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Saskatchewan native (and 2007-2008 poet laureate) Robert Currie is a poet, short story writer, novelist - and teacher - whose latest book of poetry explores dialectical kinships between memory and desire. Running in Darkness divides into three sections, "Beginning," "Beginning Again," and "Ending," labels that showcase Currie's evolving interest in mapping time. Various poems signal, meanwhile, via their titles, the poignancy of the "moment": "One Winter Night," "Summer at Midnight," "The Last Time," and so on. But memory plays an active role in the (re)making of the past, turning time into speech, so what the poet composes isn't just a (literal) record: it's also, partly, virtual - a construct. Contact between, on one hand, real life lived in real time and, on the other, wishing and longing - as these arise from absence, loss - generate a backdrop for major dramas, and subtleties, of this work. At least one reviewer has called the poems "autobiographical" (1), and there clearly are links between the poems and selected times, places, and people in Currie's life. Yet the rhythms of language/speech pull us into the craft of his work, and we're reminded of how consciously evolved patterns of conflict regularly influence the writing process. Yeats's gyres, Blake's wheels of memory/wheels of prophecy - not to mention the "and/but" binary in Kroetsch's "The Sad Phoenician" - come to mind.

The poems are, as I say, framed by time and place references, as if Currie wishes to locate the exact point of connection/translation between words and ground. He is looking for the instant of balance, restoration - a way to put things back. The first poem, "One Winter Night":

In the pinched heart of the Depression,
at the arid prairie's edge: Furness, Saskatchewan.
The gaunt shadow of the United Grain Growers elevator
falls across the two-room shack beyond the town,
its tin roof, tin walls shaken in December wind. (1)

This is a poetics of precise demarcation (note how spatial relations are registered by prepositions: "at," "across," "beyond," "in"). Yet within the historical and geographical "containers" ("Depression," "Furness, Saskatchewan"), we get jostling. The parts of memory don't hold together: fractures show, elements come unglued.

We see this in the ramshackle, the jury-rigging in evocations such as: "Above the headboard of the bed, tape / curls away from frosted window panes" (1). "Curls away" hints at breakage: details are restless, tentative, repel each other (things fall apart, the centre doesn't hold). Stasis and motion blend: the controlling image in "The Family in Black and White" is a still shot. Our gaze is on fixed gestures ("Jackpines bent by wind, whitecaps frozen on stilled waves"; "my mother wrapped in dark cardigan, eyes / like anthracite, arm curled around my bare back" [3]). But placements are threatened, since, for one thing, we face the scene from two angles: outside and inside. By means of this interplay and alteration of perspective, the poem opens itself, parenthetically, to varied voices. Currie also enters the scene, reveals what he's thinking inside, when the picture was taken. He says: "I'm trying my best to smile, gazing at my father bent over the camera" (3) (obviously, "we" [outside] can't see the father in the picture; only those on the inside see him). But the last line ("It's the only picture of the four of us" [3]) takes us out/into the now. We're made aware, reflexively - cathartically - that this is (merely) a recalled/pictured event, and the "ordinary" is exposed in all its fragility and isolation-the moment (after Heraclitus) happens only once.

One of the more recognizable features of Currie's work is his patient accumulation of local detail, which, again, situates poems in place and time - in fact crafts a space of memory that slowly finds its own shape (from within). Such time artefacts take on a relief that makes them, at one level, distinct, precious, unrepeatable. But the poems are also acts of looking back, of positing a distance of time between subject and object, which sharply defines the borders of a memory. In this way each poem becomes a transposition, from "then" into "now." Two time frames - the recollected and the reconfigured - coincide, separate, mirror one another; in "The Reminder" Currie recalls being "in the basement, / … splitting kindling for the furnace" (10), cutting himself.

Looking at the scar today, noting
how it's edged to the left, resting now
in the hollow between my knuckles,
what I remember over five decades later
is a crying boy seated on the chopping block,
his mother kneeling motionless before him,
my left hand held in both of hers, the throbbing
eased by the warmth of her palms, the soothing
words, her breath a balm mingling with my own. (10)

Again, double angles: the man looking back on the event with a brooding openness to the marginal, happenstance; and the close-up of the boy in the scene, consoled by his mother's warmth and words. But as the poem opens to the past it invests the older scene with currency, immediacy. The "crying boy" is at first in the third person, but as "the throbbing / [is] eased by the warmth of her hands" we move inside his body/pain, and the boy appears as first person: "her breath a balm mingling with my own." A similar shift in point of view is marked by the arrival of other voices. Generally in Currie's work, stasis (in the form of image) gets replaced by, unravelled into, story - as in "Every One of Us," which begins:

