Sam Creely, INVENTORYS

 

CANTING

A thin sympathetic reservoir of the had. See two figures

in crinoline advancing from animism carrying slanted

parasols. Felt surface of colloquy, teflon, polymer,

paste, put your hush finger over my mouth and tell me

time past is the only thing endless

I was curious to catch a copy of Toronto-based American poet Sam Creely’s full-length debut, INVENTORYS (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), a curious book-length suite constructed via a sextet of sections set as “six acts”—“Inventorys,” “Excursion,” “Rush of,” “Pendulant,” “Slow Rosebud” and “Tend”—attending rhythm, sound, a condensed and vibrant language and visual play. “O tiose how the limbs go at it,” Creely writes, “you know the sense of straining through wire / the thin searching oh lord of the proscenium / in lip too close, so seeable // What do we learn we learn to notice / in the nape of the neck, a remnant / in the small of the back, pre-crisis [.]” As Jon Wagner’s blurb for the collection offers, Creely’s exploration of the “shipwreck of the 18^th century Spanish colonial frigate El Nuevo Constante along with its monetized piece of cochineal is an almost too perfect metaphor for the flotsam of an age of synthetic rationality appearing as a stain upon the waters, returned from currency to ephemera and consigned to the mud of its own universalist logic.”

Composed in a variety of poem-shapes and stretches, the assembled poems are delicate and detailed, offering a patchwork of linguistic inventory and fantastic density across points and pinpoints, an accumulation of boundless speech and memory. “Baptisa Second pilot knew he / could be the moon when askd,” Creely writes, as part of the section-sequence “Rush of,” “how have you slept / sound opened / his trade language mouth / to speak achieved only grease / & two goatskins [.]” Both breathless and precise, Creely’s INVENTORYS is a plural, almost polyvocal study across a single idea, writing into and through a space of approach, inventory and detail. Through Creely, phrases and lines pile atop each other, providing layers of accumulated meaning in remarkable ways. There are almost elements that echo from Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (Vancouver BC: New Star, 2001) or J.R. Carpenter’s Le plaisir de la côte /The Pleasure of the Coast (Pamenar Press, 2023 [see my review of such here] for what appears to be a repurposed and/or found language (I say this without evidence, of course), gymnastically mangled in the most beautiful of arcane patterns, providing an electric density that does read as startlingly original.

Love imprecise reproductions

won thresh vanish mackinaw

  First own then own own

  Vacant Boatswain 

  Classical rational harrow

  Lacuna become wheat 

from creel en throstle frame

            fathom in half retrospect 

            carryed by sounds