Craven Aura's I Am A Tree

"I, subsumed in the air
with dragonflies and dander,
breathe in non-ego, broach
a feeler on the wind's tail."

These are the opening lines from "I Am A Tree", Craven Aura's book-length poem of the same name. The reader's imagination is fondled by way of a cheap shopper on the same bruised spot of an otherwise healthy apple. Whither wind? And wherefore lies the verdant toil? The tree isn't named, but as generic trees go, it does have a personality of sorts if one can call the consistency of abstract pining a hook to hang a gust on. I Am A Tree won the Arbuscle Memorial Award for Poetry last year, and with it, a coupon (in lieu of cheque) for a reduced-rate consultation with an arborist in how to release your tree from its mall boulevard coffin.

Joe Denham's Windstorm

Windstorm, Sunshine Coaster Joe Denham's 2009 effort, is more ambitious than his first book, both organically and philosophically. I think the integration problemmatic at times -- (the desire to mount the pulpit is indulged a little too often for my liking: "so the mind's flow forever eddies//there where the voices crossed over, contrapuntal/to our dissonant array.") -- but (in the same sequence) he gains a greater victory by expertly trading the anecdote with the overview in a believable and seamless interplay.

Lyrical virtuosity is lovely, with its hidden scaffolding for the most part supporting the strong rhythms, and is cleverly exploited. Most pleasingly, sound isn't offered in a poverty of release, but echoes with other sounds in many other lines, fore and aft. However, like any creator drunk on the gift of those assertions, Denham occasionally runs away with the ball when (for example) consonantal giddiness overwhelms: "cupreous and inculpable through the clouds/and we are/carried forth to the expectantly/cadenced conclusion./Our collective collusion." (There are indents in the original.) As in other places, Denham's good ideas are defeated here by the procedure, though the reverse is often true of many poets, who display impressive polish, but have little to say. There are, though, many patches in this lengthy five-verse sequence when the two unite to form exquisite lines: "Sappho's/sweetapple, efflorescent in the unexpected/the unaccustomed white, perches bird-/like in song, as sunrays cloud-split."

Tom Zimmerman's The Horse That Over My Green Shoes Asserts Its Power

This train-chain of lyrical cargo chugs across blocky stanzas with such force it's easy to miss during a first read-through that the message is less than complimentary to its ostensible paragon. One code will have to suffice here:



"Forget going gentle into that cold grave
Unless your rage upsets the chaplain.
Consider those who live on and suffer.
Kin and strangers will muffle your virtue,
Denying any closeness, denying their debts,
Those liquid and future when eulogies track maudlin.
Hand back your will with major renovations
On forty minor points, and note well the notary
Miming like a dormant dentist.
Answer to no one but tend to your molars
So the grind of your life lives on on the page."



Tom Zimmerman may never acquire the rapid bibulous ascent of the reading-tour virtuoso, but The Horse That Over My Green Shoes Asserts Its Power is nevertheless a powerful reminder that imitation is the sincerest form of servitude.

Don Knightly's The Big Bang And Beyond

No, this isn't a 942 page account of an orgy, but an exhaustive and exhausting epic from time zero to Justin Bieber. Though the tome's tone frequently matches its physical weight (my copy caused three Canada Post operatives to file for compo during its transport), there are touches of whimsy and wit scattered throughout, all the more effective because of contrast, and not least for the difficulty of sidling up to "sweeping fire of God's neglect" with "Samuel's efforts not worth a peep".

Clunky in rhythm, so verbose it'd put Foghorn Leghorn to shame, The Big Bang And Beyond, Don Knightly's Hindenburg ballast is the first in a trilogy, the volumes to come concentrating on a thousand page Canadian day-in-the-life response to Joyce, and a final five thousand page speculation on life and death from 2016 to 2843 at which point the world will apparently physically instigate Nietzsche's eternal recurrence thereby necessitating -- yes -- the same show but in different words from this tireless documentor.

