Eating Salad Drunk edited by Gabe Henry

  Sometimes we just need something light. Eating Salad Drunk suits that purpose; it’s a collection of haiku poems by a smattering of comedians and edited by Gabe Henry. The book includes comedians like Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford, Colin Mochrie, Bob Odenkirk, Margaret Cho, and more. The haiku works well for comedians because in allows them to essentially share a bunch of one-liner jokes in 17 syllables. There are some great jokes and absurd moments, and some poems that teeter on the edge of actually expressing wisdom.

One thing that’s pretty neat is that the introduction to the book gives a brief history of the haiku form. My perception of haiku is that they are typically about the serenity of nature and the distillation of a profound feeling. Henry points out, though, that there’s a bawdy and bodily quality to a number of early haiku poems. One of the earliest haiku, Henry notes, is by Yamazaki Sōkan: “Even at the time / When my father lay dying / I still kept farting” (XVII). For a comedy book, teaching me something new about the genre is pretty cool.

As a collection, there’s some nice variety in the topics and approaches of the comedian-poets. The poems are grouped, sometimes loosely, under the categories of screen time, food, friends & family, modern romance, struggles, nature calls, entertainment, words of wisdom, and self love & loathing. Several of the comedian-poets have entries in multiple of the categories, and I’m curious how the collection might have looked different if it were arranged by comedian rather than by subject matter. I wonder if it would help to get a better grasp of each comedian’s “voice” or if it would push comedians into some unfamiliar territory in their work.

The book is fun and light. I don’t have much “deep” commentary for the poems, but I will share some of my favourites, which often seem to involve either wordplay or absurdity. The way that the poems subvert expectations are just the best. Without further ado, have a gander at some of my favourites from Eating Salad Drunk:

From Aparna Nancherla:

Got to the end of
The internet. Turns out I

Was dead the whole time. (25)

Framing the internet like a novel with a twist ending has done before (SimpsonsDidIt.gif), but it has a definite charm that the twist ending is solipsistic in nature and also has the double meaning that you were dead the whole time you were surfing.

From George Wallace, with a focus on wordplay:

I’ll eat a skirt steak
While wearing a pair of pants.
I don’t give a shit. (42)

Also in the wordplay file from Myq Kaplan, who gets several entries in the collection:

Cafeteria.

Café plus bacteria?
I will eat at home. (47)

Probably the food poem that got the biggest laugh-out-loud reaction from me due to its absurdity and playfulness:

Oh, Fruit by the Foot.
You flout the metric system.

In a tasty way. (53)

That piece by Jo Firestone and Mike Dicenzo is such a joyful spin. The word “flout” is just perfectly elevated for such a stupid little poem.

Some poems are rooted in the human experience and its own silliness and absurdity. There’s a fair amount that fails to land for me when discussing social media, but Liz Magee has a great joke here about our social bonds:

Happy birthday, friend!
Posted a pic where I look
Great and you look fine. (68)

That is a finely crafted, elegant joke that works for its concept but also the voice. I can just imagine the way a comedian might present the word “fine.”

Drawing on some of Henry’s observations on the lewdness of early haiku, there are a few relationship poems that are risqué but have that same kind of wordplay and cutting humour, as seen in the following poems by Jes Tom and Kelly Bachman respectively:

A “tight five” is a
Stand-up set, or a new name
For fisting. You choose. (93)

My ex eats ass now.
Somehow that hurts way more than
All of his success. (93)

Or even Myq Kaplan’s silly:

Necrophilia
Is not what I thought it was.
I like sex with necks. (96).

So ridiculous and absurd but for that reason irresistible.

Some of the poems are also a little bit sad or stand out as more traditionally poetic through, for example, anthropomorphism, as in Laura Silverman’s piece:

Three in the morning
Refrigerator’s humming.
Must not know the words. (57).

