Blair Trewartha, Half-Earth: poems

  

DAGUERREOTYPE # 1

Start on the fainting couch,
lay him there like a pair
of slacks, propped up as if
reading. His older brother
next to him in a wicker chair,
palming his four-year-old
hand. He holds it tightly
through each pop and burn
until fear or grief or the cold
breaks his grip. Secure the shadow
before the substance fades.

The second full-length poetry title by London, Ontario poet Blair Trewartha, following Easy Fix (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2014) [as well as a handful of chapbooks, one of which I reviewed here back in 2012], is Half-Earth: poems (Palimpsest Press, 2026), a collection of first-person lyric monologues shaped and centred around navigating climate crisis, fatherhood, illness, digital media and misinformation, the Covid-era, loss, love and memories of childhood. “We could have spun the earth / on its axis,” the poem “BACK THEN” begins, “slapped it like a beach ball / with our teenaged palms.” Later in the poem, writing: […] clutched our plastic guns // the way butchers must hold a cleaver— // knowing there’s a thread in the meat / that needs to be cut, lines / of fat that have to be severed.” There’s a way Trewartha explores memory, including recent memory, not as nostalgia but a reassessing, attempting to see from the perspective of distance, how certain moments shaped and were shaped, and allowed something else to occur. “Dying in a hospital bed,” begins “EQUAL TEMPERAMENT,” “she warned us / that your body is made of piano wires / and we’ll need to keep you in tune. / That sometimes you get so tight / you can’t breathe. Other times you fall / slack, so loose you can hardly speak.”

Presented across three sections of clustered lyrics—“ROOTS,” “STEMMA” and “DIGITAL MOURNING”—there is a tension, an anxiety, that exists in Trewartha’s lines, running through the length and breadth of the collection. “There are moments at home // streaming or scrolling / while my children mimic / and learn,” he writes, mid-point through the poem “AT THE CABIN,” “that I divide / into multiple visual selves, / so I run. I run nowhere // in particular, just out, / like how some dogs bolt / the second you open / the door, even the ones / who are loved // because that’s nature, [.]” This is an anxiety that articulates itself through subject, perhaps even founded in concerns through climate and the Covid-era (including Ottawa’s infamous trucker convoy), yet showing itself across the broader spectrum of a lyric that seeks ground, seeks a way to catch one’s breath. Writing on digital misinformation spreading through the Covid-era, including resulting in that infamous trucker convoy, Trewartha asks how, exactly, culture found itself in this moment, in this place, where misinformation runs rampant. Perhaps in the end, anxiety is the only way to respond to the current climate, this particular period of time. Perhaps anxiety, and not only articulating it but attempting to rise up to meet it, is our only option to begin. The only way out, one might say, is through.

COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

Sometimes it’s a root
gone wild through silt and clay.
Every pull and tear, another
tuber reveals itself. So much easier
to simply see the weed at the top
and pluck its head. Call it a day
and be done with it.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mallory Tater

Mallory Tater is the author of four books: This Will Be Good: Poems, The Birth Yard: A Novel, Lockers are for Bearcats Only: Poems & Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming with ECW Press in 2028). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In all my works—be they poetry or fiction—I am fascinated by the way patriarchal systems shape the body, identity, and society. My writing often explores the enduring effects of childhood experiences, purity culture, and institutional religion, analyzing how early lessons on gender roles, shame, and family disconnection arise from the body. This collection poses queries about the survival of friendship and selfhood, how we bear the marks from the organizations and connections that mold us, and how we can transform those into something healing or creative. All of my work circles the same themes I feel like—whether delving into friendship and grief, motherhood and personal agency, or the struggle between genuine self-expression and aspiration—to understand what it means to live meaningfully within (and against) structures that seek to restrict and constrain us.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I find working with an editor awakening, encouraging and vital to transform my work into something beyond the self. My spouse, Curtis LeBlanc, always says writing is a selfish endeavor with the most compassionate results. An outside editorial eye is the initial cultivator of that shift from the individual to the collective. For this collection, working with Jim Johnstone was invaluable as he helped me embrace the mess of the page and to experiment with lineation and shape/form more than I typically do. Editors invite risk and risk enhances the poem.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

So simple—write the work that you want to read.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I welcomed a baby last spring, so I do not write on a daily basis. Writing when I'm not always particularly inspired, but when time allows, is a new experience for me but I am trying to embrace it and treat it as time well spent no matter if it’s a generative or ‘good’ sitting. Every day for me starts with baby cuddles, a french press amount of coffee and watching old fashioned, dread-filled cable news.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My friends here in Vancouver (Hi, Jocelyn Tennant, Mica Lemiski, Rachel Jansen and Selina Boan!) are really talented writers. I meet them for coffee or a walk and we talk about our stalls, our hopes, our process. I always want to write afterwards. Their company and conversation is a magic balm!

