Julian Day : Nectarine, by Chad Campbell

Nectarine, Chad Campbell
Signal Editions, 2021

 

 

 

          Death and its divide stalk the poems of Chad Campbell’s second collection, Nectarine (Signal Editions, 2021). Following his debut, Laws & Locks (Signal Editions, 2015), Nectarine traces themes of violence, loss, and exit across islands and forests, through lakes and locks, upriver to cabins, shacks, cities, prairie towns. And through this path there is a sloughing. The physical body comes apart. In its undoing, the thin layer between worlds is revealed: translucent and blue, as if a pane of glass.

          Campbell’s dead do not speak. Animal or human, their silence serves as record and accusation in the eye of the witness. In “Funk Island”, a man takes two auks from their stone pen to a cauldron, wordlessly boiling them alive. In “Hatchback Engines”, the reverberation of an explosion before the body is found, the remains of a boy in his burnt-out car, where he lit a stick of dynamite, and held it close, and died.

          The thin line between living and dead – and their closeness thereafter – is Nectarine’s central theme. Campbell uses daubs of colour to mark the inhabitants of each world. In “The Fisherman”, the short, hard rhythms act like the strokes of a scaling knife, echoing the effect Steven Heighton employs for his swimmer in “Endurance”:

          Bent over a bucket, took out a knife
                    and turned the blade of it into the work,
                    scales fell silver, beryl, blue,
                    the smooth exactness of his hand flaring

Blue for the dead and their witnesses: the beryl-and-blue scales of that dead or dying fish; for the blue of a kingfisher, the boundary-breaking bird, lodged like “a blue spirit in the hollow of a tree” (“Sanders Rare Prints”); for the pebbled blue eyes of a wolf staring at a frozen calf that has fallen through the ice and died (“The Invention of Glass”).

Campbell’s use of blue for the dead contrasts how he uses other colours, yellow and red and orange representing the small fires of the still-living. There are the yellow pebbles taken from a tow path, “the rations of glances of you / I didn’t know I had left” (“Yellow Pebbles”); the fire of the red hair “a river, / and yes, it extends—the season / on which all my seasons depend” (“The Fifth Season”); the orange of a liquid taken to hold on to life, drunk to “make the nerves fluoresce / around the tumours pressing in his throat (“The Map of the Earth at Night”).

          The poems in Nectarine know how to sit at the uneasy border between worlds. In “At the Surabaya Zoo”, a bear stares brokenly at a few apples. In “The Tin-Legged God”, the speaker describes someone they know, dancing by the pool table with friends in a small town bar, as one of many “figures who remain / in loops.” Campbell’s subjects show that death is not the only stillness, that not just the dead can be trapped in amber. There are many ways to live, or not, the demarcation lines never visible, and excruciatingly thin.

And though the seasons shift throughout the collection, an undercurrent of cold and winter is always present. Within these poems there is a particular chill, one that circumscribes both the scenes and their witnesses. This can be literal – the auks on Funk Island in the cold late summer, trapped first by their pen, then the cauldron; the calf under ice; or the cold that “winnows at the keyhole, would / blow out the ember and sweep the dust of you” (“The Cold”). But it is also implicitly present in the landscape of the poems, in houses in which fires go out (“The Fifth Season”), only to be relit, later on, as veins of mica along the coastline of Kejimkujik, where “you can sway / in the head of a pine watching the long lines / of the dead who cannot turn their caravans / home” (“The Map of the Earth at Night”). Witnessing the travels of the dead and lost is never comfortable. And in his careful use of rhythm and chime, in the compression of his scenes, Campbell creates a tight focus, inviting us to watch the episodic parade of the passed.

          Though elegy is present in so many of these works, it is only explicitly named once. In “Chromophilia”, the speaker describes a night on a prairie hillside, being told by a companion that an elegy will “swim into the ocean / until you either fall together underneath the water / or swim back ashore.” Nectarine subverts this. Neither drowning nor returning, the poems catch a current that carries them indefinitely. Rather than crossing over, or back, they travel the ocean separating the worlds, floating on its cold, black water, the horizon indistinct in every direction, and always impossibly far away.

