*****

William Carlos Williams: Paterson  •  Tom Laichas:Three Hundred Streets of Venice California • Calvin Wharton: This Here Paradise 

*****

Paterson by William Carlos Williams. £20. Carcanet Classics. ISBN: ‎ 978-1800173613
reviewed by Tom Phillips

The poetry that falls within the broad category of modernism however we want to define that exhibits two opposite tendencies, both driven by a desire to – in Ezra Pound’s words – ‘make it new’: one essentially minimalist, the other essentially maximalist. On the one hand, there are haiku-esque Imagist miniatures; on the other, The Waste Land, The Cantos, Four Quartets, Paterson, Maximus Poems, Briggflats and so on. Despite the flourishing of the former, long or at least longish poems are as much a part of the landscape of modernism as they are of romanticism, neo-classicism et al. Don’t just make it new, in other words, make it big.
Most immediately, perhaps, the principle difference between virtually all long modernist poems and their antecedents is that an overarching narrative is no longer the key structural principle. They contain narrative material, most often in fragments, but they tend not to be centred on and driven by an overarching narrative as, say, The Odyssey, The Rape of the Lock, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Don Juan are. Pound’s Cantos open in Homeric neo-epic mode (‘And then went down to the ship …’), but this apparent narrative coherence starts to disintegrate in the last few lines of Canto 1 before at the beginning of Canto 2 (‘Hang it all, Robert Browning …’), the poem plunges into the densely allusive collage technique that will become its chief modus operandi. It’s as if Pound gestures towards a conventional narrative mode before rejecting it almost immediately. Canto 1 demonstrates what the rest of the poem is not going to be like.

Newly republished by Carcanet, the five completed books of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson exhibit a similar tendency, moving away from conventional narrative structures in favour of collage, juxtaposition, multi-perspectival interpolation, albeit from a more localised, more grounded perspective than Pound’s sprawling palimpsest of a poem. In fact, in one sense, Paterson does have an overarching narrative in that it is ostensibly about a poet travelling through a city and encountering both its inhabitants and evidence of its history – at the Passaic river and its waterfall in Book 1, in the park in Book 2, at the library in Book 3 and so on. Jim Jarmusch’s recent film of the same name effectively takes this line, constructing a narrative about a bus driver-poet called Paterson travelling around the city of Paterson and writing poems about what he sees and hears. And this seems a valid reading of the narrative that unfurls, not so much in William Carlos Williams’ Paterson as behind it. The story of a wandering poet, however, acts as a carapace beneath which its other multifarious elements collide and drive the poem forward through the energy of those collusions. It is, in short, a meta-narrative rather than a narrative per se. Much the same could be said of other long modernist poems too: it is possible to translate their structural features into an essentially narrative pattern, either by tracing them onto an archetypal arc (The Waste Land as a version of the Fisher King myth etc) or the poet’s own life (Pound’s Cantos enacting an essentially rise-and-fall narrative that might be applied to their author’s own biography). Even so, such narratives do not constitute the foreground of these poems. We can decipher them if we choose to do so, but the texts themselves draw our attention to other things, in many cases – and Paterson is no exception – questions about language, perception, culture, communication and the nature of poetry itself, especially with regard to how it might respond to, negotiate with and exist within the world as it actually exists – questions deriving from phenomenology, whose arrival and development as a distinct philosophical category runs in parallel to the arrival and development of modernism as a cultural phenomenon.

Even those who have not read Paterson in its entirety will no doubt be familiar with Williams’ oft-cited dictum ‘No ideas but in things’ that makes a number of early appearances in the poem, articulating the essentially Imagist approach embodied in much of his previous work, most notably the equally oft-cited miniature ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. How to translate this thought into practice, however, is a concern that recurs throughout Paterson, as in the passage from Book II in which voices whose owners remain ambiguous openly spar:

Go home. Write. Compose.

Ha!

Be reconciled, poet, with your world, it is the only truth!

Ha!

– the language is worn out.