On the top floor of King Edward School,
we sit in our desks, heads bent
over our times table, Miss Dunlop
before us fierce as a badger.
"You'll stay in your seats, "she says,
"Every last one of you. Understood?" (11)

In "The Reminder," curiously, what's carried from past to present is the wound, which is really an emptying, an inscription. It's as if memory is just that, a space, a crack, an interruption. The stand-out moment is one where routine dissolves and an unexpected, potentially catastrophic "action" occurs. "The Reminder" is about a near miss: the meaningful - the real, secret, buried - action is what didn't happen; or the action (i.e., the wound) turns into a non-action.

Meanwhile, Currie's eye/ear accuracy - given by means of the miniature, the smallness of the details he piles into each space of memory - is at times marred (if that's the word) by trope. Currie's poems are a kind of compressed long poem, which is why verse and prose elements so easily mix. In the shortened space of the poem, the unreal happens, for example when Miss Dunlop is caricatured - enlarged and flattened: she is "fierce as a badger." So the raising of the past is layered with vernacular, with a figure of speech - simile. This is one of the ways the past gets (re)installed in language, so we might now say Currie's search isn't just for the unique moment but for resonance, replication, which include linkages - exchanges - between event and word, object and word. Currie is writing his own canon. The carry-over effect - the work of calling up old time - creates points of reference to something "out there," something that's there when the poet isn't looking. Yet we never miss the destabilizing force of hyperbole/irony (note the number of times a poem is concerned with something lost, unnameable). Each poem thus is occupied with an overshooting or falling away of the moment, as if critical experiences are mentioned as they are disappearing (Currie's world is red-shifted). All this calls up the more-or-less rhetorical drama of "too much" played off against "not enough." And this is dramatized in the flight of Icarus, who flies too high, then falls below (and in Brueghel, nobody sees him hit the water).

Now, Currie's poetics relies on sound. We've seen the commingling of voices, which either are not the poet's, or not the present "version" of the poet writing the poem in "the now." But think too of onomatopoeia, as in "The Dance":

Wham Bam a Bam Bam A Bop Bam Boom No sense no need for sense at all just music pushing at the dark    (27)

Currie engages a variety of "sense" experiences. These aren't only sight but, as I say, sound (and silence), rhythm and touch; Currie cultivates the tactile as a kind of extended metaphor. Running in Darkness is a multi-sensory panorama directed at the day-to-day.

Still, memory isn't just a reflection of something - it involves close-up, immersion, as if by repeating an event (in the mind, and in the mind of the poem), we forget it's a repetition and feel it, magically, as an "original" event.

Following Kristeva's distinction, we move out of the "symbolic" into the "symbiotic" (the "origin" always arrives last) (2), as the poem becomes an "experience" - a unique event, though not merely exotic. This happens when words stop trying to interpret themselves ("no sense no need / for sense at all") and focus instead on their own performance, or "enactment": i.e., the reader-interface. "The Summer I Worked Construction" unfolds this contact with earth/matter, also calling up an idea of lost connection, of something that might have happened but didn't. Currie's is a poetics of alternate/unrealized worlds - traces, final contacts, goodbyes, departures; his landscapes remain outside because they reside in future silence:

but here there was no moon, and you
were on the other side of the wall, though hand
in hand we'd walked out of town that evening,
puffs of dust rising together at every step,
hushed prairie and bush, one magpie in the dusk
just a whisper of black, gliding low
at the edge of vision, your shoulder
pressed against mine    (32)

What is it about this gathering of sights and sounds - as darkness presses in - that augments the impression of physical contact/pressure ("your shoulder / pressed against mine")? So we seem not just to be seeing images or hearing sounds but seeing sounds, hearing images - and let's not forget both seeing and hearing involve the body's touch with earth. But, again, such immersions presume an outer, objective frame of reference - general landscapes, shared timelines, communal histories, maps, other witnesses, other voices. This shouldn't come as a shock, if we think of previous Currie experiments - with documentary form (Klondike Fever [1992]), or his continuing validation of the remembering act (the short story collection, Things You Don't Forget [1999]).

