of how details tend to expand (oxymoronically) inward, as if a poem's self-elaboration is fractal, which introduces a curious element of rest into the positionings of change:

The Oak tree is small: its leaves turned open
like palms, as if in a moment it shrugged
its shoulders a hundred times, perhaps to say

that the little joke of the wind's natter
is of no consequence. We think it shouldn't
matter that the rough blister of the planet's

spin is like a top upon a table listing
in its concentric wobble. The table is made
of oak, and worn and smooth with the brush

of many palms that seek to know the treason
of the wood, the secrets it couldn't keep.
The creases on the inside of a hand branch

in the shape of a tree, so much is known.
But what hand wrought this landscaping,
this brush of lawn that sweeps across the hill

in its weightless sunlight and says, "Shadow me.
Lay your small palm of night on my shoulder."
The contusions of the weather are like

a stranger from away who settles into a house
with creaking floorboards. We didn't deserve
the hilarity of sunlight, its banter in the leaves. (48)

We note the plurals ("leaves," "palms," "a hundred times"), the feeling of energy pouring out of containers, of sustained excess - an effect provoked, of course, by the recurring enjambment as well.

Space is presence, as we are drawn to perceptions of size ("small"), shape, position, direction ("the planet's spin," "a table listing"). Space consumes time, makes time graphic: it forms as it moves (a "concentric wobble"). The point is not to observe, or even tell a story of place, which would be gestures of containment. The point is to achieve a kind of stratified hearing. Multiple elements in this scene are "natter[ing]" to each other: so, references to talk: "perhaps to say / the little joke…." Not that we can be sure of what's said, or that this helplessness matters, or loses us anything. This talk "is of no consequence." It's as if something is here at the moment it leaves, which expands the world to its traces, afterthoughts. There is only the text, which is the outer body of the planet's simultaneous yieldings and suppressions (its revelations are its secrets). We never find out who speaks, who creates what is here. It seems to be a stranger, a momentary in-dweller of the place. This is a myth we erect to "explain" the "creaking floorboards," and we're left with the paradox that weather brings pain and pleasure. The lines ("creases") that form the piece of world in front of us are wounds, "contusions." But there is also "hilarity" and "banter" in the communion.

It's tempting to think of an Odysseus wandering through the world, gathering, compressing parts into language. On the other hand, there's no need to journey if the world is already moving (in place). What's required is immersion - for Leckie the writing is on the inside of the hand. So we learn to read particles in their motion, as if the dynamic is integral to the thing: verb is noun. Being named, eponymously, in terms of what one acts is also un-naming. Potential sadness is transformed into hilarity, as object is instantly made speech. So, images flow in and out of each other: "creases on the inside of the hand branch / in the shape of a tree." Creases transform/translate to branches before our eyes. The hand that "wrought this landscape" becomes the landscape it leaves behind. How do we accommodate small and large, a table and a planet, in the same (finite) space, i.e., poetic line? The point is, perspective matters less than the becoming, conveyed by synecdoche. No thing is identical with itself (self-identity being, as Descartes taught, the condition for objects to be part of an inhuman nature). In place of this certainty we find a preoccupation with material. This, to recall Wallace Stevens' phrase, is what will suffice: "The table is made of oak, …worn and smooth…."

In the Scaffolding, Eric Miller's second book of poetry (Song of the Vulgar Starling appeared in 1999) offers complex and erudite meditations, in long-liner space, on subjects from - as the back cover blurb notes - nature to fatherhood and childhood. We might expect pastoral, but topical concerns provide a dramatic edge, allowing for curious rhetorical turns, reversals. If there is a "subject" running through these poems, arranged in four sections, it is, broadly speaking, perception, the role of language in perception, indeed, language as perception. Miller takes up and puts down a variety of masks or, better, lenses: the variety itself is a marker of the inventiveness, verging on improvisation, of Miller's thought. "Invention" meaning excess, hyperbole - keep in mind that there's something hyperbolic in the longing for correspondence between signifier and signified - as if the balancing act is too much. Miller's poetics involves, on one hand, the piling up of image clusters, which, while drawing our sight, focussing attention on themselves in the moment, also act as windows. One such window is time, the singular moment, which acquires a power to speak, and show, distinct from other moments; but timing (kairos) is everything, as in "The Stinger":