Further on, in Book III, an essentially phenomenological assertion has it that ‘The province of the poem is the world’ and another more lyrically minded, perhaps even romanticist one that ‘song but deathless song’ is what might ‘bear us past defeats’. Such optimism of outlook, however, is offset, not only by the recurrent image of a burning library that runs through Book III, but also by repeated returns to the idea that the language with which the poem engages with the world and through which a song might become deathless is worn out or somehow defective. ‘The words are lacking’, the poem states while, elsewhere, Williams has a (possibly imaginary reader) observe of Paterson itself: ‘Oh, Geeze, Doc, I guess it’s all right/but what the hell does it mean?’ The idea that writing such a poem may be impossible resurfaces in Book IV when Williams (or, again, his alter-ego, the poet also called Paterson) describes himself as being ‘Waken from a dream, this dream of the whole poem’.

For readers, this question of how you write such a poem inevitably translates into the question of how you might read such a poem. A linear narrative, after all, invites a fairly straightforward approach: you begin at the beginning and keep going until the end. The route through Paterson is less clear. There are abrupt shifts in material and surface texture that interrupt an easy straight-line reading. Episodes and scenes come into focus (a preacher’s autobiographical monologue in the park, Phyllis and her sexual encounters in Book IV etc), but they are invariably interrupted, by the intrusion of a different voice or, most commonly, Williams’ inclusion of – for the most part – found prose material such as letters, newspaper reports and, at one point, a geological survey. Similarly, there are recurrent phrases, images, voices that inevitably invite us to go back and reconsider (the suggestion that the burning library in Book III is Alexandria’s or at least might be a temporal echo of it, for example, comes very late in the poem), that foregrounds the circular rather than the linear, the musical rather than the narratorial, the associative rather than the logical.

This, of course, creates a paradoxical reading situation. On the one hand, the absence of linear narrative means it’s possible to read the poem in a non-linear or excerpted way; on the other, its recurrences and circularities resist that, foregrounding the other structural principles that hold it together and provide its particular kind of unity. The section late on in Book V describing the poet Paterson ‘tending his flower/garden’ à la Voltaire, for example, loops back to earlier passages describing flowers and nature, not to mention the snake and unicorn that make an appearance here, so that, although it’s entirely possible to read it as a self-standing piece, it also clearly operates on multiple levels, encouraging the recognition of interconnections with earlier parts of the poem. It can survive on its own, but it fully comes into existence as part of a more complex whole.

Over the course of the whole poem, in other words – which, let’s not forget, was written over the course of whole decades – Williams is juggling plates, continually experimenting with, not only different ways of perceiving and considering the things that make up an actually existing dwelt-in world, but also with the tools and resources available to him as someone actively seeking to describe that world in language which may or may not be ‘worn out’. Where Williams differs from Pound on the question of the success or otherwise of his attempt to create ‘the whole poem’ in a modernist context becomes especially clear in the final moments of Book V. Pound famously signed out of the Cantos with the last in a series of increasingly self-piteous claims – ‘I have tried to write Paradise’ – and requests for forgiveness – ‘Let the Gods forgive what I / have made / Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made’ (Canto 120), whereas Williams heads off in a different direction, acknowledging failure, but also directing us back towards what we have by way of compensation in the troubled coexistence of love and death:

We know nothing and can know nothing
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxbut
the dance, the dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxSatyrically, the tragic foot.

