Andy Weaver, The Loom

 

where
            we’re headed,
                                    only realizing that
the arc
              of the pitcher’s arm
                                                mirrors
the galaxy’s
                    swirl,
                              that through
its parts
              the universe
                                    posits
a sum
            and the silliness of games
                                                     ends. (“ligament/ ligature”)

The fourth full-length poetry title by Toronto poet Andy Weaver, following Were the Bees (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), Gangson (NeWest Press, 2011) and This (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2015), is The Loom (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), one hundred and forty pages of an extended sequence-thread on the surrealities surrounding marriage, children, parenting and homestead through first-person lyric. As the back cover offers: “Andy Weaver led a life of quiet contemplation before becoming a father at the age of 42. Within three years he had two sons; two small, relentless disruptions to an existence which had, for a very long time, been self-sustaining and tranquil.” For some time, Weaver has been engaged in pushing his own variations upon a blend of the long poem/serial poem, and The Loom exists as an extended, book-length line. Composing sequences within sequences, he writes an excess that stretches itself through sequences and layerings, suites upon suites, clusters and accumulations, one held together and by this new foundation of domestic patter, and discovering how big a human heart might become. “Perhaps if a new content is / a new devotion,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CLEAVE,” “the result / of novel imagination, then / there is love even in reason—if / emotion is the first evolution / making ways for new forms of life, / then love is what gives us reason / for reason and saves us from the crushing / reality of reality.” Through the evolution of his lyric, passion and reason are no longer separate, distant poles, but a blended opportunity for enlightenment, calm and perspective, offering fresh layers of personal and lyric insight.

Throughout The Loom, Weaver offers structural echoes of Robert Duncan’s lyric blocks and staggers, writing not an abstract articulating the spaces around and through the occult, but one of an open-hearted familial love, a grounding provided through his two young sons. “When I had journeyed half my life’s way,” he writes, near the opening of the collection, “I found I’d lost sight of love—just the sort / of line that mediocre, middle-aged men / have been using since the evolution / of male pattern baldness.” Through his explorations around family and children through a particular lens of the long poem, his work exists nearly as counterpoint to that of Ottawa poet Jason Christie, two modest and quiet poets (both with two young sons of similar age) simultaneously working their long lyric stretch of an abstract, accumulating domestic line. As a fragment of the fifth section of “THE BRIDGE” reads:

Looking at the lake at night, a child knows
the flat field of reflected lights is a series of depths
of incalculable distances, sets of eyes gleaming
from an underneath where there is no holding
them away, and the strain is etched into the walls
of his brain cells like shapes scratched uncountable
years ago into the stones of a sea cave forgotten
so long ago the crews of the fishing boats sail over it
every day without even shivering, no clue that every
minute love is watching and waiting for the moment
to capsize us.

There’s a density to Weaver’s lyrics, stretching out across packed sequences even as the language breaks down, fractals, breaks apart, leaning harder into pure sound and collision. At times his language deliberately scatters, akin to light through a prism—“the knot / will not / knot but / that does not /mean that / an untie,” he writes, as part of the extended “ligament/ligature,” “a terrible naught / that unbinds, / should be taught / as an answer / to shield you / from feeling distraught.”—and the structure of sequence-within-sequence offers a further layering of the book-length poem stretching further and endlessly out, his mix of sound and cadence offering a propulsion well beyond the accumulation of one line upon another. Through the book-length poem The Loom, Weaver weaves a deep sincerity across the newness of children, devotion, uncertainty, minute detail, deep appreciation and abiding love, detailing a swirling abstract of emotional upheaval and ongoing, continuous wonder; one might almost consider The Loom to be a meditation on love through chaos. “My actual family,” he writes, “those bodies / whose parts / in my speech / make a texture / beyond cognition,” offering a detail upon detail. As the final extended sequence, “THE BRIDGE,” ends the collection:

                        But there is a point in every event
that we cannot see through, and another we
cannot see at all. Love’s opacity, then, is its essence.
Which is to say that the peculiar fate of the lover
may be that the most serious question can only
be posed in the vocabulary of love.
                                                            And I’ve written
myself into a corner, a full stop, an unproductive
bafflement that freezes my hands over the keyboard,
trying to parse out the difference between hiding
and lying in wait—until there you are, stamping
into my room trailing giggles of glory, grabbing
my hand and pulling me from my seat at this
cerebral dead end, my lovely gosling, my godling,
my Hugh ex machina.