(no subject), Peter Burghardt
Omnidawn, 2022
Much like Göransson’s SUMMER, Burghardt’s poems have the sense of the lyric journal entry, sketching across the immediate and recollected, of a particular weaving through the dailyness of domestic life, although constructed less on the activity itself than utilizing the details of those days to speak to something more abstract, writing almost a Robert Creeley sense of the domestic. “As an American,” he offers, as part of the fourth poem, “the camera is always on.”
There is such an ease to these poems, deceptively so; as well as an underlying quickness, anxiety and easy humour, able to poke the occasional self-jab. These are poems that sit exactly where the authors sits, as he is sitting there, and you, the reader, there also. As the catalogue copy for the book includes: “The poems of (no subject) are an investigation of the personal everyday. The title for the book and the poems contained within are derived from the default subject line of a subjectless email. The books’ composition was informed by this idea of the quickly written subjective email, as the author would clear small periods of time to write and record the observations and thoughts around himself at that moment, then send it to himself for future refinement.” “Continuosity is a word I just made up and time / will not undo that.” he writes, as part of the opening poem, “Nothing is ever undone / but one time I fell in a hole in the tall grass / of my front yard. I showed you where it was / and you had me answer how far down it goes. I said / I’m glad it’s not deeper.”
The way the individual poems connect into each other, one could almost call this a collection of two poems, each constructed in different manners, but each a standalone of multiple, kenetic, moving parts, with the second sequence, “epilogue(s),” leaning a bit further into the koan; a structure of the minimal that offers an ending before any easy conclusion, almost comparable, narratively, to the minimal poems of the late Paris, Ontario poet Nelson Ball. As poem “(xxii)” reads, in full: “Daily I withdraw and paint myself / with my home as a shellac / against feeling. I wish to be fondly / regarded which sometimes means / not saying anything.”
(no subject)
Each hour wounds,
the last
one kills. Inscribed
on the sundial where
I sit in someone
else’s garden listening
to three kittens
patter their stubby
legs in the
planting soil, not yet
a year old but
already practically cats
their kibble
causing flies to flick
their filth
around. The landlords
aren’t happy about
the mess
but they love the
company.
The sun today is
too much for the succulents
and tomatoes N
planted. A text
arrives but the
data won’t load.
I feel I need to
sit and think deeper
about my five-year
plan which is
a joke I don’t know
how to finish.
There are tiny, almost delicate connectors between each of the poems through his “epilogue(s)” sequence; sometimes as subject, or narrative, or as a further thought along a particular thread that barely seemed visible, making one wonder if these are deliberately-constructed connectors, or possible echoes? One might say neither, either or both, and the effect might still be the same. “Here I am typing into what is only / the widening space I’ve put between / myself and who I pictured I’d become.” he writes, as part of part five of the sequence.
(xxv)
My son wakes up
and sometimes
the first thing he
says is “I don’t want you”
which I know he doesn’t
mean.
He means he wants
his mother,
in his limited
vocabulary of choice.
We’re all
unrepentant sociopaths
as children, and
my son also happens
not to be a morning
person, which I admit,
I’m not either.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, he now has a substack at https://robmclennan.substack.com/, through which he is attempting to work through a book-length essay, and a couple of other prose projects.