Edited, introduced and scrupulously annotated by Christopher MacGowan, and including the notes and fragments of Paterson Book VI that Williams never completed, Carcanet’s republication is a timely event. In its divergence from the high-end modernism of Eliot and Pound, Paterson can be read as a precursor to whole strands of late modernism that variously emerged in the work of Objectivists like George Oppen, Projectivists like Charles Olson, the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby et al), the Beats (Allen Ginsberg’s letters to Williams form part of Paterson’s structural armature in the latter stages) and, on the other side of the Atlantic, the often regionally based British poets who had the temerity to be influenced by American poetry at a time when the proponents (but not necessarily the poor conscripted members) of the movement known as – with such imagination – The Movement were busily advocating a return to four-square ‘proper’ poetry in England as represented by the likes of Philip Larkin and effectively decrying engagement with all that weird – as they saw it – American, European and global stuff. It is also a poem that, for the most part, avoids the allusive bombast of high modernist style. Common ground emerges through the closely observed description of the temporal particular rather than through the imposition of ready-made generalities, myths and allegories onto experience – which seems to be the direction that the high modernists were chasing, the mapping of current experience back onto archetypal patterns, whether those patterns happen to be ancient Greek myths or a Dantesque topography of the afterlife. Read now, in the aftermath of the various directions that the modernist experiment took as it morphed into the post-modernist (whatever that might mean), Paterson can’t but help feel like the result of a different kind of mapping or, at the very least, an attempt at a different kind of mapping, one that is less prone to starting with the accumulated knowledge stored in the library that will potentially burn down and one that favours beginning with the immediate and tracing the connections that the immediate has in store – those ideas that exist in things rather than the things that are made to come into existence because of ideas.

Paterson is, in many ways, a difficult and surprising poem, especially surprising to those who’ve only encountered William Carlos Williams through those much-anthologised minimalist poems like ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ or ‘Spring and All’, but difficulty – and indeed surprise – are relative concepts. They depend to some extent on our expectations. On that initial question that must inevitably come when encountering a new work: ‘So what, exactly, do we have here?’ With the long modernist poems that many of us have been taught in school or university, like The Wasteland or the Cantos, there are now already existing answers that we might make a choice from. With poems like Paterson, the field is more open and this suggests to me that it is precisely with these poems that we should begin to re-examine how a long poem works and what actually constitutes the relationship between, as William Carlos Williams has it, ‘the province of the poem’ and ‘the world’.

Paterson is by no means a ‘lost masterpiece’ – it’s been hovering around on the periphery of our understanding of what modernism and its inventions introduced for far too long to be described as lost and there are passages in it which, depending on how you read them, might not quite amount to genius – but it is nonetheless a significant and important work. It’s a poem in which one of the closest observers of the rebarbatively real attempted to extend his perspective and at a time – the 1940s and 1950s – when an entirely new international paradigm was beginning to be slotted into place following the end of WW2 and the start of the Cold War, traces of which can be found without too much effort. It is also a poem of immense lyricism, as in this passage from Book V:

Their presence in the air again
calms him. Though he is approaching
death he is possessed by many poems.
Flowers have always been his friends,
even in paintings and tapestries
which have lain through the past
in museums jealously guarded, treated
against moths. They draw him imperiously
to witness them, make him think
of bus schedules and how to avoid
the irreverent …

Tom Phillips is a writer, translator and lecturer currently living in Sofia, Bulgaria. His own poetry has been widely published in magazines, anthologies, pamphlets and the full-length collections Unknown Translations (Scalino, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (Firewater, 2003). Other recent and forthcoming publications include, as editor, Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work (Shearsman, 2021) and, as translator, Geo Milev: Selected Poems and Prose Poems (Worple Press, 2023). He teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski and translates work by many of Bulgaria’s leading poets.

*****

Three Hundred Streets of Venice California by Tom Laichas. $15.95. FutureCycle Press; ISBN: 9781952593444 reviewed by Rowena Sommerville 

In the poem ‘Strongs Dr’ in Three Hundred Streets of Venice California Tom Laichas says:

America has built eighteen Romes and eleven Jerusalems. Ten American cities have
named themselves Athens. Three claim to be Venice.

In the translucent daylight, the elder cities insinuate themselves within our facades.
We’re meant to learn from their grandeur.

This neat encapsulation of fact and opinion, referencing civic ambition, exploring subsequent process, implying some level of civic failure or refusal, seems to me to sum up the tone and poetic approach of much of this highly enjoyable book. Laichas references about sixty streets (rather than all three hundred) of his hometown, and through them touches on personal and civic history, memory, psychogeography, cultural exchange, community/break up of community, and the ongoing 21st century loss of wildlife and nature. On the back cover Susan Suntree says ‘Laichas shape-shifts from resident, to historian, to social critic, to ghost, moving among one neighbourhood’s heavens and hells’.

