Nicholas Bradley, Before Combustion

 

Parable of the Conflagration

After the fire thundered over the fields
like bison, like horses, like cattle, like
trains and eighteen-wheelers, and the woods
were cindered, and after the thunderstorm fired
itself into a dripping calm of carrot
and melon, after history was left
to smoulder, the creatures who inched out
of the embers were coated in mud. They looked
at each other with colliers’ eyes until
their ashen masks mouldered, and they set to work
like oxen, clearing ground for graves and grass.

I found myself charmed by the heartfelt intimacies of Victoria, British Columbia poet Nicholas Bradley’s [see his 2018 '12 or 20 questions' here] second full-length collection, after Rain Shadow (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018), his Before Combustion (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023). Before Combustion opens with a suite of poems that focus on the new moments of parenting, of fatherhood, offering such clear and quiet moments I haven’t seen prior around the subject, one I’ve also had the experience of enjoying three different times, three different ways: “I am the oldest / living thing // you know,” he writes, as part of “In the Beginning,” “an unshaven // bristlecone / bent over // your bed.” While there is an enormous amount of territory worth covering and recovering on parenting generally, the subject matter of fatherhood is still one that emerges with hesitation; a poem or two at most by any new fathers, perhaps, although there are exceptions [something I covered across 2012-3 in my four-part “Writing Fatherhood” essay over at Open Book, which Benjamin Robinson reminded me of recently].

Bradley’s Before Combustion is a collection sectioned into quarters, with the opening cluster of poems focusing on that newness of life, that newness of expansion, becoming and being. As the two-page poem “Waiting Room” begins: “Your third night alive / I drove home // from the hospital / to find sleep // and left you sleeping / those few hours. // In darkness, having / forgotten // everything but food, / water, and how // to keep you fed, clean, / and quiet, // I entered the house / a stranger // and failed to notice / the oak leaves // letting go.” In certain ways, the entire collection is centred around that opening moment of new life, new fatherhood, echoing the way one’s entire world compresses into a single, singular moment at the birth of one’s first child, slowly rippling out a return to the world but with an entirely new perspective, an entirely new lens. The poems of Bradley’s Before Combustion begin with new life, but slowly do edge out into that return, offering graceftul turns of phrase and line-breaks and short phrases, each of which do provide a slowness, requiring deep attention, even through poems such as “There Must Be 50 Ways of Looking / at Mountain Goats on the Internet,” that begins: “Stoned, blindfolded, one /goat dangles above / a second, horns / sheathed, four / ankles bound / and then four more, / rhyming quatrains.” In certain ways, each section provides its own impulse, less leading up to combustion than reacting to a change or changes so life-altering they seem akin to an explosion. Or, as he writes to open the poem “Parable of the Drought”: “Not the end of the world but the onset / of another.”