Nathanael O’Reilly, BOULEVARD

 

46.

squirrels snicker, chuckle & squawk
scamper up tree trunks across limbs

& boughs, jump from trees to fence-tops
sprint across lawns, duck under hedges

& shrubs, scurry along sidewalks
with acorns gripped between teeth, zig-

zag across the boulevard, dance
along black powerlines with erect

tails, descend onto leaf-strewn lawns
burrow into brown grass with front paws

digging up worms, swivel heads & prick
ears when dogs bark & cars brake, chase

each other up the alley, squat
atop blue recycling bins, grip

branches swaying in the wind, bouncing
beneath their weight, leap from rooftops

speed like furry animals through the air

I recently saw a copy of Texas-based Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly’s pandemic-era BOULEVARD (Co. Tipperary, Ireland: Beir Bua Press, 2021), a sequence of seventy-six numbered poems that narratively speak to his immediate local in a relatively straightforward manner, offering a sequence as a kind of lyric montage of the locked-down hyperlocal across a period he is unable to travel either to his home-geographies of Ireland or Australia. “a young woman emerges / from a backdoor wrapped in a green // blanket,” he writes in “26.,” “runs across the boulevard / holding a blanket across her chest // returns twenty seconds later / with a puppy tucked in her armpit [.]” There is something of the narrative structure to his sequence that is reminiscent of the work of the late Fredericton poet Joe Blades, specifically his river suite (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1998), a book-length sequence on the hyperlocal that also included long stretches of montage narrative, both of which are constructed around a geographic thread or through-line as its central anchor, from Blades’ Saint John River to O’Reilly’s Benbrook Boulevard, in his adopted home of Fort Worth, Texas (I should arguably also mention Vancouver writer Michael Turner’s classic 1995 poetry collection Kingsway, which also utilizes this particular through-line structure). As such, it is O’Reilly’s “boulevard” from and through which the entire poem ripples, simultaneously moving beyond and returning, yet again, offering descriptive moments and scenarios involving neighbours, squirrels, crosswalks, university students and fathers with strollers. It is as though O’Reilly composes the length and breadth of this sequence from the safety of his window, seeking beyond what he can see, but held to what the situation of a global pandemic might allow. As the sixth poem in the sequence reads:

at the corner of University
& the boulevard a group of twenty-
ish students throw a birthday bash

during lockdown in the parking lot
behind their apartment building
play beer pong & twerk to a pumping

sound system, yeehaa down a twenty-foot;
high inflatable slide, carouse in swim-
suits while the virus kills

Adding to a growing list of pandemic-era compositions, including Nicholas Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (2020), Australian poet Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle (St. Lucia, Queensland: Hunter Publishers, 2021) [see my review of such here], Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Lisa Samuels’ Breach (Norwich England: Boiler House Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], O’Reilly’s deliberately aims his project outward, allowing any other considerations of beyond or within to sit within the particular bounds of the view beyond his window. As he offers in his short introduction: “Boulevard explores the life of a street and neghbourhood over the course of a year during the pandemic. I forced myself to write about events happening in front of my house, in nearby backyards, a couple of blocks to the east and west along the boulevard. Instead of travelling in search of subject matter, poetry came to me.”