My own impression of Venice, California is of a fluid, transient population, but Laichas seems to have grown up and grown older and wiser there, observing and recording change, both in himself and in the town. In ‘Brenta Pl’, near the beginning of the book, he says:

A boy, around six, lies on his back on a parkway lawn, his head at the base of a palm
tree. He looks straight up the column, into the fronds.

This is not something his parents have done. This is not something his neighbors have
done. No one, as far as he knows, has ever lain flat on the grass and watched a tree
being a tree.

He says that (the boy) ‘has just learned to read and sees words in his head, as real as trees’.

Many of the poems/pieces are concerned with memory, his own and others’, and he talks of being accompanied by his ‘otherselves’ as he walks or drives the familiar, but inevitably changing, streets. In 11/Washington Bl he says:

I drive alongside my younger selves. One drives a ’64 Dodge Dart on a forgotten
errand. Thirty years older, another self, with his wife and daughter, slow drives the
Altima after sundown, and stops for Christmas lights hung in West Adams front yards.

I remember and remember. The air crowds with earlier selves, earlier boulevards, a
swarm growing dense as I drive. A cloud of remembers.

I found a great sense of space in this book – specific geographical spaces as subjects, spaces for thought and memory in the writer’s mind, and spaciousness in the writing. I can’t avoid notions of ‘cool’ and ‘zen’, apologies for the Californian clichés – but Laichas is so skilled at calm, thoughtful writing, which is not disengaged or emotionless, just beautifully observed and considered, and clearly rendered, whether he’s writing about potholes, about family history, or about the ocean. In ‘Courtland St’ he writes about potholes:

Now Courtland’s surface is smooth to the touch. We drive with delight, afloat on the
placid roadbed.

Two streets away, another block blisters. A wound gapes, and winter rain, like a
reptile’s toxic saliva, dissolves the interior tissues. The front passenger tire hammers
into the pit. No city is ever wholly saved.

In ‘Horizon Av’ he talks about sounds and rhythms – bird cries, footsteps, road crossing signs, the ocean, his heart:

Blood’s not the same thing as ocean, but they have a history. This close to dawn, in
such quiet, they remember what it is to speak and to be understood.

He very lightly touches upon classical myth – in ‘Marine Ct’, also referencing the changing of urban spaces and lives, he says:

What’s beyond that edge? The Pillars of Hercules. The Garden of the Hesperides.
The Slumbering Sun’s Summer Palace.

There’s not a wife in Venice who paces a widow-walk, straining her eyes towards a
mainmast’s return. Not one neighbor in a hundred knows a fishery from a bathtub.

The final piece in the book – ‘VI Washington Bl’ – finds the writer ‘tired of driving’ and seemingly accepting both his own and the city’s limits, perhaps snapping out of thoughtful reverie back into everyday life:

But my phone rings in Venice. My mailbox is full. I have appointments and neighbors. There’s an ocean, the Pacific. I live at its edge, my otherselves behind me.

This collection of poem/pieces is easy to read in the best possible sense, the writing does not draw attention to itself or to its own cleverness, but creates vignettes and vistas for the reader, with light-touch allusions and thought-provocations. It is a world seen in three hundred streets and a lot of grains of sand. I recommend it, highly.

Rowena Sommerville has written poems and made things all her life, the last thirty years of which have been lived in lovely Robin Hood’s Bay. She has worked in a huge variety of community settings and arts organisations. She left full-time work in 2017, and now she freelances, both as a creative and as a project producer. She sings with and write for the acappella band Henwen, which has been performing locally and nationally for a long, and harmonious, time. She was The High Window visual artist in residence for 2022.