 

 

 

 

Julian Day lives in Winnipeg. His debut chapbook is Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021).

Julian Day : on +doc and null pointer press

 

 

 

 

I started null pointer press in November 2020 and it’s impossible not to talk about the pandemic. I was going out once a week for groceries. I spent the days working in a dark basement office. The days folded into each other, and it was hard to tell one from the next. My dog had died a couple weeks earlier and I was feeling the potent combination of dullness and restlessness. I remember being tired of reading perfect, polished, bloodless poems. I logged on to Twitter to tweet:

I got responses. I got a lot of responses. And the replies surprised me. Me too! ; I have dozens of these ; If you are interested in including translations, I may have something for you! I looked at these lighting up my phone and figured, well done Julian, now you’ve got a decision to make. Posting is easy. If I didn’t follow through with this, it would become just another hypothetical project floated online. God knows there’s enough of those. I felt a jolt of something. I decided to do it.

Shortly after, I put out a call, received a number of submissions, and solicited quite a few others. Most of the poets I solicited replied, though only maybe half of them were interested and sent work. I included a few longshots (nationally/internationally lauded, many-award-winning types). Most didn’t reply, but one sent work, to this nobody’s first project out of Winnipeg. I was staggered at the trust. I remember thinking, you are not allowed to fuck this up.

In one of our emails while I was asking around the possibility of work, rob mclennan asked me: have you a pressname? Very cheeky, knowing exactly what he was doing, making me think about plans and permanence and what I want to do next, and definitely making me consider this as something more than a one-off. So I googled a few names, and surprisingly, they were all taken, either now or at some point in the past. Reaching past geography (I remember my first choice being three pines, based on the three huge pines that grew at my old house in St. Vital), I decided to go with something more technological, knowing it was unlikely to be taken.

null pointer press is a nod to my technical life, pointers being concepts you have to deal with in systems programming languages such as C. The name was a reference to the illegitimacy I felt declaring a small press with literally zero experience – in programming languages, null pointers don’t point to valid objects. I didn’t fully understand at the time just how many small presses are solo operations, a single person with access to a printer or photocopier, a stapler or needle and thread, making something meaningful and beautiful in the time they can find. That there is room for all types.

In the months between, as I received work and started thinking about its potential orderings, I registered my press name with Library & Archives Canada so I could get myself an ISBN. I figured out how to lay out a chapbook, making a little pamphlet from one of my long poems. Figured out the value of test prints as I fidgeted with margins and font and layout. Came to a solid, repeatable process.

In late February of 2021, I released Odd Poems 2021, a one off (maybe?) anthology of work by Canadian, American, Israeli, and Nigerian poets. I sent out contributor copies. I advertised on Twitter and sold some more copies. Suddenly, it was all very real: I had a small press, and I had copies going out across the world.

But then with this done, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. At the time I was working on a couple of long poems, and not seeing that sort of work represented in the magazines and venues I was reading. Twitter favours the short and snappy (the bots that tweet Basho, or Sappho fragments; the people who tweet a small poem or excerpt every few days). Most Canadian lit mags contain short stories, poems, creative nonfiction, a few pages of reviews at the end. Given the space allocated for poetry, the desire of most magazines seems to be to maximize the number of people or poems published. Sometimes you’ll see a short sequence, but typically the poems are a page or less. Very rare to see a single poem that takes up a few pages. There’s the odd opportunity for long poems, such as the Malahat’s biennial contest, but that’s, well, biennial. I mostly write shorter poems. But I have several longer, largely finished pieces. I remember thinking: this has got to be representative. People have to be sitting on longer work.

