Sunday, April 13, 2025

Zane Koss, Country Music

 

tell the cougar story

                                    so jerry and tom go out

this one time to check jerry’s traps he’s got a line out

for lynx and you have to check these quite regularly

so the poor thing isn’t stuck there so long that it starves

to death or chews its leg off to get out it’s just

a regular foot trap staked to the ground

and they get there to where it’s supposed to be

and it’s gone but there’s some tracks heading out

over the snow, big tracks, not a lynx and they follow the tracks

and there it’s this huge cougar the trap stuck on its paw

dragging the chair and stake and jerry’s only got his 22

because he’d thought it would just be the lynx

Guelph, Ontario-based poet and translator Zane Koss’ second full-length collection, following Harbour Grids (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2022) [see my review of such here] is Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025), a book-length poem of stories, ghosts and the country music of rural British Columbia upbringing. It is a very different tone and approach from, say, the music of Dennis Cooley’s Country Music: New Poems (Kalamalka Press, 2004) or Robert Kroetsch’s “Country and Western” section of his Completed Field Notes (University of Alberta Press, 2002). As the back cover offers, Koss’ music emerges from stories told around campfires or the kitchen table, held “against the backdrop of rural British Columbia,” offering working-class tales of “humour and violence of life in the mountains.” Koss weaves these stories through and around the shape of an understanding of his own origins, and how he got to where he is now. As he writes, early in the collection: “where have our fathers / gone i have still lived more years / of my life // on a dirt road than a / paved one, / i tell people that, and // though      true, it doesn’t / feel that way; mike, / where have we gone [.]” He opens the book, the poem, with a sequence of storytelling narratives to establish his foundation of a good story, plainly told; conversational, sections of which feel comparable to The Canterbury Tales, but all told by the same unnamed narrator. The poems, the extended long poem, of Country Music, is structured in accumulating sections, offering short narrative bursts of storytelling lyric, notational across the pause and parry across each storyteller’s particular diction.

seen that picture of you
with the gun

    with the twelve-gauge pump-action
    shotgun
and the dead birds, pixelated

while you mourn your grand
father; i bet you        are wondering;

                but me,
i never shot anything except
popcans and paper targets,
but i know it,                  clubbed
fish to eat; gutted
             them,        myself

    one time my dad brought
home a tiny rabbit
    in a cardboard box        that
his skidder had disturbed

There is a way that Koss writes these stories as part of his own DNA, but as much deliberately left behind, distancing himself from the roughness, the low-level violence; of knowing one is from a particular space but no longer of that space, no matter how foundational some of those experiences, that thinking. “when they tell these stories now // i fill in the lost details // as they try to tell them // wanting it exactly // as i remember it // every rhythm // every detail [.]” Or, this particular moment, as one’s own learned impulses make unexpected appearances:

    these days hand-fees the cat scraps from the table;
but sometimes, the urge overcomes me, to lay my hot
coffee spoon against the thinnest skin on the back of
kate’s hand; it comes up deep from below, faster than i
know how to fight it; when i tell her you used to do that
to me at the breakfast table, every morning, she can’t imagine
you thus.

The next page, the next line, writing: “truthfully, i can no longer either [.]” This is a thoughtful and powerful collection, as Koss articulates a roughness, and a particular kind of low-level toxic masculinity taught that he still works to remove from himself. Through such, Koss’ Country Music is comparable to Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], in which Smith speaks of fathers and sons, and what passes through and what he works to prevent passing along. Koss, in his own way, works to think across similar spaces and distances, attempting to articulate even how to utilize the page as that best thinking space, to find both comprehension and comfort. “how to make the page the space,” he writes, “where that happens /// alone,” he writes. “the page the context in which improvisation                  could // driven by the difference only // only possible in otherness // to make the page a space of // confronting my own otherness to myself // as a means of improvisation // cannot quite [.]”

As well, there’s a particular kind of pacing and visual rhythm displayed in Koss’ long poem that is reminiscent of the late Prince George poet Barry McKinnon’s classic I wanted to say something (Caledonia Writing Series, 1976; Red Deer College Press, 1990); whereas McKinnon’s wrote the stories of prairie immigration across his family history, focusing on parents and grandparents, Koss writes a more immediate setting of attempting to articulate and understand himself through family stories, including the telling and retelling of many tales he was directly around for, leading up to the present moment. “the beer bottles / mark time,” he writes, “gathered around, telling new / ones [.]” Koss writes not purely through the lens of what these stories tell but in the telling, of the attempting to clarify what it is that helped make him, and those elements he chooses to hold, and others he attempts to leave behind, all while wishing to remember the whole of it, as best as he can. And, as Barry McKinnon opened sections of his prairie long poem with “I wanted to say something,” so too, Koss, composing his structural echo across the interior of his own particular British Columbia upbringing:

I wanted to write a poem

                        that would somehow
place me
                        late night

kitchen table

            stories

 

                                    a campfire

 

All my sense

                                                depends upon
that

 

 

 

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