Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation, Curtis LeBlanc
Nightwood Editions, 2020
LeBlanc exhibits the greatest control in poems where he draws upon his accumulations of seemingly disparate imagery and condenses them so to arrive at some sort of realization. Firing toy rockets from the bottom of a gravel pit, an ad placed in a newspaper for a missing malamute, eating hot wings in a San Diego bistro, the malamute found safe: all these things telescope in the final lines of “A Restaurant in California,” becoming the means through which the speaker wishes for the resolute optimism of a good friend. “If I could crash back / down into any moment, Cole,” the speaker muses,
I would let you marshal me down,
break through the clay-tile
roof
of that restaurant in California
and hear again how it’s possible for
some good to come if you ask for it.
In “On Seeing my Father in Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap,” perhaps the best of these telescopic poems, ekphrasis lends clarity to a relationship between father and son. The painting in question has three foci: a blue-grey sky marked with barren treetops and a few birds, people skating overtop a river coursing through a town, and a rudimentary bird trap waiting on a snowy hill. The speaker’s father is said to have skated along St. Albert’s Sturgeon River as a child, “caught in a current / of his own making,” proposing a connection between the painting and the father’s childhood in Alberta. But LeBlanc disrupts this connection. If the father sees himself in the painting, it’s not as one of the skaters, all “together / with arms linked, gliding on the green pond,” but as one of the birds threatened by the trap: “He’s in the birds, grounded, about to croak / beneath the wooden deadfall. Unhappiness, / a solid sheet dropping often on top of him.” It’s easy to hear the homonym “croak” here as the grating sound of crows and as a sign of their death. “Deadfall,” the type of trap depicted in the painting, suggests that what has fallen away from trees will soon fall upon the birds and make them dead. Whereas the puns of other poets often take the reader to a different emotional register (often one that needlessly sidetracks), LeBlanc’s savvy soundplay sharpens the sense of unhappiness befalling the speaker’s father and, by extension, increases the reader’s involvement in the atmosphere of the poem.
LeBlanc interrupts the flow of a sentence to reveal the speaker’s feeling toward his father’s way of being in the world later in the poem. Describing a photograph of his father “cussing [him] out” while on a tour of Bruges, the speaker admits that his father never seemed more himself than when he was disconsolate. Reading these lines aloud and pausing slightly at the end of each line, one can hear hesitation in this admission about his father’s disposition:
He
was somehow more
himself that way, finally spilling over the lip
of his unacceptable demureness, mostly quietude
and kindness in the body of a man at odds
with the men who held themselves above him.
The effect of the line breaks is subtle, but one that works greatly to LeBlanc’s benefit. In expressing a lack of certainty and perhaps even discomfort, these lines make the speaker’s concluding address to his father about inheritance all the more poignant: “Father, I have become you, some small shape / in the foreground, bracing myself for another / record winter and waiting for the sky to fall.” This is a sad poem from start to finish, but nevertheless a memorable one due to its beautiful execution. The poem is a testament to how LeBlanc can turn a small detail like a bird trap into such an expansive yet coherent symbol, one pertaining to unhappiness felt individually, experienced between father and son, and recognized as a form of inheritance.
Patterns of sound give many of the poems in Birding in the Age of Glass Isolation a centrifugal movement, at once a sense of encirclement and expansion. Take “Unforgiving Air, Arundel, Quebec,” for instance, where the the phrase “We were” appears repeatedly in what is essentially a list about adolescence in Southwestern Quebec. Here’s a small excerpt:
We were
fireflies
having come
of age in a place
too cold and
dry for anything
as beautiful
as fireflies. We were
marshland
past the greenhouse
where larvae
fed and formed
wings that
allowed them to hover
against the
backdrop of a blue-
black sky as
we fed on their light.
We were
cigarillos and toonie
scratch
cards, not old enough to
own
ourselves. We were currency.
We were
Autoroute 15 to Montreal
and the
flatbed trucks that passed
while we ate
at a casse-croûte
on the
roadside.
The repeated phrase stresses the distance between the lyric present and the time of the feelings and events in and around Arundel, Quebec. What I admire about this poem is how this anaphora has an incantation-like quality, as if encircling on the past by repeating “We were” might make it relivable in a sense other than remembering. Restating these experiences through the past subjunctive of “be,” the poem tries to marshal the energies of nostalgia to make the past present.
Another noteworthy poem marshalling sound and nostalgia is “Poplars.” At its core is a difference between what falls from trees in the speaker’s hometown and what falls from trees in his current location. I admire the degree to which sound makes the distinction:
At home,
the poplars that
line the city streets
drop white cotton
seeds like a blizzard
in the brightness
of June. They gather
in drifts for neighbourhood
kids
to use as kindling
for brush fires.
Here, trees drop
black sap that bakes
onto the hoods of
parked cars,
becoming one with
their enamel
until they return
to the earth
in a junkyard or field.
The alliteration in the sole simile (“like a blizzard / in the brightness of June”) has a lightness befitting windswept cotton seeds, whereas the monosyllabic plosives in “trees drop black sap that bakes” represent discreet sounds which bring to mind the distinct sap marks left on a car roof. The sound symbolism of these lines, to put it in a way incommensurate with LeBlanc’s soundplay, help in making us believe “home” is pleasant in comparison to “Here.” What perplexes is why there’s difficulty or a reluctance when it comes to addressing the significance in this difference. Here are the poem’s final lines; they continue directly from the section quoted above:
I
don’t know
what
to make of that comparison
except
to say I miss softness,
how
it once gathered at my feet,
how
it rarely gathers for me now.
