_What prompts a contemporary poet like John Beer to title his first full-length collection The Waste Land and Other Poems?  Is it wit or self-deprecation, mimesis or admiration?  Perhaps it is none of these things, or a combination of all of them.  What few may know is that when T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922 there already existed a poem by Madison Cawein similarly titled “Wasteland” and published in a Chicago magazine in 1913.  That Eliot read this poem seems likely, his friend Ezra Pound was an editor there and wrote an article in the same issue. 

Yet what Beer is aiming to accomplish seems more consciously intentional.  Even the cover of Beer's book looks maddeningly similar to Eliot's 1923 Hogarth edition, with its equivalent colour scheme and typographical rendering.  The first edition of Eliot's book was hand printed by his friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and in 1923 Virginia wrote to her friend Barbara Bengal: "I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliot's poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles."

_At the beginning of Ordinary Sun, the debut collection of Matthew Henriksen, the author begins with a line regarding the work of the eye.  The reader may do well to turn as well to the opening poem of Frank Bidart’s Desire, which repeats a similar line: “as the eye to the sun.”  Henriksen’s line “An eye is not enough” is as definitive and confident as Bidart, who turned to Plotinus for thesis-making: “To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it” (Plotinus). Though Henriksen may never explicitly conjure Plotinus, Ordinary Sun harkens back to such thinking as explicated by the philosopher and opened further by Bidart. This cycling of logical thought constitutes Henriksen’s project, a type of circling-down-the-drain to a purer experience of thought or, on a more instinctual level, emotion in relation to the tactile.

The voice in Ordinary Sun, which is dense and prolific, asks a great deal from the reader: to give over his or her faith to the logic ascribed by the work’s language. The author himself states in the penultimate stanza of the title poem:

             I love the way metaphor can corrupt

            but so seldom allow it.

            Though each allowance is

            an interruption.

            I sing loud enough.

                        (“Ordinary Sun”

_Brian Teare’s  Sight Map is a breathtakingly precocious foray into the natural world, yet the poems—some of which respond to nineteenth century poets Emerson, Manley Hopkins and Thoreau—are not run-of-the-mill pastorals.  Contemporary society rarely values nature for nature’s sake, by which I mean the “There will we sit upon the rocks /and see the shepherds feed their flocks” Christopher Marlowe sense of the word.  The modern view on the natural world is ecological rather than romantic, tinged with an apocalyptic flavour which would befit a Greenpeace advertisement more than a poem.   In light of all that, I find it remarkable that Teare supersedes the campiness of the genre without abandoning lyric forms, albeit forms that he challenges with a stunning proficiency.

Teare is no stranger to the tools of contemporary poetry.  His syntax is an amalgamation of fragments, utilizing sleek enjambments and chiasmas to create a type of seamless movement which illuminates ideas without sounding either hip or postmodern.  Take for instance, this section from “Emerson Susquehanna”, the opening poem in the collection which takes subtitles from portions of Emerson’s journals:

…Subzero, months

from thaw, we walk—o trees, trouble,

tremble at the roots of being, underneath,

under laws, the order of things

so deeply a violence and unnumbered like the snow.

_Who is to say what a sentence really is?  Must it end with a punctuation mark?  Is it essential to have a subject and a predicate?  Does it consist of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses?  Grammatical rules aside, can it be defined simply as a set of words that is complete in itself?  Lisa Robertson (in an interview on the Poetry Foundation website) states that she has always been seduced by sentences.  “I’m a sentence-lover before I’m a writer,” she stipulates.  Is this akin to saying something along the lines as I have a foot fetish or I prefer the lyric song rather than the symphony?  Perhaps.  It certainly sheds light  on the contrapuntal texture of R’s Boat, a dizzying, refractive array of sentences.  “Much of my earlier work has been testing the internal structure of sentences as wildly psycho-sexual-social units,” Robertson adds in the interview, and true to form R’s Boat is filled with phrases that seem to exude a type of virile autonomy.


By early June, I lost speech.

What about the conceptualized trees?

What about the phosphorescent sexes that took my strength away?

and later:

I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed in purple.

Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from sentiment.

Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my senses.

The section that these excerpts are from, UTOPIA/, is a heady continuum of arresting phrases, separate yet strung together by a non-narrative, philosophical arch that approaches a quasi stream of consciousness.   Robertson capitalizes the beginning of each line, the majority of which end with a period.  Lines are double spaced except between stanzas, after which there are three spaces before the next stanza commences.  The overall architecture of the section—and of the entire book, in that case—is like that of an edifice with few walls and many windows.  Sentences hover through white space, space which becomes as essential as the text.  Punctuation is sparse and never unexpected, acting only as fermatas through which the jouissance and liquidity of each phrase detaches and attaches itself to the next.

This fluid quality of the poems must have something to do with R’s Boat itself, the vessel of Rousseau which Robertson has used both as a muse and a sounding board off which the patina of  her text reflects.  Rousseau, in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, describes floating directionless in a lake, perceiving the flickers of his consciousness at one with nature’s patterns of light, water, sound and foliage.  His writings featured a focus on subjectivity and self-examination which would greatly shape modern philosophy.  Yet Robertson is not a philosopher in the literal sense, she is a poet, and therefore these poems are archival and at the same time autobiographical, mapping out the experience of daily life in a method that relies on collage and a certain morphological layering.

The cell which Robertson layers, manipulates, and ultimately has her way with is of course, the sentence.  “It is always the wrong linguistic moment/So how can I speak of sex?” she writes at the beginning of A CUFF/. In that first sentence is the only question mark in the entire twelve page poem, which does not contain even one period.

And if I degenerate into style

It’s because I love it very much

All week long

Like a first thing

Like a technique or marriage

Where conditions are incomprehensible

Thus satisfying the narrative of the body

It is interesting to note that she writes of narrative when the poem seemingly is devoid of a conventional narrative itself, and more remarkable that she writes of it in juxtaposition with the body.  The aura of this poem is somewhat sexy, but faintly clinical, as if from a biology student’s point of view as he dissects anatomical parts from the whole.  I believe that this dissection is key to Robertson’s work here.  It is widely known that Robertson gleaned text from sixty of her personal notebooks in writing R’s Boat, yet her aim was not confessional, but rather to create an “autobiographical book that was not self-referential.”  Therefore the sentences are like amputated extremities of a whole, an odd assemblage of parts that is not imbued with the innate pulsation of a narrative or coherent body but which rather finds its embodiment in its fractured, indexical quality. ~WSW

_“I knew I was dangerous: razor in a soft fruit”
(“Aria,” 55)

Society’s morbid fascination with the trope of missing, raped and murdered girls is the driving force behind Lightsey Darst’s debut collection of poems, Find the Girl.  Darst is interested in both parts of the title equally: “the girl” and the “finding.”  Referring to the hope of finding a missing girl alive and the need to find a dead girl’s body, and on a shadow level, the urge felt by a killer to “find the girl” (Darst writes: “Find the girl in time. Find her/and you stop her future”). Though obsession is behind the stories, reading the collection doesn’t quite feel like experiencing obsession. Darst creates an interesting distance in Find the Girl, which reflect the dehumanizations these girls undergo as they are transformed from people to headlines or myths, or worse, warnings:

“Let her suffer it, since someone has to,
some to be the stories
others survive, learn.”
(“[Methods, listen],” 21)