A Bouquet Brought Back from Space, Kevin Spenst
Anvil
Press, 2024
It was our iceberg-calving father on the
lazy-boy
who collapsed our home into cold waves…
A Bouquet Brought Back from Space is Kevin Spenst’s fourth book of poems. In many respects, it is his most ambitious and fully realised collection to date. Those astute enough in their literary tastes to have read this prolific poet’s three predecessor collections (and his 16 chapbooks) will recognise some familiar themes in Bouquet. They will also discern a broadening and deepening in the sophistication of Spenst’s unique poetic voice.
As was the case in his previous works, the spectre of mental illness casts a long shadow across the poems in this new collection. Spenst makes no secret of the fact that his father suffered from an intractable schizophrenia. He was in and out of hospital repeatedly over several decades which overlapped with the poet’s childhood and young adulthood, forcing the young Spenst constantly to seek “distraction from [his] father’s/ mind as he jettisoned jobs, crankcases, tools, and fortnights of sleep”. Yet, for all that, and despite the resulting trauma that subsists into the present, Spenst declares that his father was the “one man/ he loved most”.
It occurred
under the radiation
of the moon,
that the boy could never
trust his fellow
man ever since the one man
he loved most
had gone lunar…
[From “The Moon’s Woodcutter Beholds”]
The imprint of troubled childhood experiences is everywhere to be seen in Spenst’s present worldview and sensibilities; it emerges repeatedly in poems that carefully dissect and lay bare the consequences of growing up alongside mental illness within the family. As one would expect from this poet, though, the subject is treated with, by turns, bone-chilling starkness, respectful humour and a deep tenderness. An example of the latter is found in “Kneeling by the Side of the Bed, He Taught Me to Pray”:
… I wish I could go back with what I know
now and work on the mechanics of our awk-
wardness, to stop mid-prayer and tell my
dad
he wasn’t a sin-wrecked failure… just
different.
Religion also permeates the poems in Bouquet, just as it does the poems in the earlier collections: Jabbering with Bing Bong (2015), Ignite (2016) and (to a lesser extent) Hearts Amok (2020). Kevin Spenst grew up in Canada in a Mennonite family. His parents were but one remove from the sternness and austerity of their Low German-speaking parents—immigrants from Russia and Ukraine—and many strict Mennonite ways and customs informed Kevin’s own upbringing. It is plain that some of the constraints and Biblical strictures associated with that culture added to, and did not ameliorate, the effects of his father’s mental illness upon the trajectory of his own upbringing and development. But, perhaps surprisingly, like the love that Spenst still carries for his father, a somewhat sui generis form of faith seems to have survived all of that. Thus, the large questions of virtue, sin and redemption continue to preoccupy Spenst; they are, however, interrogated insistently, intelligently and with the added wisdom and insight that come with having witnessed both the failures and comforts that are available through institutionalised religion in times of great personal difficulty.
Angels are of course intriguing but one approaches them warily in poetry, no? You need not fear. There’s no cloying sentimentality here. While angels do appear quite frequently in the poems in Bouquet, they are almost always delightfully, refreshingly, unconventional (such as the ones who “strive to do their best to resemble/ clouds, potatoes and a handful of bones// in hard bargaining”).
Importantly, the darkness and turmoil captured by the poems in Bouquet—both earthly and celestial—are leavened by rays of sunlight that shine brightly out of Spenst’s approach to the subject of love. Here, he is on solid and familiar ground. Spenst well knows the effects of love’s wondrous power in his own life and he is better than most poets at decanting those effects from experience and pouring their essences beautifully onto the page. The result is that, at the end of the day, Bouquet offers the reader a balanced and highly textured treatment of life’s riches and torments which captures, with admirable deftness, the contours and nuances of both.
