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There is scarcely a leaf in the Psalter
not stained by some withered flower.
To gather some of these petals and read -
    - Brian Bartlett The Watchmaker's Table

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
    - T.S Eliot, The Waste Land

As its title suggests, Brian Bartlett's The Watchmaker's Table concerns itself with temporal matters. With writing that is simultaneously lyrical, vivid, and contemplative, Bartlett reminds us that although we tend to refer to time as a singular abstraction, human lives are composed of many states of temporal awareness. We live not according to epochs and eras, but from moment to moment, passing though climactic peaks, enduring monotonous stretches, anticipating future disasters and epiphanies. The poetry shows the apparent linearity of time to be relative, its flow coloured, arrested, and intensified by unfolding human drama. Adopting multiple perspectives on his subject, Bartlett exposes the emotional mechanisms that play into temporal awareness, allowing us to grasp the mutability of both perception and existence itself.

Divided into four parts, the book operates in several registers, and as a collection it may be described as polyphonic. The first part, "The Sideways 8," explores the effects of temporal awareness on personal matters such as the raising of children. "Given Words" allows voices from the past to speak through phrases collected out of Bibles and hand-me-down texts. "Breathing and Reading" reflects on the legacies of literature. And in "Time, Flying" the poet wrestles with the inevitability of time by means of personification and direct address. Certain works, particularly the found poems in "Given Words," employ fragments and lateral logic. The voices and locations shift according to the emotional tone that a poem demands. Other pieces make use of strong individual narrative voices. They possess a linear drive that carries the reader easily from initial propositions to conclusions. Bartlett also includes two series of linked haiku and a number of poems in several sections, for example the eight-part "St. Mary's U. Études." Taken together, the collection shows the virtuosity of the writer. Contrasting the vast and minute, the mechanical and the natural, the eternal and the momentary, Bartlett moves between extremes, showing readers a world that is at once harsh and full of grace.

Bartlett opens the collection with an individual take on an old metaphor. "All the Train Trips" presents a lonely passenger traveling on a night train. The darkness hovering outside of the cars - as much psychological as it is physical - and the sense of ghostly insubstantiality felt by the passenger, become recurring themes in the collection. Bartlett writes of "sleeplessness, the broken breath of strangers, / my face after midnight haggard and vague, / reflected against anonymous woods." Bartlett represents human lives as running steadily forward like the night train. In this vision, the future is as dark as the forest outside the windows and the mind is haunted by a haphazard collection of vivid memories, out of which the self is constructed.

The poem suggests the strength of memory's associations, as when Bartlett writes "I'll always read Lorca's poems in the light / of one winter night when the world outside / was all snow." Elsewhere, though, he points to the fickleness of memory: "I've forgotten the names of villages and towns / […] Someday will I recall nothing / but how far in the dark I was? -". Powerful though it is, memory cannot overcome time's destructive qualities. The passenger, whose reflected image is "haggard and vague," who is subject to the vagaries of memory, occupies a precarious position with respect to both the past and the future.

The poem that follows, "Ghosts of Pier 21," develops the notion of an unstable present. Bartlett describes in detail the imagined lives of travelers who once passed through the pier when it was a gateway for ships arriving from the Old World. He concludes the poem with these lines:

Face by face, the timeless light restores them all
     while your spectral fingers
touch your spectral face, and you whisper to anybody
     who might listen,
"Hello. I am the only ghost here."

Where the passenger on the train merely appears vague, the person addressed in this poem becomes literally spectral, while figures of the past grow more substantial. This device serves to emphasize the transience, the brevity, of our ownership of the present. It also allows Bartlett to achieve an important reversal, giving anonymous figures from the past primacy over the addressee in his poem. Throughout the collection, Bartlett returns to this idea that historic events have weight to the extent that the humanity of prior generations is recognized.

In the second section of the book, "Given Words," Bartlett constructs voices and personalities out of letters and texts that he inherited from members of his family so that figures from the past actually speak. "St. Mary's U. Études," from the third section, "Breathing and Reading," responds to great works of literature; Shakespeare's The Tempest, for example, or the poems of Emily Dickinson. In all of these works, the past constantly acts upon the present. Certain poems are the result of sifting through the fragmented statements recorded by an ancestor on the inside cover of a bible, while others are the result of a teacher's momentary flash of insight in the presence of students. In all cases, the language and speech of recorded history are both powerful and fragile: words carry great weight but require a receptive audience if they are to live again. Bartlett depicts the present as a thin moment, a gateway through which past and future intersect and speak to each other. His narrators are poised between history and oblivion, and the poems that contain their stories are refractive devices, capable of capturing and expanding upon events that are fleeting, destined to pass away, were it not for the verses that hold them up to our gaze.

Some of Bartlett's most touching reflections on mortal finitude are also reflections on intimacy. "Three Candles and a Fan" is a restrained yet passionate love poem, the more poignant because it emanates a sense of human vulnerability:

Tonight, abed, apocalyptic thoughts:
I'd want to be, if the heat never dipped again
If this north became a south -
the last to see your mouth.

