Count on it
Reviewed by Judith Fitzgerald (Globe and Mail, January 17, 2009)
CORRECTION LINE, by Dennis Cooley. Thistledown Press, 94 pages, $15.95
SPIRIT ENGINE, by John Donlan. Brick Books, 75 pages, $18
THE PLACE THAT WE KEEP AFTER LEAVING, by John B. Lee, Black Moss Press, 64 pages, $10
Poetry, now more than ever considered one of the few affordable and accessible refuges from a world off its rocker, took its fair share of hits during these past few globally bankrupt months, from jury-stacking here to conflicts of interest there to down-dumbing pretty much everywhere. Fortunately, some poets continue to create work of lasting value that, in the words of the incomparable Emily Dickinson, still takes the top of one's head off.
Look no further than the latest collection from John Donlan (who lives and works in Vancouver half the year while spending the other half in the bush north of Kingston, Ont.), Spirit Engine, a neo-pastoral cornucopia inviting readers to participate in one metaphysically lush and metaphorically rich world where the "work of love's a good kind of order" and "even in a day of just eight hours of light/ spirit expands to fill the time allotted."
Donlan, a keenly seasoned observer of "our vulnerable cathedral," our natural world where identity and ego yield to a timeless beauty almost too overwhelming to communicate, exits "post-industrial landscapes" to discover that which endures and expands, even, "freely giving, deepening us/ out of our tiny knowing."
A poet who writes both by eye and ear, Donlan invites readers to step into his work in the same way Tom Thomson (1877-1917), say, encourages viewers of his elemental vistas to participate in their movement toward infinity, particularly in those paintings featuring the rugged and brutal hinterlands at the heart of the Canadian North. (Think The West Wind, Pine Country, Smoke Lake and others.) Spirit Engine, in fact, consists of a series of near-perfect sequences lovingly shaped and finely formed, built from the ground up in order to stem the flow and stanch the blows delivered by an obscene world seemingly intent on destroying all that does not easily lend itself to commodification at the expense of the ground-down (which Thomson implicitly abhorred in his insistence on "getting the greens right" in his painterly enterprise):
Not much happening: the slack-string
calls of green frogs barely keep
the conversation (if it is
a conversation, thick with pause
or overlapping) alive;
twenty-two black and shining
turtles clamber onto half-sunk logs . . .
south of here, the TSX
consolidates after resource profit-taking,
strengthens to ten, six at the close.
A brilliant wordsmith, Donlan writes circles around many of his contemporaries and, in so doing, creates an ultra-campestral world where all remains redolent with the radiant sheen of life writ lush with largesse and a kind of courage to express both humour and humility through deeply moving meditations that leave "the mutter and ache/ and fuss of self" (as well as ego) in the rubble and ruin of so-called contemporary civilization. It's almost impossible to put down his work without feeling somehow renewed by a magnificent mind at work, refashioning a soothing sense of the world we (think we) know to such an exquisite degree we almost believe this planet's splendorous ways will survive despite our puny efforts to prove otherwise. This fact may explain why (and in the interests of full disclosure) I am both proud and privileged to call this gentle man a long-distance friend, whose work inspires my own in ways I cannot begin to express.
...
Now, that's poetry; and, in these times so desperately in need of solace, understanding, integrity and faith, readers will not find finer comfort and cause for celebration than in the works of Cooley, Donlan and Lee.
Poet and literary journalist Judith Fitzgerald is at work on Points Elsewhere, a new collection of poetry to be published next year.
