two recent reviews of World's End, (ARP Books, 2023)

Reviews! I'm constantly complaining that my work doesn't see critical response, but my latest, World's End, (ARP Books, 2023), has already two! Thanks much to both Wanda Praamsma and Billy Mills! And did you see the one-question interview Hollay Ghadery did with me recently on the book as well, over at River Street Writing? Obviously, copies of the new book are available via those fine folk at ARP Books in Winnipeg, but I have a box or two here, if anyone is so inclined. A similar deal to some of my most recent titles: send $18 (via email or paypal to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com) ; obviously adding $5 for postage for Canadian orders; for orders to the United States, add $11 (for anything beyond that, send me an email and we can figure out postage); for current above/ground press subscribers, I’m basically already mailing you envelopes regularly, so I would only charge Canadians $3 for postage, and Americans $6 (that make sense?)

Here's the first review of the book, kindly written by Kingston poet Wanda Praamsma as part of a group review (alongside Sandra Ridley's latest, etc) via the Toronto Star! See the original review here.

World’s End
by rob mclennan
ARP Books, 64 pages, $18

These poems take on the quality of measured breath — inhale inhale pause, exhale. Inhale, and exhale. In so doing, they slow us down, a necessary and welcome step for all, but particularly needed while moving through the births of children and their early years, as mclennan is/was. “A circle of latitude, this/rushing force/of birth; of hours. … Days fold, moments. Into/collapse, and/still.,” he writes in “The small return.” mclennan applies beginner’s mind — the ability to address everything anew — to every poem and fragment; he appears a Zen master through his meditative sequencing, though not unruffle-able to the trials. “Oh, you are stupid, death./You’re drunk; go home.” Intertwined are mclennan’s welcome lessons on process and form (“Attempt to see if sentences can breathe, take root, grow limbs.”) and the abundance of clarity gleaned from small children: “I later gift the toddler a small/plastic robot. She names it: robot.” No need to overcomplicate. These poems send that message: Simplify, breathe, look around.

Here's UK poet Billy Mills, who posted this on his blog, as part of a group review (see the original post here):

The Worlds End of rob mclennan’s title is, we are told in an epigraph, is a ‘pub on the outskirts of a town, especially if on or beyond the protective city wall’; a space that is both convivial and liminal and a tone-setter for the book.

As a poet, editor, publisher and blogger, mclennan is a key figure in a world of poets, and this community is reflected in the fact that most of the poems that make up this book have individual epigraphs from writers, the regulars in the World’s End. A sense of poetry as being intrinsic to the world weaves through the book right from the opening section, ‘A Glossary of Musical Terms’:

The Key of S

Hymn, antiphonal. Response, response. A trace of fruit-flies, wind. And from this lyric, amplified. This earth. Project, bond. So we might see. Easy. Poem, poem, tumble. Sea, to see. Divergent, sky. Deer, a drop of wax. Design, a slip-track.

This melding of the natural and domestic worlds (hinted at by the slip-track) with the world of poetry and language is characteristic of mclennan’s work here, with frequent pivots on words that can be read as noun or verb (project). The carefully disrupted syntax calls out the sense of observing from the margins. This can lend a sense of Zen-like simple complexity, a tendency towards silence:

Present, present, present. Nothing in particular.

In the poems in verse, this disruption is often counterpointed by deft assonances:

A gesture: colour match.

Describe, describe. Sarcophagi. Small bite marks
perforate the humerus.

[from ‘Cervantes’ Bones’]

The second aspect of convivial community is family and parenting; the book overflows with babies and toddlers:

Toddler’s outstretched arms,
convinced herself bigger

than she still is, asks: Let me
hold her. Two ducks,

three. The western shoal,

swift curl of seagull, her
newborn deep

and impenetrable.
The contours

of a shapeless day.

Their mother, relieved
she finally out.

[from ‘Two ghazals, for newborn’]

As the book progresses, these themes become more closely interwoven, a process that comes to a head in the penultimate section, ‘mmm’ (the final one is just two pages long, so effectively at the end of the book):

We. Are turning a boundary.

Shush. Shush. Be quiet. Shush. Restrain. Restraint. Abate. Or don’t. Could never. Can’t. I couldn’t. Please. I beg you. Silence, or.

Begat, begat. This is a copy of a document held by the Office of the Registrar General. Begat, begat. Ceaselessly exposed, and hollow. Cyclical, ends. This grown head strikes a ceiling.

Until a separation, there can be no relation. Is this true?

Parthenogenesis. Maternal instinct, strikes. If you the only one. Trade for passage, ours. Delighted. Like it was the day before the day before. Slips through the fingers.

Former mother. Birth. My wrong grammar implicates.

It’s a quietly powerful conclusion to a book that benefits from, and fully merits, careful rereading. At the start of this review, I listed some of mclennan’s many roles in the world of poetry. Let there be no doubt, the primary one is poet.