Guy Birchard, Most By Books

 

Preface

Though he daily invocate, though he sacrifice Hecatombs, the Muses and the Graces still upon the Dunce look asquint. John Donne profanely paraphrased.

Why on earth in a guy’s eighth decade would he contemplate issuing yet another unwanted masculinist stream of invitations and affection? or affectation and invective.

Why?

Jack B. Yeats answered Thomas MacGreevy: “I get headaches from reasons… I think Reasons are very little use down here. But up aloft, just after St Peter shuts the gate gently on us, with us within, we will be as happy as lambs throwing little round reasons from hand to hand until they roll over the side and flop down into Hell…”

The Ideal Reader would be she who takes as much time to read a page as the author took to write it. 

It is too much to ask.

I was recently intrigued to catch a copy of Victoria, British Columbia poet Guy Birchard’s Most By Books (Victoria BC/Parry Sound ON: Symple Persone Press, 2023), a chapbook designed and produced by poet Jack Davis [see my review of his own full-length debut here] “in a private edition of forty copies.” I was fortunate enough to discover Birchard’s work through a title produced by Beth Follett, Only Seemly (St. John’s NL: Pedlar Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], a title I picked up a small number of extra copies of when the press folded, the book is just that good. I give them away, here and there, to those that I think should be reading it, as well as to counter the fact that there is something about Birchard’s approach to almost going out of his way to sit just under the radar, releasing new work with small or even smaller, ephemeral presses. Over the past forty-plus years, Birchard’s list of published books and chapbooks includes Baby Grand (Ilderton ON: Brick Books / Nairn, 1979), Neckeverse (Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press,1989), Birchard’s Garage (Durham UK: Pig Press, 1991), Twenty Grand (Boston MA: Pressed Wafer, 2003), Further than the Blood (Pressed Wafer, 2010), Hecatomb (Brooklyn NY: Pressed Wafer, 2017), Aggregate: retrospective (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2018), VALEDICTIONS (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2019) and Montcorbier (above/ground press, 2020), with a further title through above/ground press to appear later this fall. Might a selected poems at some point be worth doing? I would certainly think so.

The title of Birchard’s latest collection, Most By Books, is excised from a longer quote, set on the title page to include the full—“They do MOST BY BOOKS who could do much without them.”—lifted from the prose work Christian Morals (1716) by the English writer Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a posthumously-published work originally composed as advice for his eldest children. Through nearly forty pages of lyric heft, Birchard reshapes Browne’s advice, leading by example through a selection of poems rife with reading. “From my fingers,” begins the poem “Mustapha Reached His Koran Back,” “off the shelf from which I had casually picked / up The Book in barely enough time to open it, Mustapha, with / dignified tutting, his father projecting approval, retrieved the / Koran from my hands, from before my eyes.” These are poems built from books, from not only reading but years of intense, dedicated and ongoing study; the kind of attentions that lesser poets proclaim loudly across author biographies, entirely the opposite of what Birchard writes for his: “Scholar of nothing. No degrees. No prizes. Neither profession, trade nor career. A lay poet. Anglo-Canadian.”

There is such an interesting way that Birchard uses writing, uses what we might think of as poems, as a way of thinking through writing and big ideas. “Augustine, rhetorician / that millennium and a half ago,” opens the piece “Homage to Sarah Ruden for Her Confessions,” “yet crazy as Beckett or Roberto Benigni / by virtue of the sedulousness and circularity // of his case, for want of confidence enough to match her / predecessors, drives our current lady translator to her cups.” This is Birchard, the well-read thinking reader, the intellectual crafting poems out of reading notes, allowing the lyric to explore and examine. He writes of St. Augustine and The Troubadour Club in West Hollywood, Jack Kerouac and Saint Pancras, moving across incredible distances through a short cluster of lines, stepping one foot ahead of another, keeping such detailed notes as he journeys. His poems blend study with journey, a wandering through language that explores alternate corners and catalogues of language. Dedicated to the late writer and critic Stan Dragland (1942-2022), Birchard’s bricolage, his own ‘journeying through bookland,’ one might say, is certainly comparable to Dragland’s work, but holds a different tenor, whether to Dragland’s work or the work of that other poet of bricolage (as Dragland wrote), Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall. “Exiting the cinder block shower next morning,” writes the poem “Butterflies & Turtle,” “not a / soul around, sunlit, stepping into his gotch, his shoulders / and damp, bare back were suddenly a drift of Painted Ladies / alighting. // Guy fetches the camera a look of small-c concern.” There’s a density to Birchard’s lines that hold a different kind of weight, perhaps, well beyond the myriad of alternate reference, offering not just connecting reading and ideas from across an alternate spectrum, but, veering occasionally into Old English, one that holds a depth of language, and language meaning. As the poem “Company” writes, to close:

Smoked a rollie, using the tinplate ashtray. Sat, gazing round. Inside unaccustomed hush—out of the wind. Lit no woodstove. Book of Common Prayer in syllabics. Lit no kerosene lamp. Despite no roof overhead for weeks, we would not crash there. Nah.

Understood. At dusk, canoed back to make that heathen camp of ours in sandy, hallowed precincts between Native graves and water.

Slept.