Stephen Collis, The Middle

 

I tried to speak of the
times but there were
too many and
                        glancing
some like blows turned

in a twilight they had
created turned and I’m
sure like a bird or
something more seed-like so

/ even the mighty river burned /

and darting bent back
on their lines of flight
so that the yellow trees
were our fellow
                           travellers

and gave what they had to
spore or to flames we
took to be the earth’s own
vascular system unlocked by the
hot wind was our breathing was
                                                    common
as the dense mycelial air (“FIRST MOVEMENT”)

Vancouver poet, editor, writer and critic Stephen Collis’ latest full-length poetry title is The Middle (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), furthering his array of poetry collections that speak to elements of climate crisis, social politics, community and human responsibility that include Anarchive (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008/2014), To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013) [see my review of such here], Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016) [see my review of such here] and A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Each collection of his to date is crafted as a book-length poem, but one that has evolved into an extended, ongoing trajectory of thought, writing from the deepest part of the centre. “To be in the middle is to be in relation,” he writes as part of his “PREFACE,” “moving between.” Across a sequence of “MOVEMENTS” and numbered “CANTOS,” it is curious to see the evolution of his ongoing work, and how he sets himself firmly in the tradition and foundation of the work of the late Robin Blaser (1925-2009): if the forest is indeed holy, one might suggest, then it requires protecting. As his “PREFACE” continues, a bit further along: “This long poem grown from the middle of life comes in three parts. The first finds its seeds in the assembling of a small library of Robin Blaser’s books – a decade after the poet’s death, his books arrived at the university where I work, like a long-whispered echo through the trees. so I ran through the Holy Forest like a madman – there was some urgency, the librarians said – so I ran, pulling quotations from volumes like branches broken from the trees, apples caught as they fell.”

The deep middleness of things compels me – this fraught stretch of life between certain pasts (let’s recall, if only a few, colonial land grabs, empires in their always-new clothes, vast carbon incinerations) and uncertain futures (can we yet dream of a time when all will come to have a relationship with the earth that is welcoming and mutually sustaining?). I am writing this in a winged hut at the back of my mind, which is to say deep in an imaginary forest (where there are no actual trees) – a place I find whenever I’m surrounded by books and silence. That’s a middle of things that necessarily feels like respite, an eddy in the flow, as opposed to the middleness that feels like a slow-motion tumbling – in medias res – as the planet tips, and the turtle sloughs off that’s been built off its back.

The Middle presents itself as a book-length poem of perpetual love, despite all ecological trauma we’ve inflicted upon the both the planet and ourselves, but articulating the conflict held between that devastation, that love. Self-described as an extension of Collis’ ongoing “investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering,” The Middle is the second volume of a projected trilogy; as a layering of one poem atop another, an expansive and introspective questioning of climate action and inaction, of state response; of music, movements and cantos, employing Blaser’s element of song across his examinations of the earth. “Without stopping / one after the other / lit out / for all haste / you move / your image moves,” begins “CANTO 25,” “words remain human / like blood coagulates / and quickens / like a plant / or sea fungus forming / from the begetter’s heart [.]” There’s a thickness to the collection, an intellectual and lyric heft, blended in such a way to not allow either to get in the way of the other, but intermingle comfortably; akin to the work of Blaser, one might say, able to absorb and engage with elements from his surroundings, his community, into something unique, lyric and purely his own. As he offers as part of his “NOTES” at the back of the collection:

To cite in poetry, I have believed, is to participate in the commons that poetry exhibits better than any other genre: our literary resources are shared, a common treasury for all. Citation may also be a form of solidarity. But I am compelled to note my sources here because, as Fady Joudah has said, “There is a solidarity whose horizon is assimilation, and there is a solidarity whose horizon is liberation. The former is hierarchical to those it is in solidarity with. The latter is in community with them. The former treats them as abstraction. The latter is citational. It names those it loves” (The New Inquiry). I would name what I love, and be in community with the many writers whose work I gratefully take up here.