The next group of poems in Running in Darkness is "Beginning Again," a heading that implies review, going back over - an art of the second glance. Prominent, here, is Currie's explicit recovery of himself, as poet or teacher. Autobiography, yes, but this includes an autobiography of the writing life. Memory and writing fuse: travel backwards in time is travel through the writing act. We see this in his anecdotes of the classroom - instants of exchange and failed exchange between teacher and student. It's also in allusions to/dialogues between Currie and other writers (Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Weibe, Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, Anne Szumagalski, and so on).

The "rupturing" apparent in "Beginning" mellows here, as there is a more frequently evoked sense of things being together. A sense of vital kinship between the parts of the moment, of a message, a gift being sent. "Starting Out Together," the first poem in the section:

We brake and stop for a solitary moose,
its hulking shoulders, its dark bulk just visible
in a thrill of moonlight by the lake.
Then we hear our song on the car radio.

We're deep in the park, miles from the Narrows,
our honeymoon cabin where light dies at midnight,
the generator stilled, cold stars shaking above.
Car doors flung wide, we step out together,

dance on the broken pavement,
aspens quaking in the car's dim light,
beyond them, black woods, rock and decay,
the eyes of animals, awake and waiting. (41)

An impressionistic scene, with a mix of heavy and light brushstrokes, sharp lines between darkness and light, shapes and sounds. Darkness lurks, and invisible creatures wait outside the perimeter. But this is an innocent, timeless darkness, a blackness of underground passageways, backlighting, such as Blake identified with "Urthona."

The (oxymoronic) presence of darkness thrusts partially visible details into grainier relief, yet mystery is absolved into consolation, connection: "Warm in each other's arms, aching with love" (41). Excess, anticipation, and a sense not of the isolated moment but of space, stretching, including. Past, present, future intersect (note the plurals): "shadows and moonlight, silent pines around us" (41). Tensions are gathered, suspended, even as (note the singular) "an animal, / alone and in pain, tears at its paw in the dark" (41).

Something of this sense of buried tracks, of landscapes evoked as a dream state, emerges in "What The Father Knows":

He recalls his dream, in a cave
he was, going down, always down,
when he wanted to be up and out,
explosions beginning, echoes
from a darker tunnel, everything
falling, boulders all around him,
the only air-dust, and he was hacking,
gasping, startled, blackness
everywhere, hearing
     cautious
footsteps
     padding down the hall. (63)

The belated glance, the dreaming back, affords Currie a seemingly isolated/elevated viewpoint that ironically allows for burgeoning detail (sight, sound, texture).object:

But perspective is altered, adapted - played with - as in "Saturday Morning" when the poet, washing his car (a mundane action layered with erotics of touching, curved metal) is conscious as he works that he is watched from, of all places, his bedroom window - he becomes

and you
at our bedroom window
rub sleep from your eyes
ah, that smile is there,
slow sensual,
and I
am heading back to you. (42)

Such moments, when one is aware, abruptly, of being watched - the sense of another presence in, or just outside, the scene - recur; "After Round Hill" ends: "Often in the weeks afterward / I'd look up from reading and catch my son / staring at me as if he'd just discovered sight" (54).

But what presses in can be threatening too, a sign of lapse, as in "Closing Time," which calls up the danger of losing his son. Again, an image of the near miss, the alternate pathways time can take us down, ways the real can break open: "You look away / for just an instant: / this is how it happens" (53). Quantum spaces, the uncertainty, pathos of the miniature, the ghost/chance: How many other lives do we live? How many other timelines rear up, ready to crash in?

Currie's scenes are interiors, domestic, concerned with the rituals and rhythms of ordinary days and nights. So: patchwork timelines, quilted links between times, emerging through anecdotes, mini-narratives. What is cultivated is a weightlessness of circumstance, and timing (kairos). The poems aren't just about what happened, but why it happened at this time, and why it's returning to consciousness now? Looking back usually prefigures entry into the scene. But how often do these scenes involve limit, or truncation? This is revealed when the poet, bearing witness, runs up against silence, becomes aware of how memory, the poem as memory, holds together. The poem includes what it can't name, gains force when it stops (prematurely) short. "Golden West" ends: "I never saw him again" (65). Or when the lesson he's teaching doesn't get through, or is re-routed by his student. But these are shortcircuits, swerves, moments of de-control - spots of time. Beyond straightforward ("simple") autobiography, Currie's teacher-self is his "Spectre of Urthona." This is the Clark Kent half of his writing personality, the portion that lives and works, survives, pays his bills. This "daily" self needs to be in place so chaos can occur. Order, then, is crucial to the fabric of creation, as in Currie's quiet praise of Anne Szumigalski. "Mother Poetry" reads: "she plans the silence / between the lines" (69).