Marguerite Pigeon's Inventory

The objects in Marguerite Pigeon's first book of poetry, Inventory (2009), are given moderately searching attitudes and often quirky personalities, so as such projects go, it's an entertaining and breezy read. The (mostly) banal subject/object matter is titularly arranged by the alphabet to emphasize the democratic nature of the endeavour. No hierarchy of significance, which unfortunately means no hierarchy of mood, pressure, statement. Poems are mostly in third person (from "Bicycle": "City cruiser, ghetto low-rider, banana seat/with tinfoil rainbow streamers."). An exception is "Pancreas", and it's the best in the volume. The first person (or first organ, if you will) allows Pigeon the room for emotional development, and the poem unfolds in continuous surprise and complexity, the personality imbued with a wise care for harmony, yet devastated by loneliness and lack of received love and appreciation: ("The Islets of Langerhans./Exotic, but no one visits."). Par for the collection, though, are revelations which aren't convincing or rivetting, no matter that many "Hair Dryer"s are occasionally (one would think) countered with a "Cunt", where "I feel the shame and exhilaration of keeping company with such an eccentric, independent relative." Contrast this, for example, with Sharon McCartney's object poems in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder in which the objects overspill the pages as unpredictable, even dangerous, creations, both universal and highly individualistic, lit from within.

I'm left feeling that Pigeon is -- however sensitively -- struggling to complete an exercise and it's one more reason (of many) why the project book, dominant in today's poetical procedure and landscape, is (with many fine exceptions, of course) a wrong turn for poetry in general.

Claire Croissant's Missives And Mistakes

A multi-organism free-for-all, Claire Croissant's exploration into the shallowest recesses between sentience and new academic creation, Missives And Mistakes, nevertheless manufactures chaos into what it means when peoplehoods on unintelligible matters commit those clever thoughts to page and book thereby adding to the understandable apprehension that when one goes under, more and many are soon to follow. (Cassandra was a gutsy gal, but her response was questionable.)

So: "verities of maple, freshets of vowels, tumblings of inexactitude parade in a quandary" meaning that maple is maple, vowels aren't fresh in this case (lower or upper), and full marks for fearless self-analysis.

Objectivity is used as contrast. We're treated to found fact, and newspaper phrases float on a theoretical stew like violin string on stagnant pond water, ripples occasionally altering the sheep gut letters from an infrequent, feeble wind: "while we shift categories and accept the lessons, fulminating a word misconstrued and egocentric, the 40,000 dead in Turkey submerged in a crime of consumerist vocables". Check, and checkmate! Onward, avant soldiery.

Stan Ormello's Byways And Pixie Dust

A day and a month late, but I'll do two in one day at some point in the month. Yes, that's right, it is (or was) National Poetry Month, and we all know what that means. The Burgeoning Poetry Blogosphere, the Cottage Presbyterian Sentinel, and the Ladies Home Journal all grit their teeth before smiling fixedly and trotting out the Poetry-as-Buckley's-Cough-Syrup routine. Trouble is, usually the hawking of blissful ignorance is much preferred to going along with the undisturbed breath patterns of the smooth set with nothing to say, or the unmodulated noise of interesting story-tellers with a notion of craft as barge or rotting raft.

First up is a gateway book by Stan Ormello. Unfortunately, the gateway here may lean more to freebasing airplane fuel than to Ginsberg or Greville. His Byways And Pixie Dust covers a lot of ground if you equate circling a high school track a hundred times as a fascinating journey. Let's open the pages.

The initial poem is also the title poem, always an indicator that the poet WISHES TO MAKE AN IMMEDIATE AND IMPORTANT STATEMENT. And that statement seems to be: though there be bombs and bad men, sports colour commentators and retro beehive hairdos, there'll always be a song in the heart and a spring in the step of anyone lucky enough to be privy to the glib lozenges of "here the running hare and the placid lake conjoin", which, despite the author's best intention, had me wishing to dive into those still (and deep) waters to rescue that imaginative animule whose brief-hour-and-heard-no-more fate was quite a bit different than that of canny Bugs. Alas, bunny of aborted byways: your past tense foredoomed you. I throw a carrot into your watery cairn and pray that no one takes this review as persiflage.