Ben Robinson, As Is

 

THE ORIGINAL TREATY between the Mississaugas

and the British described the upper boundary of

the parcel as an imagined line from Lake Ontario

northwest to Deshkan Ziibi / La Tranche / The

Thames. To confirm it, Jones & co. set out on

foot from the lake, crossing the Speed and the

Grand before reaching the Conestoga. Realizing

their line would never meet the specified river,

thus could not close the perimeter, they turned

home to inform the Crown that the Indenture

entitled it to an impossible tract.

The latest from Hamilton poet Ben Robinson, following The Book of Benjamin (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], is As Is (Winnipeg MB: ARP Books, 2024), a collection that opens, appropriately enough, with a quote by the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe: “It is a long distance call from London to Putnam (25km). / It is not a long distance call from London to Glencoe (50km).” The quote emerges from Curnoe’s infamous Deeds/Abstracts (London ON: Brick Books, 1995), and Robinson utilizes As Is with similar intent, even if far different approach: attempting to explore and articulate his own relationship to geographic space and its wealth of history, from his own immediate back through well before European occupation. Whereas Curnoe explored the specific Lot upon which sat his house, Robinson explores specific elements of his Hamilton, Ontario, where, as his author biography has offered in the past, he has only ever lived. “I push my son through our neighbourhood.” he writes, to open “By-law to Provide for and Regulate a Waste / Management System for the City of Hamilton,” “It’s just us / and the dog people. A three-legged chair on a lawn, / a box spring at the curb with NO BUGS spray painted / on it in black.” Through long sweeps of short lines and historical space interspersed with shorter, first-person lyrics, Robinson provides As Is the feel of a kind of field notes, moving across and through layers of personal history, the history of Hamilton, and the occupation of centuries. “He didn’t realize that in this country,” he writes, as part of “Remediation,” “when a white man / runs his boat into something, it gets name after him. / Fifty years later, randlereef.ca is adorned / with a logo of a tern flying low over water.” Composed as a poetic suite on and around overlooked and neglected histories, Robinson folds in and incorporates research and first-person observation, moving in and across time, references and intimacies deep and distant, from kept lawns and parenting to city founders, landscapes and boundaries, and what passes for history, passing notes like waterways.

Founder’s Day

It is not a metaphor
that the city’s original square

sketched by Mr. George Hamilton
was centred around a prison,

that though the jail’s wooden walls were sound
its foundation was so compromised

an inmate need only lift the loose board
in the corner to make his exit,

that once free, if he followed the main road south,
it would have led straight to the founder’s door.