Currie eventually thinks of the various mnemonic associations and evocations as events that take place as language. So what I'm calling memory, structure, continuity of time, is acted out through words, as if memory is really just an attribute of writing. (But silence is a voice too.) Time is held together - and opened up - by regularities of assonance and consonance, especially in a poem like "The Most Creative Act." Here, in an impersonation of metaphysical lyric, the composition process is the poem's alter ego.

He thinks of counterpoint the
cadence of a catalectic line that breaks
another curving back upon itself the flow
into cesura's calm texture
of vowels and consonants expect
-ations dashed the stretch of
tension    aesthetic    distance. (70)

We see/hear/touch the poem as a performance carried out (visualized, dramatized) on the page (seeing the spaces between words). And the crucial instant is when language loops back on itself. Then we see through words, which act like lenses, and we allow that words have a (prefigurative) power to shape what we think we're looking at. This happens before any readerly grasp of meaning (memory, symbol). Doubling puts the poem slightly out of reach, but it suggests the writerly need to "make it new."

We need, then, to take seriously what might be called the pragmatic dimension of the composition process. Currie's question isn't just "what" (happened) but "how" did it happen, and in this sense he is caught up in the double-ideal/pragmatic - register of the modernist image. (And T.E. Hulme invented image poetics on the Canadian prairie, let's remember.)

One of the "stages" of poetic/rhetorical invention Harold Bloom describes in The Anxiety of Influence is "tessera" or "completion and antithesis   " (14).

I take the term not from mosaic-making, where it is still used, but from the ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of recognition, the fragment say of a small pot which with the other fragments would re-constitute the vessel. A poet antithetically "completes" his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough. (14)

Tessera names a part-for-whole relation, synecdoche, wherein the remnant is used, as Bloom says, to rebuild the whole to which it (once) belonged. That the part, treated in isolation, can be imagined as "containing" the whole implies part and whole are reversible, which in turn calls up the kind of outer/inner configuration Kenneth Burke calls a "scene-act ratio." Derrida offers a version of this synecdochic transformation in his essay "Force and Signification":

Structure is seen through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and fragility of its existence. Structure can then be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability. (6)

Many of the poems in the third section of Running in Darkness are based on the uncovery of the tessera. This, again, is the piece of a (lapsed) totality the poet deploys to call up the entire "institution" of the past, which is what occurs in the section's lead poem, "The Glove," wherein the fragment is a baseball glove: "A pick-up game and she wants to borrow a glove. Well, there's my old three-finger model…" (81). This leads the mind backwards to a series of associations with "Paynton, Sask., August 1948" (81).

In "Why I Was Seated in the Midle [sic] Of The Front Row At The Saskatchewan Centre Of The Arts," it is "sprayed tomato sauce on [Aunt Aggie's] pink blouse," which causes her not to attend a Tony Bennett concert at the Centre - Currie swipes her ticket. Failure, slippage: the remnant, charged with memory - and able to produce an apologetic, "explanatory" narrative of an eccentric occasion - is disorientingly mundane. Currie hints at interiors, built-in layers of memory, inward travel. In "Here's To You, Searce," the token is a colour, calling up weather, a mood, which links to a larger memory:

April grey with winter sludge
and I think of you, old friend, caught
somewhere between middle age
and the end that always follows.
The sky opens, the street
Suddenly streaming, pebbles
Of rain beat down,
the whole block dancing.
The window pane melts,
poles, trees, waver, ripple. (87)

The association of "April grey" with past time is a link from part to whole, small to large, text to context, concrete to abstract, but note also how the colour, locked to a time, embodies an interval ("between middle age / and the end"). Note too how the interval is fixed in an orderly pattern: the end "always follows," which shows that we know the (penultimate) ending before the last episode takes place. We "decipher" whole time from a part. To read the poem of "ending," is to wait for the revealing image, and then we see how this clusters a possible/complete (true/eventual) story: beginning, middle, end.