I knew I wanted to keep making physical things. I like picking up books, reading for a while, bookmarking them, putting them down. Ironically, given what I do for a living, I’ve never really enjoyed electronic editions all that much, except maybe for the convenience. I’m always concerned about longevity. Will this be available in twenty-five years? Things are better today with cloud storage, but that’s only around as long as the company is. Will we still have PDFs in two decades? Will the format be readable, or superseded? Will Google close down Drive, like so many of its other services? How much gets lost when our computers crash, when online lit mags shutter, when we switch providers, lose passwords?

I decided to make a long poems journal. I decided it needed to be print, and biannual. And after bouncing some potential names off friends, I landed on +doc, liking the snappy feel, its suggestion of longer work.

I put out a call and I got a surprising number of responses. The first issue featured work by rob mclennan, Tom Snarsky, and melanie brannagan frederiksen; the second, Grant Wilkins and Amanda Earl. Since then I haven’t had as many submissions, but I also don’t put out calls on Twitter, just on my website (which I suspect gets very few visitors). Word of mouth seems to attract great work: Robert Hogg heard about it during an online chat with Grant and Chris Turnbull. I’ve only solicited one poem of the nine published so far, and I haven’t had to turn down work since the first couple issues were set, which makes me happy. If I’m offered good, interesting work, I’ll want to publish it, though I’m often a bit regretful of the long publishing cycle. I typically plan two issues at a time: for +doc.4, there was more than a year between accepting Jake Byrne’s “No. 21 THE WORLD” and sending it out.

The goal from the beginning has been to put out more long poems. The happy side effect has been being trusted to read lots of long poems in a variety of styles. To figure out which might work together, and when. How to order them. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways that submitted work can unknowingly play off other accepted pieces. For Odd Poems 2021, Jordan Abel’s piece was the last to arrive, and seemed in some ways to bind things together, working in interesting ways off the language in Susan Gillis’ and Eduardo C. Corral’s poems. In +doc.1, I loved the juxtaposition of outside-inside-outside between the three poems. And so on.

Since the first issue of +doc, the magazine has been physically large. Two of the poems from that first issue (rob mclennan’s “What they write in the snow” and melanie brannagan frederiksen’s “the third season”) were naturally long-lined, and fitting this in something based on folded letter paper would either require miniscule typography, or compromise. So I decided to work with folded legal paper, which allowed those longer lines to breathe, gave more blank space on the page, and, I hope, allowed the intended flow. Interestingly, many of the poems I’ve accepted have been long-lined: only a couple (Amanda Earl’s “BLOOMS, PAIN, STRATEGIES” in +doc.2, and Robert Hogg’s “John Charley—Stacking Hay—Successful Indian Farmer”, +doc.3) have had shorter lines. I was surprised, and if you had asked me what my expectations were before I started, I would’ve guessed the opposite, that what I saw in published shorter poems would be representative of longer ones as well.

Despite the explosion in literary magazines in the last ten years, with WordPress and other options making it pretty painless to stand up something that looks good, it would be easy to say there is too much poetry. And yet, people are sending me these incredible longer poems, that should’ve been published elsewhere, but haven’t. Long poems fascinate me because of the potential that comes from using more space, in a number of senses. Once you jettison the idea that a poem has to be around a page in length, or resolve itself neatly, or any of the many implicit ideas that seem to steer selection at traditional literary magazines, then the possibilities really open up. Even if (especially if?) the finished product is closer to a zine, made on a black and white laser printer and bound with staples.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable talking about artistic statements, but I want the things I make to look a little more handmade, a little less perfect. I want to pay people a little, and I want to offer what I produce for very little money. I basically ask for the cost of postage. If you find me in person with copies, you can have one for free. I absorb toner and paper and all the little things myself. I don’t have any funding other than what I set aside, and I like it that way. My costs are relatively low. I probably spend more money paying poets than I do on supplies, which is great. A typical year sees me buying a few packages of legal paper, maybe some toner, covers at the copy shop. I feed and print and staple and fold a hundred copies or so for a pair of issues.

