The heart in love - the heart in nature
Reviewed by Bill Robertson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix, January 10, 2009)
THE LUSKVILLE REDUCTIONS
By Monty Reid, Brick Books, $18
SPIRIT ENGINE
By John Donlan, Brick Books, $18
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In these two collections of poetry, two men speak clearly -- though one far more metaphorically than the other -- and at times insistently about matters close to the heart.
For Saskatchewan born Monty Reid, who now lives in Ottawa, The Luskville Reductions is one, long, multi-part poem on the loss of his marriage. For John Donlan, who divides his time between Vancouver and a cabin in the woods near Godfrey, Ont., the message in poem after poem of Spirit Engine is the importance of the natural world and our human blundering yet essential interconnectedness with it.
Reid doesn't waste time getting down to business. In a short and pithy epigraph to his 14th book he lets us know that Luskville is a tiny settlement in western Quebec where he lived for five years until his partner, "nursing a suite of dissatisfactions," left him to go back to Alberta.
The minimalist poems that follow -- these reductions -- many of them barely taking up half a page -- are his response to that very definite act. And in his heart-arrested state, Reid sees metaphor everywhere for her action and his reaction.
"Nails pop in the siding// old friends show up/ from the same exactitudes// with that/ same look of surprise;" "How long did it take us/ to discover// we were sliding into the river?" "The dust assembles.// It has found us/ because it was looking for us;" and a cliché of marital strife: "Lying somewhere/ between us// the remote/ that little box/ of signals and intentions ... Ok/ you hold it."
In observations of the changing seasons and in simple household tasks, the bereft husband sees his aloneness everywhere: in the beautiful poem about leaves turning red, in his rolling up the "so-called/ unkinkable hose, in the way the Ottawa River rolls by, and in a lovely poem about washing dishes together. Mixed with the beauty of such lines as, "But the sweet air/ that entered you// and came back to the space/ of the world much reduced// but remixed and yes/ sometimes looking for me," is the odd bit of humour: "They say that if you live together/ long enough// you and your television/ begin to resemble one another." Ah, the lament of the lonely man.
In all these poems, and in a later plaintive question, "Does anyone need boxes?" we see the man's heart stripped naked before the world. These are brave poems.
THE TONE of John Donlan's fourth collection is entirely different from Reid's. Despite the amazing cover photograph of a fuel dragster doing a flame burnout, a photo that definitely fits the book's title, the poems inside are mostly contented musings on the natural world and this man's place in it. The Spirit Engine is probably that which animates the frogs, birds, and trees surrounding the poet, but those fossil fuels had to come from somewhere.
In poems that usually adhere to a 16-line, four-stanza structure, Donlan looks to the woods and water around him for guidance. In Across the Line he declares: "You learn patience from white pine," while in Noise he says of a tern, "you envy her bedrock purity/ of intent, wide-open awareness." In Survivor he says, "Close attention to the sky erases/ history," and in Torso also declares: "How free it feels, to be unnecessary!/ --ungod, one creature among others."
In his joy at leaving behind the city and so-called civilization, Donlan occasionally becomes a bit pedantic. In Influence he prays, "Inner Voice, help us speak/ in the language of animals and plants, so we speak for more/ than a species whose original sin or genetic stain// is to be too successful and make earth's heaven a hell." In Wiggisey he closes with the lines, "If no one is shooting at you;/ If no one is threatening you with torture;/ If no one is bulldozing your home;/ you can appreciate the hummingbird's pendulum dance." True.
What Donlan would seem to argue, though, is that many of us, without those above threats, still take no notice of the hummingbird's dance, and he has taken it upon himself to notice just that. Most of these poems are gentle nods in the natural world's direction. The "essential work" of moss and yellow pollen "ignores so-called civilization" and "finds a voice/ below words, where the songs come from."
It's those songs that Donlan listens for.
Robertson is a Saskatoon freelance writer and poet.
