Neil Surkan, Unbecoming

 

INFINITIES

At this sharp
crook in Beaver Point
Road, a cumulus
of blackberries
frizzes with ripe fruit,
veined leaves. Cars slip
past like swallows
in the throat while
three wild horses
tug drupelets
off the spiny
boughs, their wire-
twisting plier lips
tenderly efficient.

On this crisp
July evening,
they’re completely
ignoring me. Looking
down, I suddenly notice
the grasses teeming
with baby toads.

The second full-length collection by Calgary poet Neil Surkan, after On High (Montreal QC: The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), is Unbecoming (The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), a collection of delicately-carved portraits of attention, characters sketches and family stories, all held together by heart and hearth. Surkan articulates a sequence of restrained lyric bursts, composed as tightly-packed narratives that reveal spaces, scenes and recollections, and stories writing out all the words for silence. “Why are we taking these strands / of words so seriously?” his narrator is asked, at the offset of the poem “POETRY WORKSHOP / WITH MEDICAL STUDENTS,” writing a short scene of a seeming-difference of opinion between the workshop attendees and facilitator. The poem answers, ends, as the narrator/facilitator turns the question back: “Why are you so invested / in keeping us alive?” Through a poetics of attention, there is a curious way through which Surkan attempts to articulate the whys and ways we should care about such things, including lines of poetry, and the humans that surround us, utilizing a descriptive language that is as unusual as it is striking. “Third-generation firs,” he offers, to open the poem “GLOAMING IN A MONOFOREST,” “planted like barcodes, / repeat, scaly and bald / to their modest tops, where // smoky-green tufts sway. / The ground, needles and salal / around silo-wide stumps, // springs underfoot – or shrugs.”