ongoing notes: mid-May, 2026: Dale Martin Smith + Ben Robinson,

You know the ottawa small press fair occurs in a month or so, yes? I already know you’ll be there. Or that zoom-interview that American poet Cole Swensen is conducting in a few days from now, via the Brooklyn Rail, with myself, Misha Solomon and Jennifer Baker on above/ground press? Oh, you should register for that. 

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?

Kevin Andrew Heslop, the correct fury of your why is a mountain

 

through beauty in and through beauty out

don’t remind me                         to tell you the story about the world
on the eve of the fiasco of souls               during the emblematic day

capitalism shot that Vermont state messenger appealing on the spot 

through                    and through
to            beauty in                       beauty out         so     don’t sugar-coat

the pulpit                                 the gas cult
                        after                                         saying to the future    no

The author of three chapbooks prior to this new release, London, Ontario poet Kevin Andrew Heslop’s full-length poetry debut is the correct fury of your why is a mountain (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021), a curious exploration of lyric thought through pointed language. I’m fascinated by the ways in which Heslop’s rhythm and cadence meets physical space. His poems are less composed by continuous flow or narrative stretch than a sequence of points met that connect to form a larger narrative shape. “a thought, barefoot //// slips,” he writes, to open the poem “forward,” set prior to the first section of the collection. To follow this, as part of “i cavalloni,” the opening poem of the first section, “one whole third of your life is spent getting used to gravity,” he offers:

when my son was a boy           his theatre teacher        a woman who’d spent
            sixteen months tending stables in her twenties told his mother and me 

actors       are like teenagers                  are like horses 

capable of bucking the very sky
but with the nervous system of a humming bird

she must have sensed we didn’t know what to make of him
the turbulence of his septembers

His is a poetry of observation, and the precision here is incredible. Heslop composes poems as articulate bursts: he makes his point and quickly out, refusing to linger or tarry across any stretch of lyric. His poems contain multitudes, and are less about and around subjects than utilizing references as source material to provide narrative context; the ways through which he speaks on human interaction and a very living language. As the first of the two part poem, “about the twice-bent blast of that good night,” reads:

Into the habitable painting of the world, a text
like What’s happening bro? arrives. “Fuck,”

candidate responses start. “Fuck, I don’t
know. What’s happening with you?”

The world and everything in it. That night,
abacus was from the Hebrew word for dust;

calculus, a pebble, from the Latin.
“I know that it’s a stupid question, but

how are you doing?”

Offering multiple contemporary references across the collection—Siri, the destruction of part of Notre Dame Cathedral, Twitter—he almost includes these as a means to a particular end; an intimate lyric built in, around and of its particular temporal space, a lyric not possible through any other time. “I’d woken from the dream in which a man,” he writes, as part of the poem “popliteal fossa,” “who in the dream I both was and could see, // mutters Esperanto to himself and walks. Limestone / and moonlight. Mulled wine in a teal ceramic cup // in his hands.” There is almost an echo here of the work of American poet Rosmarie Waldrop [see my review of her latest here], through the way Helsop utilizes structure and syntax as a way to propel his poems. What drives his lyric appears to tbe how and through language and meaning are constructed; a language not specifically assembled around the idea of structure, but a structure of ideas, allowing meaning to simultaneously be both building blocks and destination. There are some remarkable and envious things happening in this collection, and a lyric I haven’t seen done this way by anyone else.