*****

This Here Paradise by Calvin Wharton. $18 CAN.  Anvil Press. ISBN: 978-1-77214-193-1 reviewed by Derek Coyle

It is not too often we get to read poetry from Canada this side of the Atlantic. The poetry of this country being less well known than that of the U.S. south of the border. But, what a pleasure to read a poetry that features the landscape, flora and fauna of this vast and diverse country. As Wharton suggests in an early poem, ‘If We Didn’t Have Birds’: ‘we’d need to invent them.’ We know of owls and meadowlarks over here, but what of Steller’s Jay, Flicker, Chickadee, Black Kites, the Cooper’s Hawk? Something of this poet’s elevated tone can be found in the opening of ‘Meadowlark’, along with the distinctive town, city and province names of Canada, and its landscape:

Whenever I mention Saskatchewan,
Meadowlark interrupts
with a song so magnificent
it can only be sung where geography relaxes
into grasslands and table-top horizon,
while luminous sky sweeps away
the pitiful small concerns we humans
carry around with us

The poet deploys a very free sense of form in this poem, like the majority found in this collection, but at the same time, there is a subtle use of repetition that lifts the poem and gives it a loose shape nevertheless. So the opening verse of eight lines has the opening line quoted above; while the second and third verses (each consisting of five lines) give us a delicate variation: ‘When meadowlark mentions Saskatchewan’; and, ‘And while Saskatchewan mentions meadowlark’, indicating this poet’s formal confidence, his knowledge of various possibilities, here echoing prayer or song, those cousins of poetry; with repetition and variation an intrinsic feature that all three forms of human expression have in common.

 One of the finest formal achievements of this collection is the stunning prose poem ‘Wood, water, boy’. The prose poem is still a controversial form in some quarters. Here, its virtues are on full display: a fine lyricism, heightened phrasing, an energetic flow in the rhythm, and some delightfully ambivalent and yet productive syntax. This poem captures a boy of ten in the summer beside a lake’s inlet, a bicycle beside him on the ground, dragonflies buzzing, and with a wooden boat nearby. The poem is a fine meditation on being lost in the moment. Let’s look at the ambiguous syntax. This phrase lies at the very heart of the poem, physically and thematically: ‘the never-ending summer of a boy alone on a sunny day.’ The free-flowing, elongated syntax of a long sentence allows Wharton to suggest that all of the summer, its best portion, is to be found on this day in this moment of this boy’s life. Or, put another way, when this boy recalls this summer it will be this day. His phrasing suggests that months of time are condensed and contained in this one day.  A felicitous suggestion made possible by the demanding syntax of the form as he uses it, one continuous sentence from beginning to end; if it is even a sentence, as there is no terminal full stop.

And then there are other rich phrases in the poem: ‘the exclamation of unspoken joy not able to be put into words’ (why we might need poets of Wharton’s calibre), and ‘out here is where he needs to be not forever but for now’ (the clincher of this poem). We have unusual but memorable use of language, the boy is: ‘held down gently by a cloudless blue sky’, ‘a dragonfly lines straight for him in the warm mud’; and dynamic lists of three: ‘no one calls for him or looks for him or asks him to report’, and then, ‘life and action and movement’. This fine poem just ends; and so, what are to make of its not having any terminal full stop; well, this suggests that life will continue to flow out and after the poem ends, both the life of the boy and that of nature. This prose poem is, perhaps, the finest poem in the collection and a testimony to what is possible through the prose poem form.

            Not all of the poetry concerns the world of nature, although much of it is preoccupied with this terrain. We find the poet on travels to Wales, Sweden, and Beijing. The pleasures of a Beijing morning are conveyed as the poet and his son enjoy a morning jog around a lake in Longtan Park, to see tai chi groups strutting their stuff, dancers exercising to Chinese pop, meditative types shouting ‘ai-yah’ across the lake, to those who enjoy the ‘ka-toc, ka-toc’ of table tennis, or ‘a man who thrashes air / pleased to have an audience’, carried out by ‘the crack of a bullwhip.’ The pair run out by a narrow hutong alleyway, to be confronted by: ‘the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven’; in a finely judged symmetrical phrase achieved by the medial caesura, and then to journey on into ‘whatever is ahead of us / from morning into the day.’