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Gain laundry detergent.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I love television as an art form and escapism. A good docuseries deep-diving on an unconventional family or a travel show exploring somewhere I’ve never been instantly captivates me. I can lose an entire day to television if I let myself. Sometimes I do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

The collections of Canadian poetry that I’ve enjoyed most from recent years are The Program by Megan Fennya Jones, Exhibitionist by Molly Cross-Blanchard, and Midway by Kayla Czaga. These are books that boldly embrace intimacy, humor, and sadness in a way I always want my own work to.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’ve always wanted to write a horror screenplay with Curtis LeBlanc and Shaun Robinson. We watch a lot of horror movies together and I think we’d come up with something really beautiful, contemporary and intense.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I love the origins of language and etymology and helping people. If I had a keener science-oriented brain, I think I would’ve loved to have been a speech pathologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve been writing since I was very young. My first story was entitled The Dragon That Couldn’t Blow Flames. I think it’s because I love to talk but I can’t talk all day—not enough people will listen that long. Writing is a place I can continue conversations with myself in peace and in solitude without annoying everyone.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert.  And I just rewatched Parasite on a plane and it held up even better than I remembered!

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have a novel coming out with ECW Press called Soft Tissue and I am in the midst of working with my editor Pia Singhal and darkening the tonal arc of the book. It’s about reality television, stage parenting, dance culture and the darkness of social media fame.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

The Anstruther Reader, ed. Jim Johnstone

 

The pragmatism of a girl entering a room, drying her hands
the eroticism of a girl drying her hair, head bent

Contrary to common belief, hair cannot get wet.
I wash with my head bent forward beneath the faucet
sweeping forward into the stream, abstracting  the nape to a line.
The lines of my hair all singular.
Collectively immersed in water, there is a wetness,
but still each hair, taken separate, is solid.
Solids dissolve, do not let water pass through them.
It is the division between strands then, which is wet,
and creates the illusion of drench.
Same with a shirt. It is the spaces between the threads I clean. (Klara du Plessis)

I am deeply pleased to see the two hundred and seventy-two pages of the anthology The Anstruther Reader (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), edited by Toronto poet and editor Jim Johnstone, who co-founded the chapbook publisher Anstruther Press back in 2014 with his wife, designer Erica Smith. Subtitled “Ten years of Poems, Broadsides, and Manifestoes,” The Anstruther Reader dips in and through a selection of work across the first decade of chapbook-making across a press that has produced work by a wealth of poets across Canada, from Klara du Plessis to Jenna Lyn Albert to Manahil Bandukwala to Shazia Hafiz Ramji to Fawn Parker to Tolu Oloruntoba to Cassidy McFadzean to Shane Neilson to Michael Prior. One could see Johnstone’s thick and thorough introduction to this volume as an extension of the work he did through his critical volume Write Print Fold and Staple: On Poetry and Micropress in Canada (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], as he speaks of working to expand the boundaries of the press, deliberately attempting to mentor young poets and produce numerous debuts, and assembling an editorial board of young writers from various corners of the country to assist with editorial selection, to allow for a broader range of writing to appear through the press. As he writes:

When I published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21^st Century Canadian Poetry in 2018, I characterized the group of Canadian poets selected to appear in the book as the selfie generation. This cohort had published three books or less at the time, and were adept at bridging the digital divide by synthesizing multiple poetic styles simultaneously. Self-referential and self-assured, their poems moved quickly, as if they employed hyperlinks, “harnessing the echo chamber of the internet into a malleable, impressionistic music.” These characteristics still stand in The Anstruther Reader, though the poets are different. Read on and you’ll find representative samples from sixty Anstruther authors, selected to present the story of the press through the voices that have come to define it.

