David Martin, Kink Bands

 

TURNER VALLEY OIL FIELD

They trotted out his anticline,
capstone crust punctuated
by a wedge-thrust to the town’s
makeover bonanza, where
seismic pricks could plot
secured flab, and flatter him
under talk-show sunlight.
Yet look at the after shot:
Devonian shell-sweat is
girdled by a deer-head buckle,
his footwall has lead foot
an a King Cab, and during
apotheosis to carbon cloud
his Nudie suit will blacken
at dusk, sloughing sequins
over our sweet, crude sleep.

Following his book length debut, Tar Swan (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2018), comes Calgary poet David Martin’s second collection, Kink Bands (NeWest Press, 2023), a collection slyly and semi-deceptively titled for a geological term. As the back cover offers, Kink Bands is composed via “lyrically experimental poems expanding and retracting,” in a collection that “finds sonic and conceptual energy from the perspective of deep time and the geological forces that have shaped and continue to shape the Earth.” The notion of “deep time” is one that contemporary poets seem to only occasionally wrestle with (not nearly enough, one might think), focusing instead on more immediate moments and concerns, but for the length and breadth of what might be seen as Don McKay’s second lyric act (with Long Sault more of an opening salvo than an extended act), following a career of multiple poetry titles focusing on birds and birding into multiple book-length lyric meditations on geological and ecological time (the 2021 title Lurch might be McKay emerging out the other end of this into a larger, blended consideration, but that’s a conversation for another time). For Martin, the notion of the “kink band” examines both a layering and an extended thread, approaching his blending of geological research and the narrative lyric akin to extended study.

Martin’s poems are hewn, carved and crafted, comparable to if one could simultaneously carve and reconceptualize stone. Simply to read the notes set at the end of the collection makes for interesting reading, seeing how he approaches the composition of poems and the application of ongoing study. Martin moves from bedrock to striation, legends of the creation and use of stone tools to the myth of Philoctetes, and even to Martin’s own adaptation of Earle Birney’s infamous poem “David,” from David and other Poems (Ryerson Press, 1942), a poem he translates “into the restricted language of Basic English. the poem mimics the crystalline structure of foliated metaporic rocks that have been subjected to extreme pressure and heat at tectonic zones of subduction.” There is something so deeply fascinating about a particular interest or research becoming ingrained to the point that the poems that emerge feel entirely natural. “I watch my daughter clap two mitts / of snow,” he writes, to open the poem “SINTER,” “amalgamating hand-bergs. // A jillion columns, taunts, and spoked / dentrites have their civil distance // fractured.” There’s a play across Martin’s sharp language, and one might even compare Martin’s lyric use of scientific research and landscape to such as Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” or Monty Reid’s The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1985). His note on the poem “Stone Tape Theory,” for example, referencing the infamous Frank Slide of 1903, the subject of numerous poems over the years (including one of my own, around the time of the event’s centennial), read: “One explanation for the magnitude of displaced debris that occurred during the rockslide at Turtle Mountain in 1903 (next to the town of Frank, Alberta) is a phenomenon known as acoustic fluidization. To my knowledge, the Stone Tape Theory has yet to be substantiated.” As the first of the four stanzas of the poem reads:

Turtle Mountain belting a tonic
from its spooned-out lungs
as Livingstone scutes surf
on tranced cushions of sound:
charming friction’s coefficient
to embrace a dazed disinhibition.