There’s something mournful about that, but also endearing that this poor fridge is presented in its ignorance of the words. Kyle Ayers also personifies Netflix in an odd way:

When I die, someone
Scroll through my Netflix for me.
It likes the scrolling. (24)

Similarly, there’s a funny but dark poem by Aparna Nancherla that goes as follows:

Accidentally

FaceTimed my doctor’s office.
The call was declined. (5)

Or the sad response to capitalism we see in Sierra Katow:

The dogs I follow
On Instagram have better
Lives than most of us. (7)

I imagine lots of people would find a number of poems in the collection relatable, especially with respect to office culture and dating culture. Kyle Ayers writes, for example,

“Per my last email”
Is just me being polite.
Fuckin REPLY NOW. (10)

And the disconnect in communication of situationships, for example, as presented by Karen Chee:

“Sorry, just saw this!”
He says, and I believe him
Because I want to. (10)

Overall, there are a lot of fun poems and silly jokes told in a precise and concise format. Not all of them land or resonate, but there are enough in here that elicit a chuckle to make the book a fun hour long venture.

And that’s my tight five. Happy reading!

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn by Vladimir Nabokov

  William Shakespeare is often held as the paragon of literature, and he may well be, but in my view Vladimir Nabokov deserves a seat at that table. Indeed, Shakespeare’s influence is felt throughout The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, a Nabokov play written in verse.

Before I begin, though, I should note the peculiarity of this text. I’m a Nabokov enthusiast and have read all of his published novels, and when I stumbled across The Tragedy of Mr. Morn in the bookstore, I was taken aback—I’d never heard of this work. As a historical note, this play was written in 1923 or 1924 and was unpublished during Nabokov’s life, only resurfacing in 1997 in a Russian literary journal. This translated English edition is as recent as 2013 and is touted as Nabokov’s only completed play. I would put a bit of an asterisk on that, though, because a few passages in Act V with missing lines, so it’s maybe the only “basically complete” play Nabokov wrote. In any case, it was a surprising find.

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn is set across the backdrop of a revolution. The play is surprisingly conservative in nature in that there’s a king who is depicted as doing a generally good job of keeping the population happy—and his identity is a secret to all, never to be unmasked. Even the revolutionaries recognize it:

For the sorrows of my heart, for the tears
of my Midia, I will never forgive the King.
But, consider: while we were declaiming
grand words—on the oppressed, on poverty
and the suffering of the people—the King
himself was already acting in our stead. (16)

Meanwhile, there’s a group of revolutionaries that form the central cast, introducing us first to Tremens, an elderly revolutionary seemingly on the verge of a death that won’t arrive. The play begins with him waxing poetic on the glory of destruction, a longing for collapse. Tremens has remained free while his revolutionary comrades have been sent into exile. That is, until one of his champions, Ganus, returns in secret.

Like Shakespeare, Nabokov employs iambic pentameter to weave together multiple threads within a five-act structure. Nabokov also draws directly from Othello—required to return home in secret, Ganus, with the help of Ella, is disguised as the titular character. Some characters parrot lines directly from Shakespeare’s work, and certainly there’s a thematic connection: when Ganus enters (as Othello), he finds his wife Midia hosting a party and openly gallivanting with Mr. Morn. There’s a great tension to the scene where Midia is entertaining her guests and everyone is getting the hint to leave and Ganus is being wilfully obtuse to try to outlast Mr. Morn so that he can reveal himself. It’s awkward. It’s painful to watch.

From there, Morn and Ganus commit to a duel without Midia’s knowledge. Tremens is stacking the deck, so to speak, and being an agent of chaos. I’m not entirely clear on the specifics of his plan, but I think he has a lust for destruction in general. Unfortunately, Morn is the secret king that everyone loves and his death will lead to the dissolution of the joy everyone is feeling. Such is the central tension of the play.

Nabokov’s use of language is of course playful and inventive, though clearly in its infancy here. The translators’ introduction offers insight into the distinct oddities of the characters’ speech mannerisms, which I would not have picked up on. They also speak to the challenges of transliteration, and offer a really cool insight into the process. They discuss Nabokov’s own commentary on the practice of translation and the models he himself created for Pushkin. It was fascinating to me to hear about this as a common practice: translators using authors’ translations of others’ works as models for their own translation practices.

Within Nabokov’s verse, there are some lines that stand out as quotable aphorisms. Tell me this wouldn’t be in place in a Hamlet or Macbeth soliloquy:

What are passions?
Mistakes in translation. What is love?
A rhyme lost in transmission to our discordant
language. (84).

Nabokov’s concern with how language frames our experience emerges clearly. Feelings become translations and rhymes. There’s a mournful quality here, too, that feels to me like Hamlet’s quintessence of dust or Macbeth’s sound and fury signifying nothing.