Ryan Fitzpatrick talks about 50 copies as being a magic number for him. It seems to be a good number for me, too. After contributor copies, I sell some copies after announcing on my blog and social media (though probably it’s all from Twitter, let’s be honest). I normally don’t sell out, although I eventually have, twice. But I like having extras on hand, because the odd order does come in between. Or the opportunity for trades. It’s nice to have the copies available.

Given all this, I see null pointer press as a small success – I’m putting new poetry into people’s hands, paying poets a little, and every so often I get a, wow this poem is good from someone online (yeah!) – though I try to stop myself to keep from thinking in those terms, success and failure. Better to think in terms of objectives: I’ve published a couple dozen poets, and I want to publish more long poems. I also want to think about sustainable possibilities that’ll let me balance everything else in my life. A journal of very small poems? Do I ever want to think about doing traditional chapbooks? What’s my upper limit, here?

I don’t know how long this will all hold up, if null pointer press will be long-lived or not. Most small presses and lit mags seem to have a run of a few years or so, the ones surviving longer being outliers. Here I am at year two-and-a-bit. I’ve got a process in place, a loose schedule. I’ve tried to set myself up for the long term: two issues per year is sustainable in terms of effort and costs and the understanding that there are a lot fewer longer poems than short.

Submissions are sporadic, which is fine. I should probably advertise more widely, but I hate turning down good work. Last year I got a submission literally on January 1^st, and this year there’s been nothing so far (though someone I’ve poked in the past has mentioned sending work in the last few weeks, so, we’ll see!). I think the key thing for me is to keep the press at a level where I’m not overworked and I’m not worried about funding. I can keep going in the months of silence, in the face of radio static. I’ve always been amazed by how these things find their audience, and so as long as I’m selling some copies, as long as people are sending in work, I’ll try to keep going. Who knows what the years ahead will bring. But hopefully a lot more poetry.

Julian Day is a poet and software developer living in Winnipeg, where he operates null pointer press. His debut chapbook is Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021).

Julian Day : notes from the field : Winnipeg, MB

 

 

 

Deciding immediately on a fragmentary format, something note-like, a listing – an admission and an apology that there is so much in this city beyond my gaze. This list mostly poetry (another apology).

*

I’ve lived most of my life on the prairies, apart from my early childhood in Vancouver, and a year spent in Ottawa. Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 territory, is at the very eastern edge of the prairies – any further and you hit the shield. But the wide-open city is still the prairies, I tell myself; it still counts, it still counts.

*

Don’t mention the pandemic. But I can’t help myself. It might feel gauche or cliché at this particular moment, but the alternative is a lack of record.

*

When I grew up in Saskatchewan in the 1990s, the province in the middle of a long bleed. A few hundred here and there, a few thousand a year. People left for the usual reasons: jobs, restlessness, sometimes love. And while it’s easier to make a living in Calgary, or Vancouver, or Toronto, you can (and should) make art anywhere. A few of my high school classmates also ended up here; the writer and artist Alexis Kinloch runs Also As Well Too, a small press and gallery/library for art books and art-related small press works. She solicited donations, receiving a huge number of items from all over the world. The library is in-house, and held weekly open hours before the pandemic.

*

Collaborations have always existed in Canadian poetry (Pain Not Bread, Yoko’s Dogs) but there seems to be more of these recently (VII, MA|DE, and others). I wonder what could that look like here?

*

An embarrassing admission: I’ve never attended THIN AIR. Another item for the list of post-pandemic resolutions. I’ve never attended Folk Fest, either. Do I really live here?

*

Every spring, the Winnipeg Free Press runs an annual feature for National Poetry Month, curated by Ariel Gordon, with portraits of the poets by photographer Mike Deal. For someone like me, more reclusive than I ought to be, it has been an introduction to so many local poets. It was also my own debut in 2017, and a thrill to read alongside Jason Stefanik, George Amabile, Angeline Schellenberg, and others at the launch.

