J.R. Carpenter, p a u s e.

 

we walk past a log cabin. the white mud. between the logs.

has volcanic ash in it, so it dries into a hard clay, she says.

 

I’ve been reading about the specific volcano.

the eruption. that this ash came from, I say.

 

we agree that 2,350 years ago feels recent.

for an eruption.

 

geologists say the river formed 12,000 years ago.

post glaciation.

 

they say, she says.

aye. all rivers are recent.

 

people are stories.

and stories are ancient.

As the acknowledgments of Canadian poet J.R. Carpenter’s latest poetry title, p a u s e. (Llandysul Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 2026), offers: “the writing is born of a sustained engagement with kisiskâciwanisîpiy (the North Saskatchewan River) as it flows east through amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), in Treaty 6 Territory, Métis Region No. 4. this is the territory of the Papaschase Cree and the homeland of the Métis Nation. this is the territory of the poplar, silver birch, black spruce, tamarack, willow, and wild mountain ash. this is the homeland of the beaver, moose, muskrat, coyote, nuthatch, and chickadee nations. this is a traditional gathering place for the Cree, Blackfoot, Metis, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibway, Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Inuit, and many others travellers, including swallows, red-winged blackbirds, bohemian waxwings, and trumpeter swans.” There is such a clear, purposeful and precise cadence to this book-length suite, how Carpenter captures deep listening, slowness and the pause across an incredibly sharp lyric. Her subject, of course, is around, within and through Edmonton’s river valley and North Saskatchewan River, a subject matter she shares with Edmonton poet Jason Purcell, a thread through his recent Crohnic (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], although perhaps more deeply and thoroughly with Edmonton-based poet Christine Stewart, as displayed in her own book-length essay-poem Treaty 6 Deixis (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018) [see my review of such here]. The poems of p a u s e. explore walking the physical space of Edmonton’s river valley and Covid-era space, as the well-known mudlarker Carpenter works to examine this geographic and historical space on its own terms; and with the added layer of the Covid-era, stretching the isolations and the silences and the pause. “two weeks. in quarantine. // learning. what dry smells like.” she writes, “learning. the difference. between. // conifers. fir. spruce. and pine. /// two weeks. of heat. and bright. and then. // the sky darkening. the thunder rumbling.”

As Carpenter’s note at the back of the collection also offers: “this writing began during my time as writer in residence in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta 2020-2021. all the buildings were closed, and gatherings were restricted, due to Covid.” I’ve long been intrigued by residency-specific poetry titles, ever since finding a copy of George Bowering’s The Concrete Island: Montreal Poems 1967-71 (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1977) somewhere in the early 1990s, a title composed during Bowering’s time as writer-in-residence at Sir George Williams (which later became Concordia),. I later composed my own wild horses (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2010) during my time at University of Alberta from 2007-8, purposely conscious of Bowering’s own prompt. Further to those, Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s hetronym “Eirin Moure” composed Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) out of a University of Toronto residency, and Toronto poet Margaret Christakos’ That Audible Slippage (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] roughly holds to a loose temporal boundary from her time as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta in 2017-18 (I’d be eager to hear of other examples, by the way). To hold a residency is to hold to not only a contained temporal space, but, more often than not, an entirely different geography and cultural context for a writer to enter into, which can’t not prompt at least some kind of consideration of wishing to understand this new landscape one has entered.

considering compiling a field guide.

but to what.

 

walking. with ears instead of eyes.

standing. with hands open.

 

inviting. the touch. of other creatures.

listen. they find you.

 

then. the thrum.

breath into lungs.

 

wings into air.

For those unaware, Carpenter is a Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher, and the author of a handful of poetry books and chapbooks, most recently the curiously-bilingual Le plaisir de la côte /The Pleasure of the Coast (Pamenar Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Measures of Weather (Swindon UK: Shearsman Books, 2025) [see my review of such here]. What is interesting about p a u s e. is the multiplicity of approach and effect, from the author’s exploration of a different landscape and cultural space, to the “pause,” perhaps, both of attention in the moment and the away-from-home of another continent.

put the bin out. and keep going.

out the back way. down the alley way.

