Aaron Tucker: Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent, selected with an introduction by Jake Kennedy

Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent, selected with an introduction by Jake Kennedy
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024

 

 

 

        There are always the specifics and the lyrics details in John Lent’s poems, and in Molecular Cathedrals, a work that spans Lent’s terrific life of poetry, the reader is asked to inhabit the author and the landscapes of Western Canada, the Okanagan Valley in great parts, in the most intimate, direct, and wondrous ways. In this, the poems move the reader around physically and mentally: the pronouns (you, we, I) shift, the reader is the observer and the writer, the hills brown and relight along the lakeshores with the seasons, the lines extend, long and prose-like, like a breath held long, lungs released at the break.

        This is a book that demands that the full collections be sought out. If there is one critique to make of the book is that there is not enough of the poems, a fact made clear by how Lent works in the long form: a reader can take them as individual poems, but those same works really come to life within the scope of the book-length projects they come from, where the conversations and ecosystems are given the space intended. Any of Lent’s works would be worth searching out in full, but Wood Lake Music and Frieze are favourites, a soft spot for Black Horses, Cobalt Suns (my first Lent book), and his later work, Cantilevered Songs, A Matins Flywheel, in full sequence are beautifully meditative, crystalline.

        It’s not to say that the book doesn’t work with the arc it gives; it very much does. Through the decades this book covers, the reader gets a quiet excess of life, life (lives) lived, clear-eyed optimism, and amazement. It is that wonder that lingers throughout, Plath’s angel flaring at the elbow, or at a birdhouse in “Carpenter”:

        …And there it is again, this mystery
        of joining, of intersections, corners, fits, so
        damn important in everything we do, each
        small jazz symphony we might
        construct, for example,
        or song we might want
        to sing in the middle
        of the night, or poem 

Or the morning kitchen, in “Light”:

        You turn a faucet, you
        feel the chrome handle
        while another part of you
        reaches for the coffee beans
        and all surfaces, outside and in,
        are illuminating this instance
        of pure glee, pure surface

This is what I exited the book with, against a world that glooms everyday, that the daily, with enough attention, can also hold dazzle and dignity and a beautiful moment, or string of moments in surprising combination. This collection is an intelligent delight, bookended kindly by Jake Kennedy’s introduction and Lent’s closing essay, worth the investment between the covers and the effort to find the excerpted books in their complete forms.  

 

 

 

 

Aaron Tucker is the author of two novels and three books of poetry, including his latest, the novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys with Coach House Books (2023). He is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Memorial University, where he teaches Media Studies and Creative Writing. More at: www.aarontucker.ca