Mark Truscott, Branches

Scene

Trees make sense

of the snow, yet

at a certain vicinity

they too become

inarticulate fields.

The trees are limits

to their own

significance. Their

shapes in relation are

momentarily the mind,

but a swell rises with

looking. It’s like

a tongueless appetite

almost. As

neighbourhood sparrows

resist enumeration,

the scene offers itself

completely. The wood

absorbs the light.

The air speaks incessantly

with restless hands.

Toronto poet Mark Truscott’s third full-length title, Branches (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018)—following Said Like Reeds or Things (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004) and Nature (BookThug, 2010)—manages a quality of density that feels different than the poems in his first two collections. The poems in Branches further his seemingly-ongoing explorations into brevity, meditation, compactness and the single, extended moment, but there is something else as well, with poems that, while losing none of their brevity or density, are longer, and more expansive. His poems rely on a deep and slow kind of attention, as well as allowing space for the perpetual surprise. There is something very quiet, and perpetually understated, about Truscott’s work, unlike the more immediate, even electric, elements of the short poems in Cameron Anstee’s recent debut of very short shorts [see my review of such here]. In extremely compelling ways, both poets do write out their silences, managing to outline near-infinite lines around just how much unspoken their poems contain, but Truscott’s do in the same way that bare tree branches (to continue his own metaphor) outline the sky: we know there’s so much more to the silence than this. We can see it.

Dust

I know the familiar

indescribability of the

commonest surfaces.

Porous soil and dirt,

dusty light streaming

off painted wood and

plastic. The hand gets

closer than the mind.

The mind gets this, but

still it feels the need to

understand and trace

its understanding.

It wants to be in the world.

It wants to strike some

impossible balance.

Its interval is very thin.