There’s a troubled connection between joy and sorrow—creation and destruction. Tremens explores the ecstasy of death and destruction. Klian, Ella’s fiancé, gives voice to these tensions in the final stage of the play:

That’s where the horror lies—
not in death, no,—but in the fact that some
sort of whimpering feeling has inhabited
my blood, a mixture of untold jealousy
and shunned desire, and such tenderness
that all sunsets are but puddles of paint
beside it—such is my tenderness! (119-120)

The horror of a “whimpering feeling” and “shunned desire” points to a sensibility guided by joy and happiness, but within that there is an “untold jealousy.” I also like the idea of sunsets being puddles of paint beside Klian’s tenderness. All the same, there’s a conflicted tension between this tenderness and horror.

Before I conclude, I wanted to comment on just one more image from the play. Nabokov always has a knack for a surprising, evocative image and early on Ella tells Ganus that Midia “told [his] fortune by looking at the moon through a glass of wine” (13). Just stunning.

Overall, I can’t say that The Tragedy of Mr. Morn is in my top 5 Nabokov books. Even in the top 10. I’m really glad, though, that I was able to come across a “new” work by one of my old favourites. The play serves as a really interesting entry into Nabokov’s oeuvre that shows an emerging great before he hit his stride.

Happy reading!

Curtain.

Whetstone by Lorna Crozier

There is a brand of quiet poetry that appeals to and influences me in my own work. To that end, I’ve returned to Lorna Crozier’s work, specifically her collection Whetstone. As with any similar collection, some of the poems resonated and others did not. It’s more about occupying the same psychic space and allowing yourself to be guided along.

The titular poem stands out as one of the highlights for me, particularly because of its vivid first lines: “The stone that sharpens stars, / their slow slice across the sky” (13). Jan Zwicky’s essay about resonance in poetry has proven enduring in the way I think about poems. Resonance often seems to use juxtaposition as a medium for finding connection, and following this idea of a stone sharpening stars in the sky, Crozier says, “it must have mingled with the gravel / on the road I run. Now its light / has reached my eyes” (13). I can see a parallel between the smattering of stars across a night sky and the stream of stones that form the gravel, every once in a while one standing out. There’s also an odd inversion here, though, because typically we’d think of the light from stars’ light taking years to reach our eyes, but the pronoun here refers to the whetstone. It intimates the slow labour of sharpening but at the same time, the stone is placing a demand on the speaker: “What does it want from me? / To be moved into another / galaxy of knives?” (13). Alternatively, the stone could be making a call “to be looked upon and left / where it has found me?” (13). The stone is given agency, while the speaker is being called towards agency. Or, perhaps there’s no difference between them: “Maybe it’s just a stone // among other stones, desireless / and unafflicted” (13). As with other poems in this mode, a small phenomenon is then extended into something much larger, more cosmic. The narrator reflects: “Does it know I am // dulled by God? / His negligence, / his under-use” (13). I think the poem, at its core, is a matter of agency and responsiveness, and ultimately the choice to either act or not act.

Crozier’s mode here feels so similar to Jan Zwicky; I notice her guidance is documented in the acknowledgements of Whetstone. This influence also emerges in the meditations on nature. The book is largely wintery, and “Prayers of Snow” sets that tone, which reads, in part, as follows:

Snow is a lesson in forgetting, a lesson in gravity,
a long loose sentence spiralling to the end of thought.
It prays to the young god robed in white, his ascent
a blizzard returning to the sky. (11)

As I suggested, there’s a kind of cosmic quality imbued to the natural phenomenon. The laws of the universe (gravity) are embodied by a particular, observable phenomenon (snow). Having tangible images like this really gives readers something to latch onto. Imagining snow as a kind of language is also delightful; the snow streams down as a “long loose sentence” and the odd inversion of a blizzard returning to the sky is a nice touch. The poem then reads as a kind of prayer and ultimately the snow “closes the gap / between drought and plenty, belief and blasphemy, / the ear and silence” (11). The idea of snow being something that joins disparate phenomena together feels true. Consider the way that an endless stretch of white snow erases distinct features and makes everything into one canvas. Snow becomes “a migration of birds / without eyes, without feet, who settle white in branches / on breasts and wings. When you stride through snow / in dreams of waking, you are a star-walker. / It prays to the soft fall of your books” (11). I like the way the snow prays to the world around it and the distinction between snow and other things fades: snow and birds are the same. The idea of being a “star-walker” every time you walk through snow also gives the poem its cosmic quality and makes sense with the idea of snow being star-like in its shape.

