Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: I hadn’t been aware of this wee title by award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross [see my review of his latest poetry collection here; my piece on his recent short story collection here], his a very little street (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2023). This is a curious structure, two numbered sequences that suggest a far larger, more expansive work-in-progress, with the eleven-part opening, “1. The Highway,” and seven-part “2. The Doughnut.” There is something in this sequence, this pair of sequences set as part of (possibly) something longer, reminiscent of bpNichol’s novel Still (Vancouver BC: Pulp Press, 1983), the manuscript of which won the 5th International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest. Across that small book, Nichol described the room he was in with enormous detail; in a very little street, Ross describes a moment across a particular unnamed street, moving out across recollection and points across an expansive lyric map, as the chapbook opens: “One hundred and seven kilometres / of highway. Clouds roar through the sky. // Running shoes dangle from telephone wires. / Clouds of gnats. The smouldering ruins. // And my history: a red-brick barbecue / my father built in nineteen seventy-four. // The backyard patio’s pink and green / ceramic tiles.” Utilizing the highway, the sequence, as a kind of prompt, Ross weaves and meanders across a meditative assemblage of accumulated couplets, driving for as long as he can, just to see where he goes. He writes a highway into a street, and a street into a recollection, allowing the structure as a kind of catch-all for memory, a variation on the book-length poem Vancouver poet Michael Turner wrote on another rather lengthy street, Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995). As Ross writes across his sequence-thread, as part of the second section:
through our streets every
day. We saw him
beaming every day. He clutched
the handle
and bellowed a song in
Hebrew, manoeuvred
the rattling cart. The giant
ant mass undulated,
animated. The wheels of
Arnie’s shopping
cart screeched against the
sidewalk. He wore
baggy jeans and a faded blue
T-shirt
that said Hey Hey We’re
the Monkees. His shoulders
quaked with the vibrations.
The crooked wheels
faced every direction. A
hand of lightning
snatched the bag my hand
grasped,
tore it from my grip. A
doughnut. A doughnut
rose from the paper bag,
dangled from
the claws of three white
doves. It ascended
Manahil Bandukwala (Brick Books), wishing to recreate the 'grumpy poet' sequence of photos from the prior post,
Montreal QC: The opening reader of our pre-fair event at Anina’s Café (a wonderful new café in Ottawa’s Vanier neighbourhood, I should
add) was “Montreal writer, visual poet, and oral storyteller” Claire Sherwood,
reading from her chapbook sequence, Eat your words (Montreal QC: Turret
House Press, 2024). As she writes at the offset:
This poem is an interrogation of memory, a fluid autobiography. Swirling with intergenerational flavours and aromas. Stirring, blending, beating, scraping the sides of the bowl to find the right words. Struggling with separation, painful endings. Searching for home.
This is a poem struggling to be a poem. Words are impossible to control. Nothing is static. Memory continually reorders and reframes archived slices of the past. Loops and lines write the story. Is it leftovers? Am I home?
Across Sherwood’s twenty-eight page/part sequence, she writes through an accumulation of memory centred around her mother’s cookbook, threading what seem like childhood recollections and precise questions, open secrets and gestures. There’s a lot of information packed in here, and her poems read like lists, offering layers of nuance between lines, one set atop of the other. “Is it dragging your feet,” she writes, early on in the collection. “Is it a leg up / Is it the hand of friendship / Is it losing old friends [.]”
Is it too many cooks
Is it the wrong pan
Is it returned to the
oven
Is it a complete shambles
Is it terminal
Is it treatable
Is it roaring back to life
Is it mightier than the
sword
Is it easier said than
done
Is it one horse and one
cow sharing a meadow
Is it ever easy to find
the right words
Pearl Pirie, phafours
Kingston/Ottawa ON: I was intrigued to see that
Kingston editor/publisher Michael e. Casteels had produced, through his Puddles
of Sky Press, a small chapbook item (sixty copies hand printed, hand sewn,
within an envelope) by Ottawa poet and publisher Jeff Blackman, his IN THE
BRINY (November 2024). Anyone who has seen a Puddles of Sky item knows
there is a detailed and graceful ease to these publications, and there is a
spare element to these poems I appreciate, one that allows moments of density, hesitation,
spark and flourish in contained and compact spaces, such as the poem “In It,”
that begins: “Honestly / I want less to do / with my body // but the body / has
a poem / I want [.]” There is such an intriguing slow and careful attention
here, a perfect blend of text and production. Or the second half of the poem “HR,”
that reads:
how
this
poem ends
but not yet, friend.
Look,
your ride’s here.
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