The wasp is suited to its time of climax,
of something tottering in the doddering angers
of its toxic body striped in sugars
and carrion of last appetite, like the Undertakers of Black Death
who fucked the bodies they dumped, the dead brought out,
knowing they would die soon and partner them faithfully,
rotten among children and family already stiff as firewood. (19)

There is an ironic, almost parodic, twinning of eros and death, copulation and violence, a series of fabrications derived from the instant when one phenomenon transmutes into its other. Notice the overt, somewhat grandiose similes ("like the Undertakers of Black Death"), as if the line evolves by layering, one poetic idea being placed on top of another, opening to it, everything becoming transparent. Likeness becomes a way of looking through the glass, because one image loans its qualities, momentarily, to the other, while framing it - as if the whole is smaller than the sum of its parts. Something similar happens in "The Web," which tells us "September's a month spun by spiders" (18), where spiders point to what September is, construct it in their colours, textures. This is a projection of one thing through another, though we're invited to see cracks, abysses between the stages of vision. Spiders make possible, while also bending (like a gravitational mass), any line of sight we may gather on the moment, time becoming, as a result, visible - provisionally - and out of reach. In this way, the poem becomes a sequence of fractures, translations, and we get mired in the web, falling into the dangerous centre ("When you aren't looking, it is drawn tight. / Your nerves are caught and like stretched time they snap" [18]).

Such a mode of poetic fabrication suggests the building tension between condensation and compilation, reductions and expansions, as densely packed, multi-syllabic terms and phrases crowd into a tense, rich syntax. These lines work hard:

…and those hungry gems seek appeasement elsewhere
in the sparkling eutrophic dump of waters
where appetite gobbles oblivious to its own beauty
and shamelessness has nothing to be ashamed of
and to give is to receive, and bread cast on the waters
returns reflexively in the prismatic
theophany of webbed ruthlessness. (17)

The mingling of concrete and abstract, as opposing demands of definition and evocation struggle to be met, means Miller's sentences often don't end - periodicity is under extraordinary stress.

Many times the ending is a reversible trope, as things turn into their opposites: shamelessness is not ashamed, giving is receiving, and beauty ends in violence. Whatever is, also, at the same time, isn't (itself). And it is this contrariness in the roots of things that writes poetry.

The first poem in the section "The Broken Eggs of the World" spells out this phenomenology of joyous disaster perfectly. "Sleep Sink" begins with an analogy ("As though waking were air and sleep water…"), then darts through a labyrinth ("…the girl passes from one to the other in the arms of her mother" [45]). These are passages not through the same space-time corridors, but a kind of linked set of memory-trajectories - branchings. The journey isn't forward but backward: an unravelling, as if the ground is disappearing as soon as it's walked on:

My daughter has sunk like an anchor. I dive after.
She's the anchor I lost with my father when, sky darkening,
we sailed lost on a lake ringed by stone, night ascending
like a swimmer dripping oblivion from his shoulders
and coolness rose, and fear, and awareness of how
all rock is really hard potential of pain. (45)

Note the rush of similes, how they break open, unpack each clustered moment, turning it out of its calm abstraction into new, provisional resting points of association. But as images gather, the world of coherence, formulated as generalization, as maxim ("all rock is really hard potential of pain") is in fact dissolving. Excess begets not more but less: condensing not just into concreteness but final ideas, momentary apocalypses: "a shudder developing within us / as we dissolved in dissipating heat, dissipating hope." Don't miss the repetitions: sound echoes, the doubling of "dissipating."

These of course speak of reduction, elimination, so echoes are retreats, a kind of spiraling that ends up not at knowledge but thanatos. Or, at least, it ends up in the movement of thought to elsewhere. After all the place changes and costume switches, maybe the final "disguise" of the trickster is invisibility (why do we need special clothing to disappear?).