There are other poems that have a similar motif: a totalizing phenomenon that reveals connection. In the poem “Solitude,” for example, Crozier describes “Sometimes the dark’s so dark / nothing can move through it” (38). She specifies that the wind and the geese can’t move through it, despite how an hour ago they “charcoaled their journey from star to star” (38). I love noun-verbs, and “charcoaled” here feels evocative. Again, there’s a motif of stars that stand as nodes in a network of connection. The poem then continues to describe in second person that “you love the lake at night / because water keeps its distance / yet carries sound, crackled and clear, from the farthest shore” (38). Again, there’s these spaces that are vast and empty but serve as bridges of connection to the farthest shores. Crozier again gets more precise: “the hard notes of a party / drift through the screen from cabins / on the southern spit” (38). If you’ve ever sat by water in the darkness, you know these two emptinesses that connect: “You said / nothing moves through this dark. / But music does, and voices, / and you go on” (38).

One more poem I’d like to comment on is “The Physics of the Rose.” The poem opens with an epigraph about the electron and us living in different worlds. In describing the rose, Crozier says “each petal [is] an eyelid, blood-fused, over what / invisible eyes!” (24). The idea of an eyelid sealed shut by blood is both beautiful and horrific. Continuing to describe the rose, “fold after fold, its silence so enclosed / it seems a kind of speaking, light’s muted // hallelujah brought inside” (24). Crozier reads into silences and finds their voice. She looks into the quiet phenomena and imbues them with a voice, just as these roses speak in the silence of their folds. Later in the short poem, she describes it as “the antithesis of absence, / of stillness, its red fist unfurling / this, this and this, a daring to be open / so immoderate you want to say outrageous, / you want to say ridiculous, but can’t” (24). The idea of the rose being the antithesis of absence is a compelling phrase and emulates Crozier’s philosophy. Despite the silence, the rose speaks. Despite this, there’s a dark tone that gets couched in pretty imagery. Crozier describes the rose as “shocking as a heart cut out and set in glass” (24). The gruesome undertone draws attention to that which is otherwise quiet. The final lines of the poem then invert our expectations: suddenly we are the one being watched. She writes, “Clothed or not, you stand naked in its eyes. / Small and unadorned, / without a lover” (24). We are no longer the observer; the brilliant presence of the rose is observing us…I suppose when you stare into the rose long enough the rose stares back?

Throughout the collection, there were a number of poems I liked, a few that I loved, and a few I failed to linger on. It’s a good collection and, as with all poetry, the more time I spent thinking through it the more I was able to see what Crozier’s mission might be. It’s worth reading and I’ll stand by my philosophy that poems are best read as part of a full collection. The more time you spend with a voice, the more you’re able to hear its nuances.

Happy reading!

courbure de la terre par jonas fortier

  My reviews of French poetry books are always the most niche, but at least once a year I try to expand my horizons and practice my second language…so here we go with courbure de la terre par jonas fortier.

courbure de la terre essentially translates to “curvature of the earth.” The title feels appropriate not only because so many of the poems feature round elements, curves along the horizon, but because there’s something about the tone of the poems that also feels soft. fortier is not a writer of hard edges but of gentle invitations. The poet takes on a mode that feels like some early French symbolists, drawing inspiration from things like the moon or rain drops and finding the deeper significance that is sometimes unspeakable.

There’s a layer of irony to me making that statement, though. There’s a sequence of poems in which fortier reflects on writing directly and provides a list of the types of poet he is not, outlining both motivations and processes for writing. He’s not a poet that works in a factory in unimaginable conditions; he’s not the poet that stays up all night and kills himself at twenty three. These tropes of the depressive and the isolated don’t reflect him, so while there are some symbols that are resonant with classic poetry, he still distances himself from their tradition.