            Poets write out of their passions, and one of this poet’s passions is basketball. It features in ‘What Steve Nash Said’, and ‘Older’; basketball, a type of flow activity allows for meditation, and the losing of oneself and time:

It would be a good idea
if more people could
spend more time
with a ball on a court
attacking the basket
putting up shots,
miss or make
for as long as it takes
to evade themselves
for a little while.

And there’s the pleasure of the gym, in ‘Gym Rat’, swinging a racquet, moving weights, ‘these platforms for maintenance / of the physical’ when you ‘understand the responsibilities of caretaker’, ‘the deep breath that accompanies each step.’

            Calvin Wharton has delivered a lyrical, fresh and varied collection in This Here Paradise, a very accessible collection, one which sends us back out into the world refreshed and re-vivified, as the finest poetry does. I think it fitting we end on ‘Treelight Dialect’. Appreciate the powerful repetitions, the short lists, the memorable phrasing, and the transformations of the world such that we can drink down the language that is light in a forest:

If you sit here
you might see
how trees transform light
how light changes trees
if you walk a path
of stippled space between
cedar hemlock Douglas fir
you may feel light
your thoughts rising
into a canopy of green
where they settle
in the mist hanging there
after rainfall
how those living branches
maple cottonwood western birch
draw the light
make intricate patterns
to shape an arboreal lexicon
you might notice
a kind of thirst
and want to drink down
every word of that language—all
that brilliant dialect.

I hope you appreciate the double entendre on ‘you may feel light.’

 Derek Coyle published his first collection, Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow in a dual-language edition in Tranas Sweden and Carlow Ireland in April 2019, and it was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 poetry award. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s, Ireland. His second collection, Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster is due in the summer of 2023. He has published poems in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Texas Literary Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Orbis, Skylight 47, Assaracus, and The Stony Thursday Book.

 

 

 

XXXXXIn the translucent daylight, the elder cities insinuate themselves within our facades.
We’re meant to learn from their grandeur.

This neat encapsulation of fact and opinion, referencing civic ambition, exploring subsequent process, implying some level of civic failure or refusal, seems to me to sum up the tone and poetic approach of much of this highly enjoyable book. Lachais references about sixty streets (rather than all three hundred) of his hometown, and through them touches on personal and civic history, memory, psychogeography, cultural exchange, community/break up of community, and the ongoing 21st century loss of wildlife and nature. On the back cover Susan Suntree says ‘Lachais shape-shifts from resident, to historian, to social critic, to ghost, moving among one neighbourhood’s heavens and hells’.

My own impression of Venice, California is of a fluid, transient population, but Lachais seems to have grown up and grown older and wiser there, observing and recording change, both in himself and in the town. In ‘Brenta Pl’, near the beginning of the book, he says:

A boy, around six, lies on his back on a parkway lawn, his head at the base of a palm
tree. He looks straight up the column, into the fronds.

This is not something his parents have done. This is not something his neighbors have
done. No one, as far as he knows, has ever lain flat on the grass and watched a tree
being a tree.

He says that (the boy) ‘has just learned to read and sees words in his head, as real as trees’.

Many of the poems/pieces are concerned with memory, his own and others’, and he talks of being accompanied by his ‘otherselves’ as he walks or drives the familiar, but inevitably changing, streets. In 11/Washington Bl he says:

I drive alongside my younger selves. One drives a ’64 Dodge Dart on a forgotten
errand. Thirty years older, another self, with his wife and daughter, slow drives the
Altima after sundown, and stops for Christmas lights hung in West Adams front yards.

I remember and remember. The air crowds with earlier selves, earlier boulevards, a
swarm growing dense as I drive. A cloud of remembers.

I found a great sense of space in this book – specific geographical spaces as subjects, spaces for thought and memory in the writer’s mind, and spaciousness in the writing. I can’t avoid notions of ‘cool’ and ‘zen’, apologies for the Californian cliches – but Laichas is so skilled at calm, thoughtful writing, which is not disengaged or emotionless, just beautifully observed and considered, and clearly rendered, whether he’s writing about potholes, about family history, or about the ocean. In ‘Courtland St’ he writes about potholes:

Now Courtland’s surface is smooth to the touch. We drive with delight, afloat on the
placid roadbed.