Excess implies a lessening ("We dove after it, colder, / light in water beyond instinct, the water denser…"). We get an identical convergence of hyperbole on self-immolation in the poem that comes after "Sleep Sink," "Sunday Afternoon." Note the voice-over allusion to Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning." Stevens' disclosure of epiphany in a seemingly circumspect, abstract vocabulary echoes here. Again, there is an excess that, Icarus-like (in Auden's Brueghel, no one sees Icarus die) tumbles in on itself:

a surplus that escaped into something else, totemic,
incurable by the sensible rejoinders to my questions,
on those Sunday afternoons bottomed by linoleum
squares black and white, coiled by your
cigarette's self-diffusion, self-immolation… (46)

Are we, in the end, that far from the Stevens' finale, "downward to darkness, on extended wings"? Disappearance is executed by negative prefixes, which tells us something about Miller's projections of landscape. His landscapes, mediated by a transitory and ephemeral languaging, are built on the negative case. So, as he says in "Sunday Afternoon," "wonder" arrives at the eye with "irritability." In "Lagoon," we have "un"doings of what we see ("irremovable," "unliftable," "unsustainable").

Ironically, these become prefatory gestures announcing a conspiratorial yoking of beauty and pain: "the clouds a worse burden"; "stained garland / on the brow of a conscious statue, which hurts" (41). What astounds us most, possibly, is the equanimity, the impersonality of the commentator, a quality that surfaces in Harold Rhenisch's provocatively non-Bloomian entry into Shakespeare.

Rhenisch's eleventh book retraces Shakespeare's path in the sonnets, recapitulating each one, item by item, with the announced intent of making Shakespeare's language seem to us what it already - in its own time - was, idiomatic, fleshy, passionate. These are not, it goes without saying, recaps or paraphrases of Shakespeare, so much as - as already observed - translations. Again, there is a remarkable absence of the type of antagonism or discord associated with the anxiety of influence, as seen when Rhenisch, in his introduction, pays his dues to the precursor from the inside.

After four centuries, let's talk about Will, as a man. In his sonnets, Will was worried that the beauty of his young lover would disappear with age and death, even though the love he felt for him was eternal. Time was the enemy: patrician, disdainful, time. Will proposed to fight time by distilling his lover down to perfume. (7)

But the Shakespeare who emerges here is a construct, a totem, situated by the text we inherit across the centuries, and so we sense two languages at work as we encounter the two sequences (columns?) of text more or less simultaneously. (Rhenisch reproduces the Shakespearean "original" directly under his own rendition, page by page, so there's a forceful mirroring, which puts the non-symmetries into prominent relief). Rhenisch doesn't follow sonnet form, rather maintains his conversation with the "other," which Shakespeare initiated-a "double" who evolves as the story goes on.

Shakespeare enters the composition process in the same way as abstract vocabulary adopted by Miller, or the dramatic topoi in the final section ("The Horizons of Tragedy") of Leckie's book: Mimesis, Unity, Hamartia, and so on. The naming power of these articulations is a sort of homunculus of the thought. It is replicated (fractally) by being acted out. In Miller's work, the abstract term is elaborated by being circulated in other parts of a line or passage. In Leckie's, it is dramatized through the poem itself through a series of exchanges. This corresponds to the way Rhenisch relates to Shakespeare, or to the various characters in the sonnet sequence: lover, betrayer, poet, and the way these expand themes of mortality, fidelity, poetic power, eros and thanatos. Here is Rhenisch's treatment of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"):

Would you rather I wrote one of those pastoral poems
of sheep in Greece, bleating in May, and the Shepherd
playing his pipe - or yours? It wouldn't do you justice.
Sometimes a storm blows up off a dark sea
as you lie arm and arm with a lover on a mountain slope
and you have to run for shelter, without clothes;
then it's winter and your fingers freeze; the sea is ice.
Sometimes the sun's so hot your skin peels off in sheets;
sometimes a cloud turns the world into the grey land of the dead.
Every lover pulls out from his true love (of the night)
after he comes or when his cock goes limp after talk turns
to other loves. Within these words, though, it's always
summer, and I won't love you less when your voice cracks.
Death won't brag that you now roam in his private forest:
a stag before the hounds. Your fame will grow instead,
like your eyes when I first push in: as long as men
are alive and care to peer through a crack in the wall,
these words will enter you and you will moan with pleasure. (27)