I appreciate the art of quiet poems. fortier has a real observational quality in his work, rendering clouds and rain drops into art. The poem sequences are often untitled, and it blurs the line between individual poems and sequences of connected pieces, but the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>> contains a piece that feels representative of the precise quality of fortier’s style. The piece reads, in part, as follows:

cette peine-là
est de saison, brume
démanchée contre le ciel
il se met à pleuvoir de minuscules araignées
des étoiles comme nous mais mieux
des gouttelettes encore poudreuses
comme des briques muettes
des flèches d’averse
viennent crever dans nos bras faibles
et nous portons à nos lèvres
des souvenirs d’herbes (54)

The description has that touch of tenderness and devastation that characterizes what I often think about in terms of a “poetic mode.” I particularly appreciate the rain being described like tiny spiders, rendering the droplets somewhat creepy, but also as stars “like us but better.” The line breaks sometimes make the lines read ambiguously, but the poem goes on to describe the droplets like falling arrows or bricks and there’s a heaviness there that counterbalances the softness of the powdery rain drops.

The section <<Vérités permanentes>> has some of my favourite pieces, which extend fortier’s motifs about the sky and clouds. In one piece, the speaker identifies himself and another (<<nous>>) as parallel to clouds, carrying the names of their fathers and the clothes of their mothers and big beards that have grown over time and having bodies like grapes where you can’t see inside. The poem’s volta explores a new angle and fortier explores the future, made of houses with hard planks that speak as you step on them. He talks about the opening of the house, the opening of the future, letting the wind speak through open doors and windows. The poem ends on the idea of the moon guiding people to the house alongside thin, key-like trees. It reads better in French: <<d’arbres minces / comme des clés>> (62). The extended metaphor works beautifully and mimics fortier’s approach: you are being trained as a reader how to listen to space, how to hear messages from your environment. It’s hard to translate here but there’s also an aural quality to the work, where particular sounds echo with a slight difference: dures / dureté, de soi / ce soir, and so on. These give the poem a coherence that feels like it touches on something other-worldly. 

The collection also reflects a fair deal on language itself. The section <<Vérités permanentes>> opens with a reflection on grammar:

il y a un temps
grammatical
qu’on appelle
vérité permanente

je n’en avais jamais entendu parler
jusqu’à ce qu’un Bescherelle
me révèle son nom

c’est arrivé par surprise
comme la lettre d’un ami cher
après des années passées
dans la contemplation
d’un pays lointain

j’ai eu une émotion très positive
bien que si proche de la tristesse
en apprenant que la vérité
peut être temps présent (59)

There’s a nostalgia to the piece that resonated with me, namely the idea of learning grammar from a Bescherelle (French Immersion kids represent!). I like, too, the sense of revelation that studying grammar brings and the reality that opens up. I also appreciate the tenuousness of the border between positive emotions and sadness and the way those converge at moments of clarity.

I can’t pretend that I understood the nuances of each of the poems in this collection. I do feel that the tone read as tender and a little tragic, but reflective and appreciative of the world. I flagged one of the early poems in the collection because I felt I didn’t have the vocabulary to really delve in. As I translated it a little more, the imagery stood out more dramatically: it was about kids “chained to strollers” watching birds and knowing that life is invented by the spirits of our dead, who have become <<essaims d’abeilles>> (24)—that is, swarms of bees. The poem took on a new philosophic intensity and then becomes a reflection on time reflected in the northern hemisphere collapsing like wet butter on the sidewalk. 

Another piece I revisited reinforced the idea of the poet as a wanderer. I’m tempted to put him alongside Baudelaire as a flanneur, but I’ll resist easy categorization. Essentially, there’s a poem about wandering but then clinging to certain phenomena, including the increasingly strange—like urine accumulating in ant nests (37). There’s an endless searching and a turning up of the speaker’s eyes to the stars…but we’d call them eggs (37). It’s an odd line to end on, a bit of cheekiness that I feel undermines the self-seriousness of the wandering poet’s approach.

Returning to the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>>, there’s a piece that ties these elements together. There’s a roundness to the piece, the observational quality, and the sense of wandering and searching that fortier highlights. The poem has a simplicity to it: it lists different types of droplets—respiration, cuts and injuries, brilliant drops (52). The poet rolls like a dice all while marching on, ready to scale mountains and appreciating the thyme growing at the side of the sidewalk.

I admit I’m not the perfect audience for this book; I appreciate the language, but am not apt enough to appreciate its nuances and possibilities. The poems felt tender and beautiful and quiet, with flashes of the philosophical, which I tend to enjoy. It’s a nice collection and if you’re a reader of French, I’d love to hear you extend the conversation.

