Blair Trewartha, Half-Earth: poems

  

DAGUERREOTYPE # 1

Start on the fainting couch,
lay him there like a pair
of slacks, propped up as if
reading. His older brother
next to him in a wicker chair,
palming his four-year-old
hand. He holds it tightly
through each pop and burn
until fear or grief or the cold
breaks his grip. Secure the shadow
before the substance fades.

The second full-length poetry title by London, Ontario poet Blair Trewartha, following Easy Fix (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2014) [as well as a handful of chapbooks, one of which I reviewed here back in 2012], is Half-Earth: poems (Palimpsest Press, 2026), a collection of first-person lyric monologues shaped and centred around navigating climate crisis, fatherhood, illness, digital media and misinformation, the Covid-era, loss, love and memories of childhood. “We could have spun the earth / on its axis,” the poem “BACK THEN” begins, “slapped it like a beach ball / with our teenaged palms.” Later in the poem, writing: […] clutched our plastic guns // the way butchers must hold a cleaver— // knowing there’s a thread in the meat / that needs to be cut, lines / of fat that have to be severed.” There’s a way Trewartha explores memory, including recent memory, not as nostalgia but a reassessing, attempting to see from the perspective of distance, how certain moments shaped and were shaped, and allowed something else to occur. “Dying in a hospital bed,” begins “EQUAL TEMPERAMENT,” “she warned us / that your body is made of piano wires / and we’ll need to keep you in tune. / That sometimes you get so tight / you can’t breathe. Other times you fall / slack, so loose you can hardly speak.”

Presented across three sections of clustered lyrics—“ROOTS,” “STEMMA” and “DIGITAL MOURNING”—there is a tension, an anxiety, that exists in Trewartha’s lines, running through the length and breadth of the collection. “There are moments at home // streaming or scrolling / while my children mimic / and learn,” he writes, mid-point through the poem “AT THE CABIN,” “that I divide / into multiple visual selves, / so I run. I run nowhere // in particular, just out, / like how some dogs bolt / the second you open / the door, even the ones / who are loved // because that’s nature, [.]” This is an anxiety that articulates itself through subject, perhaps even founded in concerns through climate and the Covid-era (including Ottawa’s infamous trucker convoy), yet showing itself across the broader spectrum of a lyric that seeks ground, seeks a way to catch one’s breath. Writing on digital misinformation spreading through the Covid-era, including resulting in that infamous trucker convoy, Trewartha asks how, exactly, culture found itself in this moment, in this place, where misinformation runs rampant. Perhaps in the end, anxiety is the only way to respond to the current climate, this particular period of time. Perhaps anxiety, and not only articulating it but attempting to rise up to meet it, is our only option to begin. The only way out, one might say, is through.

COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

Sometimes it’s a root
gone wild through silt and clay.
Every pull and tear, another
tuber reveals itself. So much easier
to simply see the weed at the top
and pluck its head. Call it a day
and be done with it.