The title images, the fan with its "three blades / blurring into a phaseless circle" and the brief matches: "our three leaping flames / to interrupt the intimate dark - "succinctly capture the opposing poles, the eternal and the momentary, between which Bartlett navigates. He pays homage to emotional connections between individuals even as he highlights the precariousness of those bonds. It is the weight and richness of these relationships that he holds up against the apocalyptic darkness evoked in his opening poem.

The first three sections of The Watchmaker's Table depict the fragility of human experience, offering moments of joyful illumination, exposing readers to a chorus of voices from the past, and above all evoking an underlying anxiety about the nature of time. In the last section, "Time Flying," the mood of the collection subtly shifts: the prevailing tone of zen-like acceptance and gentle sorrow is interrupted by poems that rigorously interrogate our conceptualizations of time. In "Time Stands Up for Itself," time is personified, allowing it to address the reader:

Yes, I am merciless,
but I am mercy too: the pea-sized egg
of the bee hummingbird, the cantaloupe-sized egg
of the ostrich, stay warm in my cradle.

Pause for a moment,
imagine my disappearance - world submerged
in frozen ink, unimaginable zero -
then call, call me back from the edge -

Vital and direct, the poem shakes the reader out of the creeping lassitude induced by earlier reflections on mortality. "Damn Clock" depicts a narrator who resists the mechanical iteration of time: "I did not want silence / punctuated so, did not want my morning / measured out by a metronome, cut up into its / 14,440 seconds." "Travels of the Watch" offers a romantic personification of the wristwatch, which mourns its own inanimate nature wishing that it could "cast itself off, / sustained by some other heartbeat." Mortal angst remains present in poems like "The Verdict," where Bartlett writes of the "[l]ung-filling panic" caused by dreams of imprisonment. Nonetheless, there is a growing sense that it is possible to rage against fate, to take possession of one's mortal will and bodily self, at least to the degree that one resists giving in to oppressive mental constructs.

It is a thread of optimism that unifies the collection. Bartlett suggests that, with respect to time, it is the human lot to grow and change, to wax and wane and fade away. Fathers watch their children grow into reasoning and independent beings, spouses observe each other aging, and descendents pick through ancestral bones. Yet Bartlett shows us that those who pass away continue to speak through the literary imagination. The otherworldly narrators presented early in the book operate as both poetic alter-egos and as messengers of another age: their characters are empty vessels that allow another world to fill and speak through them. When interpreted through these persons, memories become animate and the poem itself becomes a gateway, a place "of welcoming and farewell." The written word, even in the form of a poem cribbed from advertising copy or a word "scrawled with a pen" on a bathroom stall, offers important evidence of living thought and feeling recorded for posterity

The final section of The Watchmaker's Table also draws the reader's attention to the larger world beyond human culture and temporal perceptions, through the use of natural imagery. From the first pages of the collection, when the narrator's face is "reflected against anonymous woods," natural life forms a backdrop to human drama. Certain poems pay careful attention to natural spaces, for example "A Short History of Shelters," which explores the landscapes of nomadic cultures. However, in the latter part of the book Bartlett intensifies his gaze and broadens his scope: "One Minute on the Planet" offers two contrasting vignettes, both all but denuded of human presence. The first section depicts "a cave dark as an ocean floor" where "painter and poet / have no business" and "a barefoot print / rests in sand, flower-fresh, for a thousand years." The second a bird-inhabited island that is "all feathers and noise / mobs of jammed together bodies and a riot of wings." The piece eschews reflective narration in favour of focused imagery and metaphoric intensity, once again illustrating Bartlett's control of a variety of poetic forms. "The Floral Clock" is a whimsical piece that revels in language for its own sake, listing flower names - "brilliant azure Wild Succory," "pale Common Nipple-wort," and "the golden star / of the Lesser Celandine" - as much for the pleasure of letting them roll off the pen and the tongue, one suspects, as for the purpose of exploring Linnaean natural science. Haiku devoted to a weekend maritime haunt called Brier Island and a poem to "The Whites of Pennant Point" round out Bartlett's collection, placing human mortality in the context of a natural world that is austere but lovely to behold.

The Watchmaker's Table concludes with final floral offering, titled "Pearly Everlasting and Others." Here, the names of plants are also "given words," carrying significance beyond mere denotation: "You imagine a planet on which everything / has the middle name Forget-me-Not." Carrying us from the darkness of a night train, through several generations-worth of human striving, Bartlett leaves us on a windswept shore in the company of birds and flowers. This is not abandonment but a kind of fulfillment: "On the beach / we bend to taste bits of glaucous leaves / to know in our bodies why / Mertensia maritima is Oysterleaf." He does not offer an Eden or an eternal afterlife to soothe our soul-searching, but instead places us more fully at home within our bodies and our surroundings. The Watchmaker's Table gives new significance to the notion of "shoring fragments" against one's ruin. It shows us a world that, while indeed built of fragments, is nonetheless whole and rich in meaning.