Matt Robinson, TANGLED & CLEFT

 

MARRIAGE

            Forget the coffee. We’ll pretend we’re in a foreign country, and in love.
            Raymond Carver, “THE ROAD”

                                                Forgotten, again, the coffee
pods—used, from your last few or three morning-made mugs—
are here and there, strewn; lewd travesties at a rued near-attention.
Stolidly broadcast and full in the way of any quick-sorted use
of the quaint coffee-bar-breakfast-nook we mutually share
in. Me? Galled, I’ll grimace and bear it, pretend this isn’t
a bother; that there’s near-nothing in my nasty-packed grab-bag
of bad habits that’s ever been close to akin. My skin crawls,
for an instant—an odd moving itch—and I switch: I’ve drunk in
some far-flung foreign state—a country of whose mother tongues
I’m bemusedly ignorant—and all I want is a simply made sandwich:
one I can easily chew and pronounce in my own low-blood-sugared,
quotidian cadence. To be free of everyday effort to swallow,
to fence-post the far limits of things. I just know I want out,
nothing more than to be queued and bone-tired, mind hollowed,
caffeine-cranky at customs, already half-way to gone. It’s a shock
to the system, then, when I’m all-at-once reflexively drawn
to your half-stifled yawn and languid soft steps coming—
a song, shuffled—from the bordering room. I’m aware of you,
unaware, of this us, of this assumed trip we’ve just taken. While you?
You are still home, and in love.

Halifax poet Matt Robinson’s latest, after five full-length poetry collections and a small handful of chapbooks, is TANGLED & CLEFT (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2021), a dense collection of lyric around domestic intimacies and daily life, writing a clean language with an impulse to utilize language in direct application to intricate study. Robinson carves poems as rough-hewn shapes; not diamond-in-the-rough or even diamond, but something that allows the edges to remain, offering the poems a particular kind of lyric heft. “The median’s up-bunched,” he writes, to open “DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME,” “glut-hunchy tumult / of just-ruined sod becomes—in this November dusk’s / dun sleight of bland, fading light—a grand drive-by / mistake your eyes make on behalf of your mind’s / baffled racing.” There’s almost a tenor of the complexity and acknowledgment of outdoor daily activities—I see these poems, somehow, akin to chopping wood to supply the wood stove—of the late poet John Thompson, but one utilizing a form and lyric attention closer to that of, say, the poetry of Ottawa Stephen Brockwell or Don McKay. “When the sun hits them right,” he offers, to open “AGAINST THE NEW YEAR’S DAY HANGOVER,” “those empties / extant in their nesting of shards are less / a dull, throbbing reminder of last night’s poor choices / and excess, and more a loosely curated drunk’s / afterglow, a showy blown-glass derangement // resting skew-countered, serrated, all edgily cornered / yet softened somehow by fruit flies’ flittered near / caul.”

There is something curious, also, about a collection this physically slight: at less than forty pages of poems, would this be a collection to even count against Canada Council designations of the “full-length” work? Hardly a complaint: more of an observation, really. Either way, in a trajectory that would include his accumulated work-to-date, Robinson writes in short, self-contained bursts of earnest and considered thinking and experience in a lyric narrative mode on marriage, beer-league hockey, nostalgia, aging parents, hangovers, daylight savings and snow. The collection also opens with the loss of their dog and ends with a poem around their new puppy. “The cat’s token slouches,” Robinson writes, to open “THE NEW PUPPY, IN HINDSIGHT,” “velveteen / and cooling. A cattywampus / composed, disposed // of and forgotten, / the small shrew was dead. / Is, still.”

 

 

Ongoing notes: late April, 2014

April is poetry month! (You mean we’re still doing that? Yes, yes, yes.)

It seems our days are predominantly hanging out with baby Rose, although we’re gearing up for an event through The Factory Reading Series on Wednesday, the spring editions of the Ottawa international writers festival and the ottawa small press book fair, as well as some other happenings: the Calgary launch of Ground Rules on May 8, and the Ottawa launch of my collection of short, short stories on May 10 (check out ordering information on such here).

What else? Oh, I’ve been working on copy-edits for my second collection of essays, out sometime in May or June with Insomniac Press. Admittedly, working on copy-edits is my least favourite part of the process of book-making, but there you go. Looking forward to seeing the final book in a few weeks.

And poems. There are starting to be poems again. Do you remember poems?

