Comox BC/QC: Curious to see a new phafours chapbook by Comox, British Columbia poet Jamie Sharpe, his Michael Hofmann: Poems (QC: phafours, 2024), following a small cluster of titles, including five full-length poetry titles through ECW Press. As the opening note of the small collection offers: “I was forty. I lived in an unassuming, but comfortable, vinyl-clad box in a small Vancouver Island town. I’d completed an English degree, then an MFA. Somehow, I authored five books. Then I became Michael Hofmann. […] Six-months after this puzzling transformation, as abruptly as it began, it ended. A modest sheaf of poems, written while I existed as Michael Hofmann, remained the residue of altered days.” As he describes living an ordinary enough life with wife and two small children, there’s a curious element of this apologia that might seem entirely familiar to anyone feeling the accumulation of life-shifts, no longer who they once were; an evolution of being and becoming, entirely natural through moments of wondering whatever became of one’s errant, fleeting youth. Or perhaps a writer with a handful of books, wondering if an evolution is required; if the writing requires a shift into or towards something other, else (this is all speculation, possibly; or overthinking on my part. Perhaps I take his framing too seriously). Is this Sharpe attempting to adapt certain elements of style from the German-born translator, critic and poet Michael Hofmann, working to step into a voice beyond his own? As a writer, an artist, one needs to evolve, certainly. Is a change as good as a rest?
One in a Row
The Northern Lights are
gone, leaving
Streets as the stars
scar..
As insects increase,
Southerners
Fall on boulevards. Even my
kids try,
With disgusting, sincere voices,
to make names
With their awkwardness.
I first turned to night,
as coincidence.
Succumbed to the census
by accident.
Saw our constellation in
a hospital,
Free. Mutilation, flash your
whip
With its two golden
hooks: one in vain,
The other, across dumb distance,
in lace.
The poems offer a curious shift on the work from his prior publications, one that might be less of a singular shift than part of a larger move into or towards other structures, one step following another. It will be interesting to see where this particular direction might lead.
Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s latest is Vertebrata (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2024), a chapbook-length sequence on some of the makings and doings of some of his inner workings of late, including issues he’s had with his back, one shoulder, arm: enough that he’s no longer able to play or perform music. “Articulates at the Luschka joints.” begins the small poem “CV3,” “Little Germanic teeth / subject to degeneration. // And the foramen / little Latinate windows / gradually closing themselves. // And the nerves die / twitching with their languages. / Their little languages.” Composed as short, compartmentalized and numbered sections: seven poems in a sequence titled “Cervical Vertebra,” twelve poems in the “Thoracic Vertebra” sequence, and five poems in the “Lumbar Vertebra” sequence, followed by the singular poems “Sacrum” and “Coccyx,” the penultimate of which reads, in full:
The federated bones have
a single voice.
They do now.
Sacred bone, buttocks
bone, broad bone
The bone that survives.
You sit there
and I am there for you
like a shovel in your
pelvic girdle
to shovel all the shit
out of your sedentary life.
Reid has long had an attention to the smallest detail, and the ability to extend a particular thought or sequence of thoughts, offering sequences and even collections that feel akin to a single, extended sentence-thought, holding a balance between the minutae of cause and effect, the physical and the metaphysical, bone against bone and the abstract idea. “Sit on the disc / of collagen,” writes the poem “T6,” “where the metaphysical arteries / don’t penetrate // until you become / yourself. // Every bone / needs its cushion // which you are now.”
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