Tomorrow Is a Holiday, Hamish Ballantyne
New Star Books, 2024
I’ve been looking forward to Vancouver writer Hamish Ballantyne’s’s Tomorrow Is a Holiday since Rolf Mauer announced he would be publishing it and Rob Manery would be working with Rolf and Hamish as the book’s editor. Nice that Rob should be attached, given that he introduced Hamish to so many of us when he published his poems in SOME’s fifth issue. After reading Hamish’s SOME poems, I learned of his chapbook, Imitation Crab (Knife Fork Book, 2020), and a more recent chapbook called Blue Knight (auric press, 2022), not to mention poems in journals like The Chicago Review and Blazing Stadium.
Tomorrow Is a Holiday begins with its title, with its beautiful, if not sudden, retro-temporal suspension (learning that tomorrow is a holiday and its immediate effect on the texture of today), then its bio. We are quick to look at bios -- to see if the writer looks like us, has published in places we recognize as maintaining a standard worth aspiring to, to learn what they do for a living. In Hamish’s case, he “works seasonally as a mushroom picker and works in the Downtown Eastside the rest of the year” (the latter presumably as a community care worker). Does this work have bearing on the “content” of his poems? Yes, but not in the way we think of when we think of what used to be called “work writing.” The same might be said of the book’s “style”. Is it “language-oriented writing” because it “lacks” narrative insoles? Because it prefers syntactic knots to rhetorical zip lines? Do these distinctions mean anything anymore? They do to some.
The book is comprised of four sections, the last of which -- “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK” -- consists of the poet’s irreverent or otherwise translations of three longer poems by 16th century Carmelite mystic San Juan de la Cruz (1542-91). The first section -- “Hansom” -- is also “about” a figure, a contemporary one, the kind endemic to any focused, if not improvised, gathering -- be it a mushroom-pickers’ forest collection centre or, as is increasingly common, an inner-city park, like Vancouver’s well-publicized Oppenheimer, Crab and Strathcona Park homeless encampments of the last decade.
Here’s the third page of “Hansom”:
learn from
facebook that guy Hansom
threatened to
stab
me with a
triangle of porcelain
when shouting
with my friend he woke
from a
nightmare he is dead
a bbq for him
The structural similarities between “rural” and “urban” dynamics, exemplified as much through behaviour (swatting at mosquitoes) as through language (the mosquitoes themselves), not to mention the poet’s participation in these societies (simultaneously, binaries be damned), is to my mind the book’s great social achievement. Indeed, we find these similarities underscored in the title of the book’s third section -- “A&Ws” -- in reference to a fast-food franchise whose outlets look the same whether they are off the highway north of Campbell River or in the heart of downtown Vancouver.
Here are first
six lines of the poem’s third page:
a letter from
jimmy buffet to
benjamin
treating the form
of appearance
of movement arrested
in the
billboards advertising
billboard
space: a whale encounters
an enormous
incarcerated krill in a submarine
The image of a tightly wound, brainiac, “One-Way Street”-era Walter Benjamin receiving a letter from a ludic, don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff, parrot-toting Jimmy Buffet is cutely funny and there to show range. The poet demonstrates he can be both of these men, but is he a better man for it? Indeed, there are a lot of men involved in the production of this book and the turning of its lyric gyres (a she/her appears rambunctiously in the book’s second section, “Luthier,” but her energy is frowned upon and she disappears just as quickly), which has me wondering, Does Tomorrow Is a Holiday make a case as a course add for a Masculine Studies module?
Here is “8” from “Luthier”:
and I DON’T
even KNOW her I’m just pet-sitting
the rabbits of
someone who did
she came up
with sweatsuits she
boosted and
none of us wanted
the sweatsuits
she jubilantly cast out
the window they
hung flapping from
the hotel sign
for weeks
Early in my reading of Tomorrow Is a Holiday I was watchful for traces of more-northern B.C. landscape poets Ken Belford (1946-2020) and Barry McKinnon (1944-2023), but Hamish Ballantyne brings something different to the innovative Nature/Culture trails these two writers blazed. For Hamish is a more complicated man, of a generation that grew up when testosterone was spoken of as if it were a disease, resulting in a more self-regulated man, compared to Belford and McKinnon, who were born at a time of ferocious male privilege, when testosterone was closer to a working drug. I am, generally speaking, nervous about this new man, his reactionary potential, though I remain curious about where his poetry will take us.
Michael Turner was raised in the garrison town of Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish land. His books include Hard Core Logo, Kingsway, The Pornographer’s Poem, 8x10, 9x11 and (this summer, with Anvil Press) Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems. This July he, Joi T. Arcan, Whess Harmon and August Klinburg will lead the Banff Centre’s Visual Arts Thematic Residency Get LIT! Language, Image, Text.