Two streets away, another block blisters. A wound gapes, and winter rain, like a
reptile’s toxic saliva, dissolves the interior tissues. The front passenger tire hammers
into the pit. No city is ever wholly saved.

In ‘Horizon Av’ he talks about sounds and rhythms – bird cries, footsteps, road crossing signs, the ocean, his heart:

Blood’s not the same thing as ocean, but they have a history. This close to dawn, in
such quiet, they remember what it is to speak and to be understood.

He very lightly touches upon classical myth – in ‘Marine Ct’, also referencing the changing of urban spaces and lives, he says:

What’s beyond that edge? The Pillars of Hercules. The Garden of the Hesperides.
The Slumbering Sun’s Summer Palace.

There’s not a wife in Venice who paces a widow-walk, straining her eyes towards a
mainmast’s return. Not one neighbor in a hundred knows a fishery from a bathtub.

The final piece in the book – ‘VI Washington Bl’ – finds the writer ‘tired of driving’ and seemingly accepting both his own and the city’s limits, perhaps snapping out of thoughtful reverie back into everyday life:

But my phone rings in Venice. My mailbox is full. I have appointments and neigh-
bors. There’s an ocean, the Pacific. I live at its edge, my otherselves behind me.

This collection of poem/pieces is easy to read in the best possible sense, the writing does not draw attention to itself or to its own cleverness, but creates vignettes and vistas for the reader, with light-touch allusions and thought-provocations. It is a world seen in three hundred streets and a lot of grains of sand. I recommend it, highly.

Rowena Sommerville has I have written poems and made things all hery life, the last thirty years of which have been lived in lovely Robin Hood’s Bay. She has worked in a huge variety of community settings and arts organisations. SheI left full-time work in 2017, and now she  freelances, both as a creative and as a project producer. She sings with and write for the acappella band Henwen, which has been performing locally and nationally for a long, and harmonious, time. She was The High Window visual artist in residence for 2022.

*****

This Here Paradise by Calvin Wharton. $18 CAN. Vancouver: Anvil Press. ISBN: 978-1-77214-193-1

It is not too often we get to read poetry from Canada this side of the Atlantic. The poetry of this country being less well known than that of the U.S. south of the border. But, what a pleasure to read a poetry that features the landscape, flora and fauna of this vast and diverse country. As Wharton suggests in an early poem, ‘If We Didn’t Have Birds’: ‘we’d need to invent them.’ We know of owls and meadowlarks over here, but what of Steller’s Jay, Flicker, Chickadee, Black Kites, the Cooper’s Hawk? Something of this poet’s elevated tone can be found in the opening of ‘Meadowlark’, along with the distinctive town, city and province names of Canada, and its landscape:

Whenever I mention Saskatchewan,
Meadowlark interrupts
with a song so magnificent
it can only be sung where geography relaxes
into grasslands and table-top horizon,
while luminous sky sweeps away
the pitiful small concerns we humans
carry around with us.

The poet deploys a very free sense of form in this poem, like the majority found in this collection, but at the same time, there is a subtle use of repetition that lifts the poem and gives it a loose shape nevertheless. So the opening verse of eight lines has the opening line quoted above; while the second and third verses (each consisting of five lines) give us a delicate variation: ‘When meadowlark mentions Saskatchewan’; and, ‘And while Saskatchewan mentions meadowlark’, indicating this poet’s formal confidence, his knowledge of various possibilities, here echoing prayer or song, those cousins of poetry; with repetition and variation an intrinsic feature that all three forms of human expression have in common.

