Graeme Bezanson, Ultra Blue

 

Let the dead wolf speak
Backing out of the night
As the bull’s horns rise
Let the moon shine through
The last translucent gods
No hard beds
For worn-out bodies
Slow volcanoes
On the horizon
These were not the first
Of our misfortunes
So the strangeness
Was filtered from them
Combing burrs
From a boy’s hair
Your name an arrow made
Fast to a tangled
Gust of wind

I am intrigued by Ultra Blue (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2026), the full-length poetry debut by Nova Scotian writer Graeme Bezanson, a collection composed, as the back cover informs, as “a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys.” In poems carved and shaped, almost whittled, with straightforward ease and an undercurrent of experience and wisdom, the poems of Bezanson’s Ultra Blue speak with a slow and purposeful care, offering meditations on boys and childhood, fathers and sons. “Remove us / From our places / But never bring us / To another” he writes, early on in the collection. Composed as a book-length suite of untitled self-contained lyric bursts in sequence, Bezanson’s accumulated, almost unspooled, phrases write around masculinity and its toxic elements, how it emerges and how emotions get mangled, comparable to Toronto poet Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], a comparison that seems even further fitting, given the inclusion of a blurb by Smith on the back cover. If you want young men to learn, after all, you have to teach them.