 

walking. through the fresh snow. falling.

following. an extremely. high frequency.

 

an earful. of bodies.

a static. of waxwings.

The book-length stretch is interesting, as well, in how Carpenter approaches this Alberta space through the uniquely British tradition of ‘walking’—see here for my review of Carpenter’s Longbarrow Press stablemate, the Leicestershire, England poet and sound artist Mark Goodwin’s fourth full-length poetry collection, Steps (2014)—providing a detailed immediacy to the landscape rarely articulated so closely (although one could say Margaret Christakos’ work attends the same attention to small detail). How the only way to truly understand this particular space is on foot. As well, Carpenter writes as the returning outsider, the self-proclaimed “migrant,” as she described as part of her February 2020 “Spotlight series” statement: “I am a migrant. An immigrant born of emigrants born of immigrants. I was born in Mi’kma’ki. In those parts in those days they used to say: you’re not from here until you have a grandfather buried here. So even where I come from, I come from away. I lived for nineteen years in English as a minority language on the French-speaking island of Montreal. In 2009 I emigrated to the island of England, where my English will forever mark me as a foreigner.” Or, as she offers, early on in the collection:

people keep asking me.

how it feels to be back.

 

in this place.

I’ve never been.

 

Canada, I guess they mean.

but what does that mean.

 

 

four poems from Fair bodies of unseen prose,

 

Hanging a frailty on a flame.

An impulse, light enough. Drawn close. Must we break, divide? Childhood. The frequency of green, articulates. Articulations. Clock beside my bed, an apparatus. Thumb, to finger. Rhythm. Out of the word. Ambiguous, mezza. Preposition. Hillside, bespoke. Articulate. Thus, pronouned. Alpine, outlined. The signs, of course. To settle down, surface. To love, unblemished. This risk of falling. May not be enough.

 

 

How to regain the solitary mist which endorses inner rooms?

Repeated, structure. Decentred lungs. Among the folds of words, sense. Come to their senses. I descend some steps. I descend, from. What have you. Ancestors, declarative. Each tiny fibre, mechanized means. Atonal. Blood, a moving picture. Critical perception, walls. An ocean. Action. Shush your shushy mouth. The literal figurative. Index. Bathe, in serious light. Tactfully. To ask a question, to move like a statue. Start again.

 

 

, or a series of waves in air.

To be literal. Weight. The shape of this vowel. With one left eye. I connect one gesture. Blur. The very edge. Reluctant, compatible. To venture, a line. This green promise of spring. Disposition. A distance, untold. This space between projects. Illuminate. Voice is no help. How to eat fish, slice bread. A tomato. Precarious. You could not read the paper. And yet.

 

 

Thirst sung.

Fingertips. Some chords, scorched. Subdivided. Half snow, rain. To compose, in the light. We hold these curiosities. Shoulder. I am not parallel. Beams. In America, does. The narrows, of family. To drop this veil. The world is not logical. Wine moms, rejoice. A slight breeze on a rock. Minnesota, strong. Sing it. Shout it out. Whirls our vertigo, ferment. Whirls out forever. Must the language? Such ambition, hark. The morning, silver. What will come of it.

 

 

Fair bodies of unseen prose is an homage text for, around and after American poets Laynie Browne and Rosmarie Waldrop, furthering my exploration around and through the lyric sentence and prose poem. All poem titles (which appear in italics above each brief prose poem) are taken in order from the last line or phrase of each poem-in-sequence of Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2019), itself an homage text to Rosmarie Waldrop, with all of Browne’s titles taken from Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons Press, 1994). As my own sequence progresses, echoes of texts by both poets resound throughout, especially from Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens and Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press, 2023), Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight (New Directions, 2003) and Gap Gardening: selected poems (New Directions, 2016), as well as the collection Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, edited/translated by Norma Cole (Burning Deck, 2000).

In early 2023, I reviewed three recent titles by Laynie Browne, and quickly realized just how much affinity there was between her work and my own, an element of which is certainly due to our shared love of, and deep influence from, the work of Rosmarie Waldrop. Browne and I soon exchanged books, and In Garments Worn By Lindens prompted this response.