Seattle WA: I’ve long been a fan of the poetry of American poet Sarah Mangold, even to the point of issuing and/or reissuing a chapbook or two of hers over the past couple of years, so can’t help but get excited at the appearance of THE GODDESS CAN BE RECOGNIZED BY HER STEP (Dusie, February 2014). An extended lyric sequence of eleven pages, she seems to favour the accumulation of inquisitive lines and phrases that collect into a kind of chapbook-sized quilt. I very much like the way she brings a quirky narrative thread through seemingly-disconnected phrases, managing something subtle and delightful through various small collisions. As she writes: “Plunged you down plunged // down by one minor detail // I would have liked to // imitate a certain kind of // writing Device is everything[.]” She has a poetry collection perpetually-forthcoming with Furniture Press that I am hoping sees the light of day soon.

What is it that makes everyone want a child these days

                        Who is this everybody

                            To call ourselves outsiders is a kind of lie

Sometimes we are forced into this location

                        Sometimes we choose to inhabit it

Normalized

            And comfortable

                        Our companion monsters

                        Paws on keyboards

Fredericton NB: I can’t remember the last time I saw a trade collection from Fredericton poet matt robinson, so the appearance of his a fistmade and then made (Gaspereau Press, 2013), produced as #27 of Gaspereau’s “Devil’s Whim” chapbook series, is worth noting. According to his website, his last trade poetry title was Against the Hard Angle (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2010), which doesn’t seem that long ago. The ten poems that make up robinson’s a fist made and then made continue his blend of formal lyric, descriptive sketch and open-ended accumulation (as well as his continuing subject matter of sports, which appears far less often as the subject matter in really strong Canadian poems than you might think). The poems might be short, but they’re packed with a descriptive patter rich to the point of appearing as a multitude.

february afternoon, near tampa

unsteady – not quite anxious – from the limp of this

deck furniture’s scuff-addled vantage, this small, prefab

balcony’s whitewashed aluminum rails: strobe-frames the inflatable beach

slide’s flaccid blue end-of-day posturing – captures everything

here, uneasy; collapsing; folding in, on itself. and there

is near nothing as far as wave action goes; the water sleepily-dimpled,

the gulf a sun-soaked newsprint facsimile of overworked levi’s.

afternoon’s now a breezy, disinterested sigh; nameless

near palms struggle to grab the air’s pay. checked, the view’s a strip-mall

waffle house, segmented and greasy; you can’t un-stick your eyes’

thick lids for all the air’s syrup. the beer’s not quite warm.

            this, it would seem, is america. you sit here. you lounge

in a favourite shirt worn and washed once too often –

the seams ready to give, but no one’s willing to water, just now, on

quite how.

fwd; Greenboathouse Press press release;

Having just returned from a 3-week trip to New York, Belgium and Holland, production is now underway on this year's three books. First up, Robert Kroetsch's series of poems Writer's Block is now on the press, to be followed by a new edition of Stanley Morison's classic essay First Principles of Typography. An updated edition of Jason Dewinetz's long poem Géricault's Severed Limbs Paintings will round out the summer, with book announcements to be sent out to subscribers by September. 

New on the website is an overview of the trip, with photographs from visits to the Meermanno Museum of the Book in The Hague, the Enschedé Museum in Haarlem, the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and the Dale Guild Typefoundry in Howell, NY.

For details on becoming a Greenboathouse subscriber, click here. As an added bonus, new subscribers will receive a 40% discount on our 2009 releases by JonArno Lawson, Matt Robinson and Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst. For non-subscribers, a 20% discount on these three titles is available by responding to this email (or just mention the subject line).

To find more information on recent and forthcoming projects, and plenty of other good stuff, please visit our website at
www.greenboathouse.com

Against the Hard Angle, matt robinson

After a bit of a pause, Vernon BC poet/publisher/designer Jason Dewinetz has returned to publishing through his Greenboathouse Books, with (among others) the $65 limited edition Against the Hard Angle by matt robinson. In this small edition, there is a sharpness to robinson’s work that comes closer to that essential sharpness that his writing writes up to, closer than he’s ever been before; is this robinson hardening his edge, or is it simply a matter of his poems in smaller packages?

to call it a pause is not

quite right. it’s simply a moment

drawn out and snapped

tight, so taut as to cut

this thick air like soft cheese

In this collection of nine single-page poems, robinson writes each piece as a single, sweeping gesture. A hockey fan himself, and author of numerous hockey poems, robinson understands the fluid movement of the large gesture, working as tight as it requires, and these poems float along in graceful movements of both deliberate ease and a gravity, working a complex ease that only comes with steady attention and a steel gaze. After everything that has come before, is this robinson coming out of what was good into shades of what might even be great?

a holiday offering

let me say this much,

he says:

i have nothing here to offer you

this christmas:

nothing but

the now blooming pulse of what we’ve known

this year as it leaks – smashed

bottle-spilt –

from the heel

of my left hand. my tongue –

a fist – is heavy with this

salt gift,

with the heft of knowing that it is

at once both

all too much and so clearly

not

enough.