Since there’s no suggestion that the softness that once gathered at his feet is anything other than the cottonwood fluff, the fact this feeling is said to be missed must represent the speaker’s nostalgia for home. This is another great example of how a LeBlanc poem resurfaces its own materials to cast meaning in a new light. But why does an admission of ignorance about the meaning of the two locations precede such a distinct sense of homesickness? If the speaker is being ironic or evasive here, it’s difficult to appreciate given the ease with which the physical sensations associated with home link with the positive connotations of softness.
In a piece published in MacLean’s in 2020, LeBlanc shares how, after sharing a joint with friends at eighteen, he was affected by Hallucination Persisting Perception Disorder for over two years. Here is LeBlanc recalling his hallucinations: “Walls ripple in the corner of my eyes, floaters swim unabashedly across the monochrome surfaces of buildings and the sky, and visual static blankets my entire waking life.” Met with these persistent hallucinations, LeBlanc experienced derealization and depersonalization, “the feeling that the world and the self have ceased to be real.” LeBlanc explains that the mind denies reality to protect itself from the trauma of distinguishing reality from illusion, but creates additional barriers to finding relief as a result of this withdrawal from reality: “in summoning the power to reject the world, a vicious cycle begins, begetting more panic attacks, more anxiety, and ultimately depression.” At the time of his writing in 2020, LeBlanc says that, besides “faint static” in his vision and “intrusive visual disturbances” when fatigued, the most intense symptoms have subsided. In his words, “it’s been eight years since I’ve consistently experienced any other hallucinatory symptoms, or the derealization and depersonalization that makes this disorder feel so hopeless and debilitating.”[i]
The second part of Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation opens with an extended passage on HPPD. Drawn from an article by Dorian Rolston published in the May 2013 issue of The New Yorker, the passage is a lodestar for this section:
Sufferers [of hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder (HPPD)] can appreciate that their perceptual aberrations are unreal—that their surroundings only appear blurred by afterimages (palinopsia) and trails (akinetopsia); shimmered by sparkles and flashed by bright bolts of light; interrupted by transparent blobs of color floating around; electrified by visual snow; magnified or shrunk by “Alice-in-Wonderland” symptoms; adorned by halos around objects, around people’s heads.
Each of the poems in this section relates to a symptom or experience of HPPD; indeed, some take their titles directly from this passage. “Positive Afterimages” is one of the strongest poems from this section, for it concisely exploits an overlap between the manipulation of reality in hallucination and one of the most important units of poetic expression:
I’ve
seen my nightmares spill over
from
my sleep and into my room
like
water from a rising river:
a
woman
perched
on the edge of my bed,
her
weight ebbing into the covers.
Signalled by the “like” and underscored by the colon’s sense of equivalence or resemblance, LeBlanc’s metaphor dramatizes how the device humanizes reality by allowing for unique or singular lived experience, even if this experience is a terrifying distortion of reality. In how it uses analogical thinking as a means of suspending reality and articulating a suspended reality, the poem contains genuine pathos and, at least for this reader, lingers in mind long after its conclusion.
In their brevity and lack of discursiveness, other poems from this section are like answers to a medical questionnaire that fails to provide enough room for elaboration: they catalogue, they list, they enumerate, but they don’t get into expansive detail. Here is “Floaters” in full: “Fireflies. / Fruit flies. / Pop flies. / Flitter.” Here is all of “False Perceptions of Movement”: “Garden gnomes. / Mannequins. / Coat racks. / Scarecrows.” What these poems gain in their immediacy they lose in affective intensity: they offer readers vividly clear examples of HPPD experience, but what is felt about these experiences is largely subdued, conjectural, or inferred by drawing from elsewhere in the collection. More so than with other experiences, writing about trauma stems from a pact established between personal history and the limits of the self. What I am able to express is balanced against what I struggle to articulate, what I am comfortable making public is measured against what I want to keep private, and so on. In saying that many of these shorter poems would benefit from the addition of more detail, I feel like I am trespassing on a personal covenant between experience and expression. This is far from my intention. My criticism comes from neither a voyeuristic interest in hallucination, nor a superficial curiosity in the “hopeless and debilitating” effects of depersonalization and derealization. It comes from a very simple and basic wish: to understand by the light of another’s feeling.
I began this review by suggesting that one of the possible functions of the first-person singular in poetry is that it shapes the expression of what has occurred in a life. Thinking poetically at the juncture of personal history and expression involves concentrating on the life one has lived and is living, as well as the forms coextensive with experience itself – rhythm, image, metaphor, story, and so on. If this concentration is productive, if the energy that keeps personal history alive is given a congruous form, it leads to poetry that has the potential to leave a mark on others. I think LeBlanc has created memorable poetry in Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation because he imparts a sensuous individuality to feelings, events, and objects that surround turmoil – and without letting this naming pass itself off as mastery, as irrefutable, or as the result of the unfazed composure touted by traditional masculinity. Explicit in LeBlanc’s poetry is the idea that we are deeply affected by affliction, that the negative experiences which befall us leave us noticing a deep emptiness where there was once a buoyant sense of being. What slowly unfolds as one reads LeBlanc’s poetry is the realization that we are deepened by the recognition of affliction in others, that the self enhances its ability to intuit the world’s resonance by becoming attentive to another’s suffering. Because of LeBlanc’s concentration toward his craft and personal history, this process is not only a pleasure and deeply rewarding but almost entirely detached from willed effort.
[i] LeBlanc, Curtis. “When you can’t trust what you see: Life with a perception disorder.” MacLean’s, February 10, 2020, www.macleans.ca/society/when-you-cant-trust-what-you-see-life-with-a-perception-disorder/