Rob Manery, As They Say

 

who nowhere
or near
and indeed unwritten
or aware
will aim
at least
clutching
upon each
each end
ends each
further
on (“Sometimes Welcome”)

Vancouver poet and SOME magazine [see my review of the seventh issue here] editor and publisher Rob Manery is one of a handful of west coast poets that seem to publish intermittently enough (comparable to Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak [see my review of Wolsak’s collected poems here], Kathryn MacLeod [her above/ground press title is still available] and Aaron Vidaver [see my review of Vidaver’s most recent here]; former Vancouver poet Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here], now in Winnipeg, is also worth mentioning), that one might understandably lose track, one of many reasons why it is good to see his second full-length collection As They Say (Chicago IL: Moira Books, 2023). There are those that might recall Manery as an Ottawa poet during the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, collaborating with Louis Cabri as the Experimental Writers Group and curating readings at Gallery 101, later publishing hole magazine and eventual chapbooks under hole books while curating the N400 Reading Series at The Manx Pub until he left town for Vancouver in 1996 (Cabri, on his part, left Ottawa for Philadelphia in 1994). At least twice if not three times the size of his first collection, As They Say follows It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 2001), and chapbooks Richter-Rauzer Variations (above/ground press, 2012), Many, Not Any (Vancouver BC: Some Books, 2023) and Elegies (above/ground press, 2022).

There is such a wonderful heft to this collection, as though everything Manery had worked on prior has been a kind of lead-up into this (the Elegies poems appear near the end of the collection, as well). With poems that stretch and sequence, Manery’s is a language-fueled lyric of small movement across great distances, constructed as a kind of compressed expansiveness. “I at least / yield,” he writes, as the penultimate poem in the seven-fragment sequence “These Constant Moments,” “to inarticulate / distances // if you depend / on these // unwelcome convictions / these constant // moments / some borrow [.]” Manery’s poems hold such exact language and thinking, crafted and crisp stretches, providing such a delightful array of sound collision and jumble of meaning, providing the poems far greater than the mere sums of their parts. “Please tell me a story,” he writes, as part of the poem “If All My Woulds,” “just a little story, // hemmed-in between the Would / and the Should, or the Must. It wasn’t / always like this? I count my / self the same man whether / I want or have.” There’s a staccato to his short lines, enough that he writes less across the page than straight down, providing a language of craft and baffle, drawing vocabulary from multiple sources (depending on the piece), from Sophocles, John Donne, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Louis Cabri, Catriona Strang, Bob Hogg, Ted Byrne and Dr. Robin Barrow, among others. He utilizes collision and collage in such way to provide an effect of the pointed sketch, quick lines that simultaneously offer meditative pause and propulsive force. As he writes as part of the book’s acknowledgements: “The Elegy poems draw almost all of their vocabulary from John Donne’s Elegies (Signet Classic, edited by Marius Bewley). Each elegy in the series corresponds to the same numbered elegy penned by Donne.” Built as a highly deliberate work of meditative collage, As They Say is an assemblage of Kootenay School of Writing-infused language poetry as thoughtful and purposeful as anything I’ve seen. Rob Manery’s work has clearly been flying underneath the radar for far too long.

do not excuse
a lie too

severe
and scrupulous

allow some
reservation

or illation
which they call

desirous of
some secret words

or was at that time
irresolute

both opinions
are possible

by their gravity
maturity, judgement

indifferency, incorruption
the impugners

carping at
just equivocations (“Equivocation”)