Substantial poetry in old/new forms

Reviewed by Bill Robertson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix, January 23, 2010)

Victoria poet John Barton, last year's writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, in his ninth book, Hymn, creates a strong sense of aloneness and longing, of seeking and solitude, none of which is sullied by false sentiment or self-pity.

In this large collection, brimming with technical disciplines, Barton opens with Aide-Memoire, a catalogue of sexual encounters one must turn sideways to read. Near the collection's end, in Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy, another poem printed vertically on the page, the poetic persona walks away from the Houses of Parliament, "wandering the streets of this ruined confederation," thinking of the years of beautiful young men who have gone before him.

By poem's end the speaker appeals directly to the emperor of Alexandria, home of the great poet Cavafy: "Constantine, admit us: we all want to be Alexandrians, all want to be former exiles who stand/ elegiac on our balconies and observe the street, knowing the ruined glories we anticipate// in transit below are behind us not ahead." Like many a poet before him, Barton laments the loss of a heroic or romantic past, wants to come out of exile to a home that will have him, even as he sings its elegy. In fact, even in Canada, this "unhellenic, plain-spoken country where few can still imagine there are gods," he speaks of "our attempts// at mediocrity sufficient to construct an urbanity, a backdrop for a life."

So he does his best, trying for connection as first one mirror holding someone's image, then another, shatters. Or as he seeks his father in the beautiful poem The Piano, "something you would never let me play," as he drives into the Alberta foothills, looking at "[t]his unnecessary/ highway, its denuded story I am// destined to wear/ all my life."

Yet, as he points out in Pathetic Fallacy, "we persist in forced metaphor," and then, in a homage to Sylvia Plath, brings roses to her grave admitting, "I wanted to believe in tenderness, but our age is not tender; there is no tender age." Heroic, maybe. Tender, no.

So he carries on, in poems divided mostly into two line stanzas, in a section of double-spaced, prose paragraph Narrations, and in those vertically lineated poems, as a "geologist of the heart" trying to "rearticulate all the stories left/ dissembled under future layers," realizing in The Strata that "what we live [is] not/ the story, nor what we later reflect upon having/felt at the time, though words leave us residues."

Yes, though he says we are "men who travel/ in disguises we trade amongst ourselves, comedians in the same desire," with "nothing between us but// gold courtly pretence, romance/ trailing us, tired and out/ of shape," he hangs onto that residue of words, giving them glorious shape in lines and stanzas -- and some breathtaking line breaks -- that are beautiful, lonely, and long capable of song.

Robertson is a Saskatoon freelance writer and poet.