Daniel Scott Tysdal's The Mourner's Book of Albums

PHOTO

In the last picture she smailed

she is naked. In return he sent a copy

of the Kama Sutra, pencilling

on the first blank page, “Here is the map

of that city we can never travel in

because our bodies together compose

in avenues and apartments, its flocks

and bright puddles. As these streets,

I hope, we will meet again

soon.” Once he went to the airport

with money for a ticket, prepared

to cross the ocean and surprise her

is her home, and he wonders if

she also dreams of a terminal

without passengers, schedules,

or planes, one holding nothing more

than suitcases, satchels, shoulder-strapped

backpacks crammed tight

in anticipation of all the lands

imagined but never departed for.

It is in this waiting we do not lift off from

where the last we see of love is the photo

of a pose we'll never again enframe

in our own naked poses, the life

we'll never grow quiet with, not in time

for the next uniting flash. (from “Desire, A Lyric Pornographologue of Autoerotic Haunts”)

Even with publications in journals across the country, there was something about former Saskatchewan poet (currently in Toronto) Daniel Scott Tysdal's first poetry collection, Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2006) that came out of nowhere, receiving both the ReLit Award and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award. Not only out of nowhere, his first collection was a wild collage of poems, prose, visual poems and image, an eclectic and electric mix, even more unusual for the fact that it came out of Coteau, known for years for publishing poetry collections predominantly constructed out of (comparatively) relatively straight lyric narrative. Since then, Tysdal has released The Mourner's Book of Albums (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2010), a collection that exists as a novel of sorts, or a scrapbook of the disappeared, mixing poem with prose with theory, writing poem-as-artifact, or even, art installation. Starting with a kidnapped boy, Tysdal's collection moves its way through the G20 riots in Toronto, the war in Afghanistan, and his best friend's suicide, moving through a book of loss, of losing, and what's already lost, before coming back to what remains, and what gets found. A rich, vibrant collection, so tight you could bounce a quarter off it, The Mourner's Book of Albums is impossible to compare, a mix of different forms and structures, managing mutability, confusion and play, all while master craftsman Tysdal keeps the book a complete and comprehensive unit.

ADDENDUM

A week before this book went to press, I spoke

to Dahlia's mom. I told her about the poems.

She asked me to include a story I'd never heard.

As a child, Dahlia nurtured obituaries in place

of pets. She fabricated death notices for birds

and beasts she never in the first place possessed

to lose. She invented a sophisticated cockatiel

who chirped her name when it was time

to rise for school, a border collie who saved her

from slipping through cracked sheets

of frozen water. As a favour to circling vultures,

and to expose the promiscuity of skins in their decay,

she pretended her imaginary dead pets

remained carcasses unburied at the edge

of the garden rather than buried bones,

the breadth of the backyard's burgeoning life

pierced with a stillness so singular it defied

what the siding and shingles asserted to be

the nascent relation of divided hides.

If lightning were to have struck her fantastical pile

of remains, she had known that none of the paws

and fins and wings decomposing into this dreary

chimera would have twitched awake, but in one obit

a newt taken too soon to the pile startled the sky

when parrying thunder slithered from its slender throat. (from “Desire, A Lyric Pornographologue of Autoerotic Haunts”)