Stuart Ross, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

 

JENNY HOLZER

for Kenn Enns

Kennedy, you have
words in your brain
and words surround
you and you buy words
and say words and soon
you will have words on you.
Actual words right on you.
Jenny Holzer was born in
Gallipolis, Ohio, on July
29, 1950. Kennedy, inked
You will move through
public spaces. When you
reach Gallipolis, you will
light up and blink.

The latest from award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, critic, editor, publisher and mentor Stuart Ross is The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2024), a collection assembled, as the back cover offers, as “a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes.” With so many contemporary collections seeking to cohere through shared tone or structure, this seems a highly deliberate miscellany, allowing for what each poem or situation might require, whether poems that reflect on quieter moments, homages and responses to friends, including Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell or the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, his late brother Barry, or offering his annual New Year’s poem, a tradition he’s kept up for a number of years. “In Michael’s office,” the poem “MICHAEL’S OFFICE” begins, “we are surrounded / by poetry. each passing month, / the space for books expands while / the space for people contracts. You feel / the poems on your clothes, your skin, / and your tongue. It is paradise.”

He writes of shadows, mortality and depression; not as an edge but a kind of underlay, ever-present, and impossible to avoid. “That / tingling sensation in my pocket / is not chewed gum but a cluster / of stupid nouns that,” he writes, as part of the title poem, “joined at the hips, / creates a quivering language / uttered only by clouds.” He includes poems that riff on and respond to particular works by Nelson Ball, Charles North, Ron Padgett and Chika Sagawa, among others, as well as a further poem in his “Razovsky” poems, turning his family’s former name (before it was shorted to “Ross”) into an ongoing character, one that emerged in his writing during the 1990s, and first fleshed out as part of his collection Razovsky at Peace (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001). There’s always been something intriguing about the way Ross has played this particular character, occasionally riffing as a variation on himself (who he might have been, perhaps, had his grandfather not anglicized their name), or even as a kind of red herring akin to the late New York novelist Paul Auster, introducing “Paul Auster” as a side-character in certain of his books, whether to distract or distinguish from who the main narrator might truly represent. As Ross’ poem “RAZOVSKY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY” begins:

Razovsky has never triumphed
on the esteemed grid
that serves as a battlefield
for tic-tac-toe, nor has he ever
won a game of chess, thoroughly
cooked an egg, painted all four walls
of a room (by the time he gets
to the fourth, years later,
the first has begun to fade and peel),
or finished reading a Tom Clancy novel.
He tosses his cigarettes to the sidewalk
half-smoked, and mould grows
on the surface of yesterday’s coffee
that perches on the corner of his desk.

The collection moves in a myriad of directions, providing a poetry title assembled almost as a sequence of outreaches, responses and interactions through the form of the lyric. I’ve long appreciated that Ross wears his influences openly, wishing both to give homage and work in conversation with other writers, other pieces, almost as a way of better understanding a particular work by engaging and responding to it through writing, and this collection seems entirely built around that central thought. “As James Tate once said,” he writes, as part of the poem “LIFE BEGINS WHEN YOU BEGIN THE BEGUINE,” a poem “for Charles North and Ron Padgett,” “‘My cuticles are a mess.’ Inspired, I wrote / a broadway musical about cuticles, choreographed / by Busby Berkeley. It closed after just one day / but changed the lives of those who saw it.”