Note, through the address to the absent (?) reader, the inextricably physical connection of eros to language, along with the reliance on personified abstractions ("Death"), conventions ("Shepherd / playing his pipe"). This concentrates the whole fraught rhetorical issue of what message gets through, what meaning lasts. This may be part of a longing to go beyond the ephemeral. Still, we don't get a feeling that Shakespeare is a persona of Rhenisch. So the speaker of Rhenisch's lines, like Shakespeare, is a moment of text, a sign called up by the circumstance of the need to talk. This is intensified by the performative thrust - outward, to an audience, which in turn raises the danger that the speaker may get killed, replaced by language's memory of the conversation. This may be true or false (a question, couched in terms of love and loss, posed by the sequence).

One of the angsts of the sequence relates to beauty and, given its perishability, what one should do with it. One answer is to copulate, so there is both aesthetic attraction and moral duty regarding the gift and burden of beauty (both nature and art). Neither Rhenisch nor Shakespeare overlook the implications of this for the poet. So there's a reflexive element in all this. Maybe we're finally closing in on the key stressors of (poetic) language. We can reflect on the choices we're faced with in working through the riddle, the positives and negatives of creation and its passions.

In the sonnets, recreation (turning feeling into poetry) as much as reproduction (turning oneself into another) involves, again, the plus and minus sides of the coin: self-duplication/self-destruction. Consider how often in Shakespeare we're given a choice between brothers, or the brother-like: Hamlet (father) v Claudius, Prospero and Antonio, Hal v Hotspur, etc. At an early stage, these are linked by faith, even echo each other in terms of feelings and ideals, but at some point of crisis, the two can't seem to inhabit any more the same space/kingdom at the same time. One must depart, or die, maybe due to the arrival of the feminine, who is loved by both - which is the scenario Hamlet returns to find in Elsinore, which in turn is why we have the play. This is an either-or doublet, where only one term can be selected, but what's striking is how Shakespeare, in the same play, satirizes fraternal warfare in the form of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Their brotherhood stays intact through the violence; in fact, the two are the same character written twice, speaking each other's lines in a kind of looking-glass abstraction. These two can occupy the same scene simultaneously - as if another play, the play where no one is killed, the one Shakespeare didn't write, is being performed, nostalgically, on the same stage as Hamlet. In the "real" play, the one we do have, someone seems to have died, somehow, at some point, at least according to voices heard in the night, but how can the non-existent have political and psychic force?

My point is, the sonnets may be taken as further versions of this drama of recreation and death. To what extent is creation dependent on death, and to what extent is duplication a denial of imagination? Rhenisch reposes the agency of composition in language, its movements, its power over memory and silence. Rhenisch tells us he is re-presenting Shakespeare. This must be seen as an act of translation, and of (innocent) play, which also allows - trickily - for a darkening of Shakespeare. Act/performative therefore replaces the constative. At the end of Anatomy of Criticism, Frye spelled out conditions for treating literature as an autonomous structure of words: We think also of literature at first as a commentary on an external "life" or "reality." But just as in mathematics we have to go from three apples to three, and from a square field to a squaare, so in reading we have to go from literature as a reflection of life to literature as autonomous language. Literature also proceeds by hypothetical possibilities and though literature, like mathematics, is constantly useful - a word which means having a continuing relationship to the common field of experience - pure literature, like pure mathematics, contains its own meaning. (351) If we're thinking about gravity as implying an ethical metaphor, let's remember Frye's privileging of the inner over outer thrust of meaning. Centripetal (in his words) comes ahead of centrifugal, in terms of its power of making the critic curious. Decades later, poets seem more stimulated by what's outside. This is where the most entertaining, and meaningful, complications lie. Landscape as text, as body, is an interior, but an interior that lies on the other side of words, on the margins of perception. Think of the inhabitants of the Trojan horse. The "outer" world of the enemy was just another inside, rimmed by walls. Works cited Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Gill, Sam D. and Gill, Irene F. "Trickster(s)" Dictionary of Native North American Mythology. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 308-11. Rhenisch, Harold. "Poetry and Magic: An Essay."