Chris Turnbull, cipher

 

the lake,
remnant, scar, is shallow

swings
toward edge-not.

kinetics of form
– ebb-terrain –

includes
the sodden

the parched
the reminiscent (“candid”)

The latest by Kemptville, Ontario poet and curator Chris Turnbull is cipher (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), a book of listening and attention; of being present, and outdoors. Set as a triptych of suites—“candid,” “contrite” and “ciper”—Turnbull extends her note-taking across a slowness, writing moments and local through a book of ecological space. “in now, when, then –,” she writes, as part of the first section, “compression – generated – / for this / instant-on-instant, [.]” Compression is a perfect word to describe Turnbull’s poem-structures, a kind of book-length accumulation of note-taking that exists amid the tensions of compression and expansion. Across the length and breadth of the book as compositional space, Turnbull composes short bursts of lyric that stretch out across a wide canvas, compelling and attending an ecopoetic of minutae and magnitude. “littoral zone – hundreds / list,” she writes, as part of the first section, “founder – dark reshaping clusters – /// easy / does it /// these domains / are fluid [.]” She writes of unsafe roads, ice on the river and bees messaging, a poem composed from and within a landscape, elements of which echo her ongoing rout/e, her project of placing poems along rural walking trails, and watching across time as the words fade and pages decompose’; a project, by itself, which echoes Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s collaborative Decomp (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013) [see my review via Arc Poetry Magazine here]. Across cipher, Turnbull’s words hold, erode, corrode, and slip into soil. There is an element, also, that echoes Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” although, unlike Niedecker’s infamous poem that emerged as an extension of work-related research, Turnbull’s lyric exists as both research and reportage: these poems are simultaneous study and result, and of something ongoing, deeply intuitive and regularly attended. As Turnbull speaks to the project in a recent interview conducted by Conyer Clayton for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics:

I’ve been working slowly on this manuscript for several years — and over this period considering seeming societal withdrawals ‘from’ the outdoors. I wonder how other generations might mediate their experiences of, or limit fears of, various elements of our physical worlds. I think this conundrum is important — there is no conclusion, but cipher presents possibilities. How do these generations relate to or make world(s)? Land does not take precedence, screens, networks, are central and unbound: the marsh is ripped at corner.