Spenst’s mother, a complicated figure—though in a very different way than his father—emerges in the poems in Bouquet as a bulwark. Her intelligence and faith enable her to serve as a quiet, calming force within the family. She is a diffident woman whose actions were clearly loving but who “coughs over/the word love”. Thus,
…when her husband swatted at
unseen skirmishes from his head, our
mother’s smarts
rose to the surface to protect us. To this day,
her faith is encoded privately…
The above-mentioned familial polarities of safety and stability on the one hand, and chaos and insanity on the other, provoked the kinds of imaginings on Spenst’s part during his early years that would surely stir even the hardest of hearts:
…Like many, I imagined myself adopted
and rummaged through her bedroom closet
for documents
signed by my real parents…
Many of the immediately foregoing quotations come from a powerful and poignant poem about languages and their power to divide and confound that appears early in Bouquet. It is cleverly entitled (BigGermanDialectWordClankinglyInsertedHere!”) and it ends with a cri de coeur that is at once plaintive and defiant.
… How have we fallen
through the ages to sprawl in this miracle
moment
through which we reword ourselves with language
that keeps layering in the exceptions and
exemptions of
time’s twists, burls and roots, while knowing…
silence is the most articulate thing
from the night sky of our open mouths…
We must be thankful that Kevin Spenst defiantly transcended the beauty of silence he acknowledged so lyrically in that quotation. Bouquet is the proof of that; its collection of well-chosen and well-ordered words and phrases may indeed be the “most articulate thing” to have yet emerged from the “night sky” of his emotionally rich yet complex life.
Like this reviewer, Spenst has devoted a considerable amount of his reading life to navigating and re-navigating the mysteries and magic of the writings of James Joyce. Traces of Joycean wordplay—foreign borrowings, coinings, humorous concatenations—proliferate in Bouquet as they do in Ulysses, each instance of it adding luminosity and a delightful frisson to Spenst’s poems. Thus, in “A Prayer to the Dissenter” we have William Blake looking up into “the darksome air”. In “Through Cloud Cartilage and Guesswork”, Spenst asks, rhetorically, “what is a stranger but an opulence of secrets[?]”. In “The Geometry of Wind Chimes”, the angels “assigned to Mennonites at the schism” preserve a God who is, Himself:
… nothing
but a bureaucratic sprawl of angels
within the slow ambit of a millimeter
clangoring against the nearest husk.
The
poem “Hildepartchment Excelsus von Bingen” begins, mischievously:
Upon the Great Bindle Stick of the via
ferrea,
a Partch’s clanging thirsts for the
inscape of all.
A vagabond composer seeking unselving,
And the soul-deep sound of the plaustrum’s
boodle…
Tasty morsels, these, with light seasonings added here and there that just may have been inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”.
One could go on endlessly in a review of this kind but space does not permit that.
So.
Perhaps the right way to close is to acknowledge again the stunning love poetry that, together with Spenst’s quirky humour, leavens and balances out the more troubled memory pieces that comprise Bouquet. Kevin Spenst’s love poetry is, like his other writing, wildly innovative. But it is also exquisitely tender.
“In the Middle of the Trembling Park” provides a good example. The poem chronicles an encounter between two lovers early in their relationship. It concludes gently and joyously, with the final line delicately ornamented by a perfectly wrought Joycean coining:
…The sun did its thing
over other bodies while we changed shapes like
cloudbursts on the tremoring corners of your bed.
Just one more.
Though playfully entitled “On the Origins of the Specious”, this poem is a serious meditation on love built on scaffolding supplied by the science of Darwinian evolution. It deserves to be made into a broadsheet, to be read at weddings, to be displayed on the Sony Jumbotron display screen at Times Square. Res ipsa loquitur, as the lawyers and judges say: it speaks for itself.
On the Origins of the Specious:
Our lungs were once wings which, under millions
of years of weighted words, took flight
from fancy and here I am, winded
and grounded, wondering
what we might
have been,
but you are
my guest here under
these gusts of wayward
blows and what I meant to say
under this evolution of blue is that I will make
up as much as I can from scales to feathers for you
P.W. Bridgman lives and writes in Vancouver. His fifth book—comprising new poems coupled with a novella in verse—is entitled The Word You Now Own and is due out from Ekstasis Editions in the late spring of 2024. You may visit his website at www.pwbridgman.ca and follow him on Twitter at @PWB_writer1.