Sixty authors representing the press is an enormous heft of activity, and Johnstone even includes a complete checklist/bibliography of publications at the back of the collection, which is marvellous. Publications are listed by year and, one would presume, in order of publication, although the checklist leaves out print runs or any more specific dating (I’m aware that certain titles were produced in initial runs of thirty or forty, while other publications went through multiple print-runs). In my review of The Next Wave, I wrote of how I compared Johnstone’s editorial work—from his chapbooks through Anstruther Press to trade titles through Palimpsest Press—to that of fiction editor John Metcalf: you might not be interested in everything they might be offering, and the work will have a distinct flavour to it, but much of it will be of a high enough quality to impress. As editors, I trust their judgement, even if I might not care for the work of every writer or title in their roster. I still hold to this rather general overview, although I have to acknowledge that the core of Johnstone’s interest, the highly crafted first-person metaphor-drive narrative lyric poem, does occasionally expand to include more experimental approaches (work by Derek Beaulieu, Dani Spinosa and Gary Barwin appear in this collection, for example). Either way, the quality of the work in each of the Anstruther titles I’ve seen are rigorously high, and publication through Anstruther has provided numerous authors the push into subsequent full-length publication. The work and careers of numerous of the authors listed here have flourished since the publications of their Anstruther titles, in no small part thanks to Johnstone and Smith’s ongoing work.

Near the Garden (of Eden)

The sky looks mean. I get inside
to perk coffee to drink on-deck,
waiting for the storm’s admonishment,
its precaution. The toads
and crickets puncture the grassy
lot with their calls—I’m not jaded,
but I think of Him, how He
could’ve intervened more by now.
The air seems swollen. Everything
is suspended. Last time the weather
failed, a gale pushed through,
leaning our braced saplings over
as the rain curtain crossed
the intersection. Here, lightning strikes
the sky with a quick, forked tongue. (Shawn Adrian)

There’s something wonderfully archival about a collection such as this, assembling a portrait of a range of activity, specifically small press chapbook production, that might otherwise appear quite ephemeral, even geographically localized (as most chapbook presses usually are, although Anstruther does seem to have a rather broad geographic reach). A collection such as this, produced through Palimpsest Press, offers the benefit of bookstore distribution, something nearly and completely impossible across chapbook production. One can point to other collections over the years attempting to assemble a larger, single portrait of publishing activity, from bill bissett’s infamous the last blewointment anthology, vols. 1 and 2 (Toronto ON: Nightwood Editions, 1985/86) to Stan Dragland’s New Life in Dark Seas: Brick Books at 25 (London ON: Brick Books, 2000) or the two-volumes produced to celebrate the first decade of Gaspereau Press: Gaspereau Gloriatur: Book of the Blessed Tenth Year, Vol.1: Poetry (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2007) and Gaspereau Gloriatur: Book of the Blessed Tenth Year, Vol. 2: Prose (Gaspereau Press, 2007), both of which were edited Michael deBeyer and Kate Kennedy. None, one might note, were produced to collect or document chapbook presses (although one might argue blewointment leaned that way with much of their publishing history, and Gaspereau has had a lengthy history of chapbook production alongside trade volumes), and all I can recall across Canada for such activity, beyond the three anthologies I edited to celebrate decade-markers through above/ground press—GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press/cauldron books, 2003), Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2013) and groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023)—would be Hammer and Tongs: A Smoking Lung Anthology (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999), edited by Brad Cran, acknowledging the chapbook publishing he did in Victoria, and later, Vancouver, across the 1990s with Smoking Lung Press. Why aren’t there further collections around chapbook presses? I would love to see something of the four-plus decades of Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press, or even had a press such as Very Stone House collaborated on a volume of their 1960s and 70s work. Why not housepress, or pink dog or Rahila’s Ghost Press? Too much of this activity gets lost, overlooked. It happened, is happening; this is important, even if you aren’t paying attention. You should be paying attention.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Robert Colman

Robert Colman is a poet, essayist, and critic based in Newmarket, Ont. His fourth book of poems, Ghost Work, was just released by Palimpsest Press.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

It made me realize that I couldn’t pretend not to care about the work, that poetry wasn’t just an occasional distraction but was an integral way in which I want to express myself. My first chapbook came 7 years later. When Shane Neilson accepted Factory at Frog Hollow Press it revived my belief in my abilities, the idea that I might have something to say, and the ability to say it with craft.

