Adam Beardsworth, No Place Like

 

Loons

At night with the windows opened
you hear them on the river,

their backs mirror the stars,
their deranged cries are the crack in a

cellar door you want to peek down,
maybe test the creaky steps,

compelled by the awful need to
prove something is down there,

a shape hidden in the milky black. But
you won’t. It is better not to know there

is nothing, an empty river. Better still
not to be called home by the lunatic cry.

I was fortunate over the weekend to hear Corner Brook, Newfoundland poet Adam Beardsworth read from his full-length poetry debut, No Place Like (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023), as part of the Horseshoe Literary Festival. Set in three sections of first-person lyrics—“Home,” “Earth” and Sky”—No Place Like offer a meditative series of descriptive landscapes, populated by such as Robinson Jeffers, border towns, sanctuaries, how to survive a bear attack, youthful folly and suburban sprawl. “Traffic flows downstream,” he writes, as part of “Biography of a Morning,” “past salmon // fighting the current, past anglers lashing the rip / with flies, jonesing for the hit that assures // man’s dominion over things.” There is a storytelling shade to his poems, one that is deeply intimate, focusing a foundation of ecopoetic around memory, moments and domestic matters. “The day I returned from school to find / you crying at the kitchen table / next to the canary’s empty cage,” he writes, to open the short sequence “Sanctuary,” “I learned that happiness is a glass / made of shards.”

Beardsworth composes poems in a combination of short phrases and long, languid sentences that lope across line breaks, stanzas and a deep earnestness, one that provides a comforting voice, even across multiple threads of elegy, and poems acknowledging a multitude of losses, from the personal to the ecological. “Beheaded, birds / flew from my neck,” he writes, to open the poem “Elegy,” “warblers, thrushes, hosts of / sparrows, startlings murmured // the shape of an empty heart.” He writes of fathers and sons, and of a beer at the pub, offering fresh meaning and insight across familiar realms. One of the highlights to the collection is the elegy “Buttercups,” that ends: “a reminder / of the day our lives diverged as you walked into the family / life that fitted like a knitted sweater, as if to say you still // remembered life before that day, carefree and careless, / but what mattered came after, and as this dawns I feel / your hand on my shoulder, pulling me out of the dark // one last time, pointing me towards my son still sitting / in the sandbox, holding a fresh-picked buttercup to my / bearded chin and smiling, wondering where I have been.”