Matt Rader, FINE: Poems

 

Last summer in Sunnybrae
we watched from across the lake
a kilometre of railcars
the colour of old memoires
slowly describe the shoreline westbound
below Mount Tappen
What are they hauling? I asked, knowing
we didn’t have an answer
The insides of mountains, trees, prairie
I imagined
It was difficult to watch
something being taken
but what
exactly (“Sweet Air”)

The latest from Kelowna, British Columbia writer Matt Rader is FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024), a book of fire, climate and crisis, including deforestation, mining and other increasingly-devastating resource-extractions. As his author biography inside the collection reads, Rader is the “award-winning author of six volumes of poetry, a collection of stories and a book of nonfiction,” the last title on that list being Visual Inspection (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Composed across twenty moments organized in four cluster-sections (as well as a further poem, hidden as post-script, just after the acknowledgments and author biography), the poems in FINE articulate “a vision of the present from a deep future, charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm.” There might be those who don’t recall that particular year, existing within the Covid-era, of the British Columbia fires, and this collection exists as an intriguing counterpoint to Delta, British Columbia poet Kim Trainor’s new long poem around the same geography and subject matter, A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a book I’ve yet to fully delve into.

Across the poems of FINE, Rader offers long, meditative stretches, almost as a single, meditative length, through this year of catastrophe, offering a thoughtful, quiet and slow-moving sketchwork of point-form, writing of visiting his brother’s farm, watching the landscape hollowed out and the aftermath of a season of orange skies. As the poem “Working on My Brother’s Farm in Errington, BC” writes: “When we read / a silence / we change it. I can’t tell you / what it’s like / to be outside / language / inside language. The tall grass / at the edge / of the field makes shapes / in the breeze [.]” These are poems that exist from within a changing landscape, and one that sits nervously on a precipice of complete environmental, entirely man-made, collapse. Throughout, Rader offers lovely sequences of sharp moments, turns and observations across a poem-suite of sharp attention, deep concern and an abiding engagement with his landscape. Really, it is just as much the pacing of his short lines and line-breaks that make these poems as any other element, moving at exactly the correct speed as it makes its way down the page. As well, the ‘hidden track’ poem-as-postscript, “Lite Reading,” offers its own kind of conclusion to the collection, opening: “What does a good future look like? / I asked the plum tree / as I steadied myself / on the aluminum stepladder. In its bare branches / the tree held open a few choice pages / of daylight to read. That’s what it asks here, I said / but the plum knew that passage / from memory / being a natural, as it were, in the literature / of water and heat.”