In "For Mary Drover," the holdover/artefact is the crutch of a woman dying of cancer, who refuses to talk about her illness, captured in a moment of "pause" (90). In "Gzowski In The Heartland," it's the "Harwood, his old watering hole," now gone, "but at least he's back in Moose Jaw / where he started forty years before" (92). In "Brushing My Hair," it's an ordinary hairbrush:

I grip the hairbrush in my right hand,
propel it in slow, deliberate strokes
sweeping back from forehead to neck,
grey hairs falling away, dropping out, they
pull themselves free, leap for the brush,
in moments my hair depleted - all of it gone. (102)

Of course the scene verges on mock epic, the argument of the poem being how the hairbrush calls up inevitable loss. The "object" signifies, again, something already departed (youth) or in the process of vanishing as the poem chases it; yet the effect is to invest ordinary things with a kind of bemused anima. The hairs on his head "pull themselves free," as if his body is jumping at the chance to age.

In "What We Leave Behind," the signifying fragment is "a sepia print from 1917, / the Central Collegiate football team in a line before the school…" (117) - etc.

What we can take from Bloom's and Derrida's iterations of the fragment involves, first, how Currie works with his own "precursors," who - adapting Bloom's theory of poetic influence - turn up as the eccentrics, creatures from memory who dot the poems, whose lives Currie tells - they are his "tradition" and landscape. Bloom would warn us that the literal, the lives of people inside a writer's memory, are incomplete, or the writer's memory of them doesn't "go far enough." So Currie's script of their lives isn't content to speak for them, replace them in his poem; it relays an extra factor: a critique, a distance, a sideways glance. He sees beyond the endings, the disappearing acts memory pulls off in order to be memory, to what we've been calling silences, gaps; but these are where the poem takes place. Derrida implies a surplus feeling that a work may go beyond mourning or pity for a lost past - beyond elegy - to the realization that it's not moments of gained wisdom or loss that define the past. It's not moments of "construction or ruin" but movement - instability, "lability" of time - that raises the past, and memory is complete when it becomes reversible. It slips inside its mirror image, so time not only "informs" writing but writing informs time; past and present are both "here and now," interchangeable (this is the feeling of possibility and fragility attaching to the "keystone" of memory as institution).

How can Running in Darkness be seen as not only a reflection of the past (even though it's deeply concerned with chronology, and getting the story right), or a Wordsworth-style accounting of the "growth of the poet's mind," but, in the strictest sense, a composition? Think of Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," which uses a sharply defined memory/object to suggest a glimmer of what's beyond the object: "so much depends on" the wheelbarrow, though we're not told what, exactly. What lies beyond/inside the poem is a cover story that Williams, at the moment the wheelbarrow appeared, had just spent the night saving a child's life. The wheelbarrow is potentially ideal, in the sense of being differentiated from everything around it, but it's also in and of the scene. And it's here that an outer force is seen in this concentrated material phenomenon, because the wheelbarrow embodies a certain praxis - it's an "instrument," and it makes the poem an instrument, a "crafted" thing. This same dialectic of emotional synthesis v. grounded praxis is a thread running through the literary essays of Ezra Pound. And the romantic/pragmatic dialectic of high culture v. small town anti-culture - speaking of doctors - unfolds in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street: Carol Kennicott as a figure of capable imagination v. Dr. Kennicott's devotion to practical service (all he can do is save lives).

Idealization and pragmatism, a point of meeting between fantasy and action - an assignment of the life/creative force to the "real" world. How does this help us see further into Currie's work? The answer might be that as a "practicing" poet (and teacher) Currie needs not simply to romance time as tragic hero, as possibility and loss. He must apply memory to the physical task of writing. And this becomes the world of action outside the borders of the poem, where the poem always points. This is not a "vulgar" world beneath educated sensibility, but a world that persists in retaining its practical mystery, and wisdom (phronesis), its resonance within but also beyond language - and it keeps poetry humble.

At the end of The Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke names "four master tropes": "metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony" (503). I've said Currie searches for moments of similitude, resonance, between past and present, word and event, which includes the moments of dialogue - community building - between humans. This invokes simile as a key structuring device in his poems (note the number of times the word "like" occurs). But Running in Darkness seems to proceed from the non-sequiturs of metonymy in "Beginning," to the consolidating metaphors of "Beginning Again," to, finally, the more hierarchical part-whole/synechdochic links of "Ending."

And in the end we realize that the set of "remnants" that call up the larger whole are, in addition to being objects, words themselves. Words are the physical remnants that enable the poet to write from the inside, even as he tries (also) to see life and world from the outside, as whole.

Works Cited

• Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.

• Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1945.

• Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Notes

1. Kris Brandhagen, "Review: Running in Darkness by Robert Currie," http://poetryreviews.ca/2006/11/30running-in-darkness-by-robert-currie/

2. See, for example, Julia Kristeva. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.