Sunday, August 2, 2020

Ethan Vilu : Cellar, by Anthony Etherin


Cellar, Anthony Etherin
Penteract Press, 2018



Made up of short poems originally posted to Twitter over the course of two years, Anthony Etherin’s collection of constrained poetry Cellar is the result of a sustained, dedicated, and above all exceedingly thoughtful writing practice. Published in 2018 by Etherin’s Penteract Press, whose declared focus is on “constrained, formal, and experimental writing”, Cellar exemplifies this commitment by being comprised entirely of anagrammatic (where every line contains exactly the same letters as each other line) and palindromic (where, by letter, the poem is the same read backwards or forwards) poetry. Despite the aura of stringent, potentially harsh formality which such an approach may inspire, this collection of poems produces the opposite effect – it is a wild book, an exercise in euphony, a linguistic roller coaster.

The subject matter within Cellar varies enormously, from the historical English Wars of the Roses to meditations on exoplanets, forests, rivers, and the nature of poetry itself. This cornucopia of disparate topics, united by their beauty and by the particular, regimented forms of the work, produces a powerful feeling of “entire worlds seeming / to merge in wilderness….” – a vast, generalist’s rumination on everything. It is the kind of thing which one may think would be hindered by constrained writing, but which in this case is profoundly enhanced by it. As such, whether the explicit intent was there or not, Etherin has produced with Cellar an eminently strong argument for the urgency and necessity of constrained writing in a poetic world more or less dominated by free verse. It is an argument, and a beautiful one, for the expansion of our poetic terrain – a noble endeavor, and a wildly fun time all the while.



Ethan Vilu hails from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in March 2020. In addition to editing for NōD Magazine and filling Station, Ethan is also a fledgling bookseller and collector.