*

The city is lucky to have two old and well-established lit mags in CV2 and Prairie Fire. Canadian journals have been doing important work in recent years in working towards more diverse contributors and editorial staffs – whether cultural backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, marginalized identities – and CV2 and Prairie Fire produced the notable collaborative double-issue ndncountry a couple years back. I’m looking forward to CV2’s issue next year on sick poetics. But aside from these magazines, there is a new-ish-comer in Red Rising, founded in the mid 2010s as an Indigenous collective, that puts out an annual magazine of poetry, stories, art and music.

*

One of the editors of the planned CV2 sick poetics issue is Eileen Mary Holowka, who developed the story/game/prose poem c i r c u i t s, which I’ve thought about and have come back to periodically since I first played it in 2018. She originally published a fragment of it in the annual WFP feature: Here is what you must do: ...

*

The world is on fire and the water’s rising, but CV2’s annual 2-day poem contest, held each April, helps me forget this a bit. I meticulously clear the weekend to try to make a sane poem that includes the provided words. By the end I want to burn the page and drown my sorrows: serpentine, gnathic; tub, frisson; octothorpe…

*

One of my favourite works last year: Pandemic Papers Phase One by Ariel Gordon and her sister, the artist Natalie Baird, published by At Bay Press. Poems and drawings made collaboratively together on bits of paper, more wrapped than bound, documenting the fears and quotidian that so many of us had in the first few months of lockdown. The feel closer to a handmade artifact rather than a book, something made rather than produced. I’ve been impressed by At Bay’s range – a literary press that publishes not just fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, but also sci-fi, fantasy, graphic novels, and other forms.

*

If Vancouver is a city that often appears centrally in poets’ work – George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies, Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Shadow List – how does Winnipeg work? While the city will never compete with the west coast’s temperate glamour, I’ve been struck by how central certain parts of the city are to poets – Jason Stefanik and Katherena Vermette’s North End, Transcona for Jon Paul Fiorentino, Ariel Gordon’s urban forests, Catherine Hunter and Saint Boniface. Then the rivers, as in Di Brandt’s “Nine River Ghazals” (Canadian Journal of Environmental Education), melanie brannagan frederiksen’s “The third season” (+doc.1) …

*

I had the pleasure of reading at a couple of CV2 launches, before the pandemic, and have always come away in wonder at how many good, bookless poets there are in this city: a short list should include at least Chimwemwe Undi, Marika Prokosh, Rachel Burlock, melanie brannagan frederiksen, and until recently, Tamar Rubin (congratulations!).

*

How did I learn about Bola Opaleke’s work online long before I knew he was from Winnipeg?

*

I’d love to see a new collection from Ted Landrum.

*

After making my way back to writing, starting around 2015, I started going to some readings around town, but not enough. The pandemic has a way of crystallizing that shame: a year passes, maybe two (we’ll see about three), without the strange comfort of sipping coffee and cramming in next to strangers in the atrium at McNally Robinson. I’ve taken in more Zoom/Facebook Live/etc readings in the last year than in the last four before that, met incredible people from across the world, and yet my knowledge of who writes here remains woefully incomplete. Easy enough to promise to take in more once things get back to normal; when will that be? But at least for now, some things are easier – Speaking Crow’s gone fully virtual –

*

Turnstone is 45 years old this year, and to celebrate, the press is running a year-long reading series, 2poem², curated by Sarah Ens. Each Tuesday, a Turnstone poet reads with another Canadian poet. Readers have include Jennifer Still, Steven Ross Smith, Alice Major, rob mclennan, Dennis Cooley, and others. It’s been a welcome weekly addition to my YouTube viewing.

*

Also hoping that some things remain: that while I’m able to take in readings at McNally and elsewhere, I’ll still be able to hear poets I’ve connected with in the last year from New York, Florida, Ireland and elsewhere, and that I’ll still get to agonize between two readings scheduled over the same date and time. That we’ll continue to record the readings and make them available online.