Happy reading!

Year Zero by Brian Henderson

Brian Henderson is a Canadian poet that was a big inspiration to me in the early years of me seriously writing any poetry and it’s kind of scary to me to think that the last time I read his work was over a decade ago. I read his collections Sharawadji and Nerve Language, and this time around I’ve jumped to one of Henderson’s mid-career collections, Year Zero. One of the things I’ve found inspiring in Henderson’s poetry collections is their unconventional nature; one of the first poems of his that I read is presented, essentially, as two poems in a side-by-side conversation and I remember seeing him as an experimenter to follow.

Year Zero is perhaps not as experimental as some of Henderson’s later works, but still had quite a bit to latch onto in terms of imagery and insight. There’s a metaphysical bent to a number of the poems that finds meaning in the environment. In the opening poem, “Shadow Lake,” Henderson describes in a brief ten lines, a dark lake: “That lake / with its language of swallowed things” (11). This idea of a lake swallowing detritus and making it a language, communicating through that which it absorbs rather than what it expels is an interesting inversion. It also evokes a mournful tone in its final stanza: “The air is rich with unfinishedness // Things want to be free / impossibly / without having to be lost” (11). The meditative register presents a compelling juxtaposition. The incomplete is presented as richness—it makes me think of Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy that posits possibility as the ultimate identity of something. Here, what is absent is what gives the air its richness. But Henderson also highlights a depressing reality: that being free entails also being lost; the liberatory and the elegiac operate in tandem.

I think it’s worth noting just how many of these poems are written in dedication. Indeed, the afterword of the text orbits a number of deaths. Henderson describes the manuscript not as an elegy but instead “cut glass, folding water, streaming wind” (59). He goes on to describe the complications of dedicating the book to particular people before noting that he “felt how impossible even multiple dedications were, since the relationships were of such differing textures” (59). He notes that the dedications would “all be cracking off in different directions, felt wrong, and would overburden the book, like a tombstone even though, perhaps even especially because, they are at the heart of it—not their names, but them” (59). This sadness, this sense of loss, does seem to permeate through the text.

“In the Old Garden,” for example, begins with the lines “You have hardly begun the poem /  the voice says, and yet /  many people have already died” (14). There’s a tension in the need for immediacy—if we don’t write it now, it means more people will die. At the same time, there’s a richness and endlessness to the work: “We open even a word like a book / I try to say” (14). If every word is a book, then every book is infinite. The line continues, though into a kind of futility: “but how does this help, / when in the living / every lit vein runs to the golden stigmas of the heart” (14). The reflective poem continues with the idea that the body and the word are connected and “Perhaps the only real word is /  the one the body speaks /  as a whole life” (14). We see Henderson grappling with existential and linguistic themes here, as elsewhere, and it does seem to speak in the writerly register I find so resonant.

Throughout the collection, we also see a return to the idea of the incomplete, the unfinished. As in the first poem where the air is rich with unfinishedness, “There is a Kind of Music” also connects to the idea: “There is a kind of music / an unfinished music / to this constantly moving house / an opening and closing of breath / like a tide of shadows” (29). The piece once more gestures towards a spaciousness and emptiness filled with something not quite done. The unfinished music acts as a kind of furniture. The emphasis for the speaker of the poem is placed on listening for the house’s noises “and on not hearing it” (29). The poem becomes even more existential, referencing the idea of “Death [as] a stagger in the rhythm” (29). The stanzas then speed through a life and “We come all this way to lose ourselves finally / and it’s family we find ourselves doing it in” (29). The poem becomes another meditation on language, “another language / an island the music moves / sweeps as if it had hands / and nearly comforts” (29). There’s a tension here between the power and futility of language. At the same time that language can sweep things away, it only “nearly comforts” — there’s an incompleteness even in this edifying feature of the human experience.

I have to admit that a number of Henderson’s poems are difficult to parse. They are expansive in their scope and, sometimes, it is hard to see how the pieces are connected. The focus is not as immediately obvious as some more imagistic poems. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but it’s clear that to fully appreciate these poems, it requires time and patience.