Shane’s influence, and that of Palimpsest editor Jim Johnstone, has encouraged my use of form in Ghost Work, which is a suite of poems that explores the gradual loss of my father from dementia. This new book has a much more defined narrative arc than any of my previous work, and yet it’s also the most varied in form from poem to poem.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’ve always been much more interested in poetic form than fictional narrative. I just don’t think in that shape. I do pursue non-fiction when an idea doesn’t work effectively for me as poetry. That work moves slower for me.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Very few poems in Ghost Work came out close to their final form. The only exceptions were three of the pantoums that inspired the project. After writing those, I knew a project had begun. After that I wrote about five really bad poems that were soon disposed of. Writing those, however, encouraged the creation of a shape for the first section of the book.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I usually start by writing individual poems inspired by events in my life or, on occasion, a movie or piece of art. Once I’ve written enough poems that I see certain themes, I might be influenced by those themes as I write. Ghost Work was different. I knew very early that I wanted to write about experiencing my father’s dementia. That intention sometimes made it a challenge, but the use of form helped push me, allowing me to write both away from and towards that ultimate concern.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love readings. That’s where community happens, where you can talk to other people whose work you admire. But I don’t think of them as a natural part of my creative process. For instance, I’ll read a poem out loud to myself but would never take a half-formed poem to an open mic to hear how it’s coming. What I love is hearing what work resonates with an audience. My last book came out during the pandemic, so I had few opportunities to read aloud from it in person. Reading in London, Ontario, last year, though, I had two readers comment on the same poem, one that I’d thought very little of since writing the work. That interaction changes my own perception of the work. Writing is a solitary process, as is reading, so those occasional in-person interactions are revivifying.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I write because I want to express emotion in a crafted, hopefully beautiful way. I guess the overarching question is, can I reiterate a scene or emotion in a way that is new enough or striking enough that people will notice? Writing on the anthropocene, which I think most of us feel compelled to tackle, is particularly challenging in this sense. Environmental concerns found their way into Ghost Work sideways, which is probably the best way for it to happen.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writers can reframe experience to clarify it for a larger audience. I think of how Roxanna  Bennett and Shane Neilson have helped reconsider dis/ability on the page. While it can have a societal impact, poetry can also simply encourage readers to consider language(s) in new ways, as Klara du Plessis has done for much of her poetic explorations. Hopefully what we write gives our readers at least one moment of recognition, something they’ve seen before that they have a new appreciation of because of the work. It’s all about connecting.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I love working with my editor. For me that interaction is essential. Jim pushed me to try new things - for instance, he encouraged me to work on a longer poem, which became “We’ll Meet Again” in this book. My work is very much a collaboration with my editor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Don’t think of the outcome of the work. Allow the poem space to become what it needs to become. Save the editing for later.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

When writing towards my first book I wrote every day. I needed that discipline to find my way toward the work. Now, I have a full-time job as editor of a trade magazine and life is much busier. If I have a routine, it is that I read or write poetry almost every day, but much more of that time is spent reading. I read before work, and late in the evening. Poetry writing primarily happens at night, sitting up in bed and organizing those thoughts into concrete shape.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I try to get to the Art Gallery of Ontario or the McMichael. Visual art helps calm me and occasionally inspires me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of sand and pitch pine.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Visual art is the form that seems to influence my poetry the most. The opening poem of my last book, Democratically Applied Machine, was a commentary on a Gerhard Richter painting that, at the end of the process of writing that book, helped me frame its narrative arc in a way that hadn’t been possible before. The work of Joan Miro appears in Ghost Work in a way that remains a bit mysterious but is very important to me.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Honestly, my peers whose work challenges me and encourages me to push the art further.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to write poems that tackle the anthropocene effectively. It’s something I’m working on very gradually.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Rock star? Maybe a lounge singer at my age. That’s the fantasy job I joke about.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It’s honestly the only marketable skill I have. I’m glad I found poetry along the way to becoming a daytime writer and editor.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Barbara Tran’s debut, Precedented Parroting, is remarkable. Also, Russell Thornton’s latest really surprised me.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a book of essays and criticism that is due to be published in 2026 or 2027. There is also an eco-themed poetry collection that remains in its protean stage of development.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Robert Colman, Ghost Work: Poems

