MN/NC/ON: The latest from Toronto poet Dale Martin Smith (who has a title with Wave Books forthcoming, don’t forget) is the chapbook Figures of Speech: Wide Infinity (Eden Prairie MN/Durham NC: Polis Press, 2026), a sequence of equally-sized-and-shaped stanzas, composed as lines that layer, accumulate and tilt across boundaries. You might already knew Smith as the author of a whole slew of titles, including the chapbook Blur (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Sons (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2017) [see my review of such here], and the full-length titles The Size of Paradise (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) [see my review of such here], which was up for the Griffin Prize, and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], among others, and the poems of this particular title suggest a far larger project, which could be speculative, or even hopeful, on my part. The poem extends, wraps and bleeds, almost as notes taken during a single or series of family visits, attending family meals and catching world news, numerous threads finding themselves woven into these particular poem-notes. “Magic naps cautiously in light / black fur white inside what’s / left annual family holiday visit,” he writes, “turkey sauce and copper wine / cooking gear the pie crumbs / familial banter or touching of / cell phones and flat screens [.]” The poem, the sequence, frames itself in his childhood home within an infinite moment, an immediate present, of conversation and televised football games, reports of drone strikes and bombings in Gaza, the Persian Gulf; the traces of his father’s recent death and his widowed mother, there in the house. It is a sequence of grief, and its traces, both his and his mother’s and everything else, simultaneous. As the poem begins:
An hour till boarding
crab
grass grey wind forlorn
or
just plain loss like
light
sleep I can’t remember
getting
old going for broke in
the poetry engine no one
could tell I was real inside
altered rhythm thickweed
and spurge
how hard then set loose
on a blank continent no
promise but gusto
a word
unflattens reality
whatever that is
in media zones others
dying
our leaders pay to
drone-kill
with illusion of
non-complicity unlike
orcas in the Red Sea
or Persian Gulf wherever pleases
them to sink ships they
go rightly at war with
nothing I believe in
today
inside the many
photo-albums I
look through with Mom in
afternoon post- and
pre-death return
to “moments” where time
opens
Hamilton/Toronto ON: The latest from Hamilton poet Ben Robinson [see his 2024 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the chapbook [A] Sensitive Man (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2026), following titles including his two full-length collections The Book of Benjamin (Palimpsest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and As Is (ARP Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. The poems in this chapbook-length cluster respond to fatherhood and masculinity, and in attempting to navigate both in healthy ways, offering an interesting tether to works such as Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (mentioned above), among others. “I didn’t think I was really a dad,” he writes, as part of “Has Anyone in Your Family Ever,” “more / a person who happened to have kids // until a bachelor party where I was making / lunches, wiping spills, laying blankets over // puked-out men. I folded Lou’s hooded towel / and pressed my elbow into the jamb, // stretch my hips for the morning commute.” It is just as much a suite of becoming a father as in being one, learning (as do we all, in regards to parenting) as we move through the steps. It has been interesting to see more poets approach conversations on fatherhood, offering a perspective and openness far different than those of a generation or two past, with poets such as Andy Weaver and Jason Christie, for example, providing their own conversations through the process. Robinson’s poems are gentle, complex and inquisitive, able to hold a great deal across what reads as straightforward thought-lines, writing daily tasks such as haircuts and dentist appointments. There is such a gentle way he writes of dailiness, what for so long might have been seen as too mundane to be captured in writing. As Robinson discussed in a 2023 interview conducted by Kevin Andrew Heslop for The Miramichi Reader:
I’ve been working with Al Purdy’s “sensitive man” as a draft title for my new poems, but maybe less ironically than he was wearing it, or with a different kind of irony. Yeah, I think I *chuckling* really am just a sensitive person. I’m realizing that more and more. I feel things deeply, and I find the world overwhelming in a lot of ways. And maybe this gets to what we’re talking about, this transcription of the real. This almost Bernadette Mayer idea, that the material is all out there and it’s utterly compelling. But at the same time that it’s compelling, it’s overwhelming, right?
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