That said, Henderson does not shy away from the imagistic. For example, the poem “The Hummingbird” is replete with specific images. The poem starts with the idea that “green lanterns of leaves cling / to their lifelines, / ragged with storm light” (45). Meanwhile, “The lake crashes over / lake-made dykes of the marsh / slewing sand / back over blades of yellow iris” (45). The scene unfolds in more rich detail, slowly introducing characters, an ambiguous ‘you’ and an ambiguous ‘I.’ ‘You’ is described as being undermined like the water maple by “incremental dynamite of surf” and toppling into the wet lap of a green torch being thrown away in slow motion. The ‘I’ of the poem reflects: “I have nothing if not this / forever unravelling shore” (45). I love that line because I love boundaries blurring and here the unravelling shore presents an image of flux, the “line between water and water” (45). This is the foundation for where the speaker stands. That image of tumult and instability and excess feels like an appropriate image for capturing a state of mind, consistent with how the speaker is “no longer sure / what direction forward represents” (45). Meanwhile, nature has a way: “Maple fruit torque through the wind, / propellers of future raining down” (45). I like that image; it brings back a childhood memory of watching the maple keys drift, but here the image is inverted as reflective of the future.

“Earth Ward” cycles through a number of these key motifs, as well. The poem starts with the idea of the “unfinished,” this time in the form of an unfinished “centre [that] still gathers / to scatter” (49). Henderson again returns to the idea of the incomplete and the unstable. I love the onomatopoeiac line that follows: “Bees unzip the tropic of afternoon” (49). It evokes Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”—the center gathers to scatter, everything is unfinished, the world is being unzipped, coming apart. The poem then goes on to describe the “weaving heat lines” and “the ear thinks space” (49). It’s an image of summer and that sensory confusion of wavy lines on the road and the buzzsaw of summer. The poem later takes an odd turn where it is August and the speaker is “listening, listening / at the door of your house, / my ear to taut skin” (49). It suggests the house to be a living entity (indeed, Henderson describes “your human hearth”) but then once again shifts to the idea of an ear on “the wild of the heart” (49) and describes thinking as growing like a bud into wood into bone. This growth and solidifying of thinking is personified through naturalistic imagery. Like in some of the other poems I see as representative, there’s an insertion and identification of the speaker with a natural phenomenon.

This summer poem stands in contrast with a cold one: “February: Flash Point.” The role of memory is once again foregrounded: “the air / a continuous flash that forgets / everything it once knew” (44). The emptiness in the air is this time a more active forgetting. February is presented as a time of transformation: a forgetting of the old, and “like weather, you move over within yourself, / an adoration, and disown the / shapes you blow through” (44). I feel like I calcify throughout winter, so it’s interesting to suggest a freshness and newness in the height of a frozen season. Henderson continues, “You are gestating incandescence / whose shadow shortens / to that telling moment I can tell and / tell, and say nothing of” (44). I’m not quite sure how to process these lines. The idea of an incandescence growing inside sounds like an optimistic shift within the self. That said, “whose shadow shortens” reads ambiguously to me. The incandescence and the shadow seem to be in tension with one another. Like other references to language, the ‘I’ of the poem suggests additional telling and telling—more words—and yet “say nothing of” implies an inability to communicate. Ultimately, there is “strewing the ash of snow, a drift of selves / in the tiny creases of your landscape” (44). I love that idea of a number of selves drifting together. Especially when considering the uniqueness of snowflakes, here there is the suggestion that they are all components of a similar self. It’s a collective identity and “you are filled to your season / with others” (44). The image of snow drifting together and blending feels authentic to who we are as people: collective selves loosely linked together, and the poem leads to an engaging final two lines. We are filled to our seasons with others “welcoming us to the eye / of the blizzard” (44). This amalgamation is a lovely end to the piece, an optimism about what I consider the cruellest month.

Ultimately, Henderson’s poems are rich with perspective and layered with meaning. His core themes engage me: language, space, emptiness, change, amorphousness. There are a handful of poems that I felt I could latch onto, though I admit I was hoping for some more experimental pieces. These are all poems that take time. It’s not the easily accessible work of some other modern poets; it’s the work of someone thinking deeply and considering carefully how these words can create meaning or gesture beyond themselves. As readers, we have to consider his words just as carefully in order to latch on. Year Zero is a reminder that poetry is at its best when it’s slow.

Happy slow reading!