One of the finest formal achievements of this collection is the stunning prose poem ‘Wood, water, boy’. The prose poem is still a controversial form in some quarters. Here, its virtues are on full display: a fine lyricism, heightened phrasing, an energetic flow in the rhythm, and some delightfully ambivalent and yet productive syntax. This poem captures a boy of ten in the summer beside a lake’s inlet, a bicycle beside him on the ground, dragonflies buzzing, and with a wooden boat nearby. The poem is a fine meditation on being lost in the moment. Let’s look at the ambiguous syntax. This phrase lies at the very heart of the poem, physically and thematically: ‘the never-ending summer of a boy alone on a sunny day.’ The free-flowing, elongated syntax of a long sentence allows Wharton to suggest that all of the summer, its best portion, is to be found on this day in this moment of this boy’s life. Or, put another way, when this boy recalls this summer it will be this day. His phrasing suggests that months of time are condensed and contained in this one day. A felicitous suggestion made possible by the demanding syntax of the form as he uses it, one continuous sentence from beginning to end; if it is even a sentence, as there is no terminal full stop.

And then there are other rich phrases in the poem: ‘the exclamation of unspoken joy not able to be put into words’ (why we might need poets of Wharton’s calibre), and ‘out here is where he needs to be not forever but for now’ (the clincher of this poem). We have unusual but memorable use of language, the boy is: ‘held down gently by a cloudless blue sky’, ‘a dragonfly lines straight for him in the warm mud’; and dynamic lists of three: ‘no one calls for him or looks for him or asks him to report’, and then, ‘life and action and movement’. This fine poem just ends; and so, what are to make of its not having any terminal full stop; well, this suggests that life will continue to flow out and after the poem ends, both the life of the boy and that of nature. This prose poem is, perhaps, the finest poem in the collection and a testimony to what is possible through the prose poem form.

Not all of the poetry concerns the world of nature, although much of it is preoccupied with this terrain. We find the poet on travels to Wales, Sweden, and Beijing. The pleasures of a Beijing morning are conveyed as the poet and his son enjoy a morning jog around a lake in Longtan Park, to see tai chi groups strutting their stuff, dancers exercising to Chinese pop, meditative types shouting ‘ai-yah’ across the lake, to those who enjoy the ‘ka-toc, ka-toc’ of table tennis, or ‘a man who thrashes air / pleased to have an audience’, carried out by ‘the crack of a bullwhip.’ The pair run out by a narrow hutong alleyway, to be confronted by: ‘the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven’; in a finely judged symmetrical phrase achieved by the medial caesura, and then to journey on into ‘whatever is ahead of us / from morning into the day.’

Poets write out of their passions, and one of this poet’s passions is basketball. It features in ‘What Steve Nash Said’, and ‘Older’; basketball, a type of flow activity allows for meditation, and the losing of oneself and time:

It would be a good idea
if more people could
spend more time
with a ball on a court
attacking the basket
putting up shots,
miss or make
for as long as it takes
to evade themselves
for a little while.

And there’s the pleasure of the gym, in ‘Gym Rat’, swinging a racquet, moving weights, ‘these platforms for maintenance / of the physical’ when you ‘understand the responsibilities of caretaker’, ‘the deep breath that accompanies each step.’

Calvin Wharton has delivered a lyrical, fresh and varied collection in This Here Paradise, a very accessible collection, one which sends us back out into the world refreshed and re-vivified, as the finest poetry does. I think it fitting we end on ‘Treelight Dialect’. Appreciate the powerful repetitions, the short lists, the memorable phrasing, and the transformations of the world such that we can drink down the language that is light in a forest:

If you sit here
you might see
how trees transform light
how light changes trees
if you walk a path
of stippled space between
cedar hemlock Douglas fir
you may feel light
your thoughts rising
into a canopy of green
where they settle
in the mist hanging there
after rainfall
how those living branches
maple cottonwood western birch
draw the light
make intricate patterns
to shape an arboreal lexicon
you might notice
a kind of thirst
and want to drink down
every word of that language—all
that brilliant dialect.

I hope you appreciate the double entendre on ‘you may feel light.’

Derek Coyle published his first collection, Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow in a dual-language edition in Tranas Sweden and Carlow Ireland in April 2019, and it was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 poetry award. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s, Ireland. His second collection, Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster is due in the summer of 2023. He has published poems in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Texas Literary Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Orbis, Skylight 47, Assaracus, and The Stony Thursday Book.

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