 

In the Ribs of the Whale

Before weeding Penguins and pulp fiction for the Sally Ann, my sister photographs his den. So many books. aspiration. Was there a goal, once, beyond connection? I pick out a German primer, Bertrand Russell’s short fictions, a guide to coastal birds of the United States. When did the world seem so knowable? My sister covets his teak desk, but it is anchor, not answer, Churchillian without a voicebox; outside the carapace of shelves, just some wayward sailor, landlocked, the pewter ashtray his spirit lamp. Selected wisdoms are now their own animal, wandering. When I read to him from its rows he joins me in snatches of poetry, lifts the book from my hand, turns it, caresses, cautiously riffling the pages, recalling his own face.

“I used to own this,” he says.

I’m intrigued by Newmarket, Ontario poet Robert Colman’s fourth full-length collection, Ghost Work: Poems (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), “a suite of poems that explores a son’s gradual loss of his father from dementia.” The loss of a parent is one of those universal experiences, one poets have been articulating and exploring for as long as poems have existed, and the first-person narratives of Colman’s latest collection around the slow erosion of his father offers lines and phrases set with subtle force, a striking ease and the most delicate care. “This walk is not ruined by absence— / loss comes easy to the cedars,” he writes, to close the short poem “To Test an Absence,” “birch peel and its sticky skin / that tests memory’s rule, what we hope / we can trust as we walk above / on what seems like solid ground.” This is a book of ghosts, made more difficult for the slow erosion of his father’s self throughout dementia (comparable, in certain ways, to my own father’s slow physical erosion due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). In the poem “Name,” Colman writes on regularly calling his father “father,” so as to remind him their relationship, a poem striking and heart-wrenching for that simple and ongoing detail. “I run on as if words could shape an anchor,” he writes, “shape a father unoccluded, riven of doubt.” And yet, I find Colman’s more compelling poems are the ones where he approaches his subject at a bit of an angle, allowing the language to propel, over the poems set to articulate a particular bit of information. “Tonight we char wild boar,” he writes, as part of the six poem sequence “Lost on the Way to Tortosa,” “aflame in tree boles. Yet here in the ash, / mockingly, new growth. // This is the flicker he misses, the nonsense spark. / I hear him, an ocean away, testing a tune.”

Fawn Parker, Soft Inheritance

 

FASTING FOR GOD

I was introduced to the idea of starvation
at the mercy of men by my mother

Walking into the parting crowd
she pointed and said,

“He loves you, he loves you.”
When she’s wrong I blame the men

The way they stomp their boots on asphalt,
on porch steps, in the basement

Into the precious diorama my horned father
built to cage my small, small mother

I’m presented with the microphone
asked: what is it called if you get the worst hand possible

My mother, beat-less, says, marriage!
and laughs. She embellishes

each time, she embellishes.

The author of the fiction titles Set-Point (Winnipeg MB: ARP Books, 2019), Dumb-Show (ARP Books, 2021), the Giller Prize-nominated What We Both Know: a novel (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2022), and the forthcoming auto-memoir Hi, it’s me (McClelland & Stewart), the first full-length poetry title by Fredericton writer Fawn Parker is Soft Inheritance (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2023), published under Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Books imprint. I’m intrigued by the back cover quote by Toronto writer Lynn Crosbie, and there are echoes and influence in Parker’s approach to narrative content, whether swagger or swipe, to Crosbie’s own fierce lyric: you can see it in Parker’s first-person storytelling slant that refuses to be held, or held back; occasionally reactive. “My husband says there is one place I can’t / do it and I do it there,” Parker writes, to open “POEM AGAINST MY HUSBAND,” “I don’t come, and I don’t want to / so instead I write couplets.” The poems lead with swagger, but hold through precise measure, as Parker crafts sharp lines of meditative, observational grace, composing short monologues across a lyric surrounding grief, maternal loss, marriage, caretaking and how one even begins to feel safe. As the same poem ends: “But for the love of things / I do nothing. // My work needs me like an infant— / this is why we understand each other.”