Kim Fahner : If I Didn’t Love the River, by Robert Priest

If I Didn’t Love the River, Robert Priest
ECW Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

Open Robert Priest’s If I Didn’t Love the River and feel as if the poet has offered you his heart—open and welcoming—in the cradle of his cupped palms. The first poem, “Love Has Nothing to Do,” begins with this evocative stanza: “Love has nothing to do with the stars/except that I see them as symbols of distance/and love can be distant.” Stars string themselves through the book, reappearing in the beautiful poem, “On Star Divination,” in which the poet imagines that humans “are devices thrown down by the stars/divining sticks with no will of our own.” The stars peer down and watch us live our lives: “We’re lots cast down relentlessly like rain/We guide them home when they are lost, our love so luminous/they can’t avert their eyes. And yes, oh yes—stars wish on us.” Distances play a role in this book of poems, too, with reflections on how love can seem both very distant and still terribly close at the same time. Lovers in “Between a Tender and a Tender Place” are fluid beings, “strobe/to our extremes and back in luscious arcs/till stardust starts to tingle in our toes.” In “So Close,” Priest writes: “All I know is/there is some reaching/required/some receiving/called for/some distance/to be overcome/before we can be/close.”

Shifting from the complexity and depth of love in all its many incarnations, Priest ponders the way in which we are too tightly tied to the world of the internet. In “Device,” he considers the ways in which we are addicted to our cell phones: “First thing in my pocket when I dress/you tell me the time/the weather…I hardly need a memory, you store/the essentials.” This is a list poem, full of rich images and metaphors. By the end of the poem, the reader might feel a bit overwhelmed at the seductive nature of cell phones, and this is reinforced when Priest writes: “You are the finger for all pies/And we can’t quit you//You fasten/flies to the web/and make them pay.” In “The Like Process,” there is further exploration of the addictive nature of social media as he documents the ‘likes’ one by one: “I am a like machine/They zero in out of corners/They sponge up out of cracks/Octopus-like likes insincere likes/seeking favour.” There’s an awareness of human greed, emptiness, and superficiality here that continues with “Big Money,” a poem that excoriates capitalism in terms of how it negatively affects the world: “Big money fraks people/drains the human aquifer.” These poems are wake-up calls to how we live in the world. Do we follow blindly, or lift our heads to look around and change our poor behaviour?

If the reader hasn’t already thought about the way humans negatively affect the natural environment, If I Didn’t Love the River leads them in that direction. In “What the Albatross Has Round Its Neck,” the poet laments  “the death of fish/the death of sea lions/the extinction of polar bears/the passing of the otter.” In “Your Brand New Bag,” plastic bags become “White cauls/Jurassic ghosts/mouthing our groceries//choking our birds/clinging to us//hanging from our wrists/like burned skin.”

Often referred to as The People’s Poet, those who have read Robert Priest’s poems for years will know that there will be likely be a call for social justice, for activism, in them. In “Hunger Knows No Lockdown,” a pandemic era poem, he appraises the plight of those who are already marginalized. “Hunger keeps no distance/It comes in close and gets at the throat/devouring muscle/weighing down the head.” In “Egalitarian,” the speaker assesses the risks of wishing for one’s fair share of the world’s pain. “Add up the pain of modern slavery--/of child mortality, of those in jails/and old age homes, of refugees and all the agony/of poverty—then put my own upon the scale.” Our own pains and challenges, he concludes, are ones we’ll likely “stick with.”

In the latter portion of If I Didn’t Love the River, Priest returns to the theme of love with “My Women Named Marsha Kirzner Thing,” and “Nothing Made This Love Inevitable.” In “You Were There,” he writes: “Every place I left/you left with me/And when I got anywhere/it was like you had preceded me/It was like you had always been there/awaiting my arrival.” Despite the hardships of being human, there is hope in the love that winds like a river through these poems. There are rivers that are watched by far-off stars, and love that gathers us together—individually and collectively—even when we straggle haphazardly through difficult times. That hope is the very thing that makes this collection of poems sing with a clear voice.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim’s first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com