*

The nagging feeling: who am I missing? It’s okay. I’m sure I’ll remember after the post goes live.

 

 

 

Julian Day is a poet and software developer from Winnipeg. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Banshee, and Riddle Fence, and his debut chapbook is Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021).

Russell Carisse : Late Summer Flowers, by Julian Day

Late Summer Flowers, Julian Day
Anstruther Press, 2021

 

 

 

One is confronted and comforted by a strange familiarity, in Julian Day’s chapbook, Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press). A familiar one seeks out to revisit, or rather revisits one as companion along journeys into memories of past loves, old towns, and localized mythologies. Joined with the start by a poet's familiar, the roads lead back home to the unfinishing resolution of an old lover, a funerary process one is glad to have this companionship for, while tender subjects are rehashed with soft hands. Here also, are the records of out of the way places and their witness to lores of shared culpability in these names expressed, marking places, as they are struck out like passing signs on the highway. Names to be mouthed in their creative destuction. And yet, one is often stopping roadside to pick ditch-weeds, and smoke/share other late summer flowers, with stolen time together in the glacial pause of emence landscapes and small towns, where one can find new points in the constellation of these poems, and feel welcome to revisit moments of transformation, growth, death in this “the final naming of things”.

 

 

 

 

Russell Carisse is currently hiding in the woods, until it's safe to come out. Their half-baked ideas are found in antilang.magazine, The Quarantine Review, Utopia Project, The Pi Review, Funicular, Periodicities, Still: The Journal, The Paragon Journal, in translation at Le Watts Revue, Nomography (Sideroxylon, 2020), and forthcoming debut chapbook BRICKWORKS (Frog Hollow Press).

Kim Fahner : Late Summer Flowers, by Julian Day

Late Summer Flowers, Julian Day
Anstruther Press, 2021.

 

 

 

 

Anstruther Press has a reputation for publishing beautiful chapbooks. It comes as no surprise, then, that Julian Day’s Late Summer Flowers is no exception to the rule. Set in Saskatchewan, Day’s debut chapbook is a lovely thing. If you’ve travelled to Saskatchewan, you’ll recognize the wide open space that the landscape offers to the poet. That sense of spaciousness is present in Day’s work.

In “Qu’Appelle Moon,” Day conjures up the space of the valley itself, referring to the moon as a “pearl over water,” a “prairie lantern,” a “coyote’s eye,” and even as a compass. It is, he writes, the “last lamp/before the final naming of things.” In “Saskatchewan,” the poet writes about the province being the “middle of the west, an easy trapezoid,” and how it is “a province of winter/rye and wheat, a place you left/but never plan to leave.” He speaks about how there is beauty in Saskatchewan’s “show of what’s wide open,/whether the sky or the sharptail’s refusal of it.” The landscape of the place causes you to pause, to stop and take stock of internal things.

There is an underlying sense of nostalgia in this collection, of remembering and longing for moments of connection from years gone by. In “Godzilla (1998),” the speaker refers to the unspoken boundaries that often exist between close male-female friendships and romantic relationships, and how tenuous a line that can sometimes be. The poet writes: “The world may not have been simpler then,/but we could explain away the rumblings--/that what we felt were only tremors/and not a creature in the seabed.” From a distance, looking back on the past from an older age, we tend to romanticize it all, gloss it over with gilded paint, in sharp contrast to our more consistent responsibilities and worries of having grown up and reached adulthood.

In “Summer Flowers,” the poet documents a youthful relationship that broke apart. The poem begins, beautifully, with the line “I found you at the edge of summer,/falling for the wide-open road/and the French in your voice.” By the final stanza, though, the relationship is “over and ended,” just a “fragment of a moment” in a life’s journey, “two lovers/in a haze of gin and weed, the late summer flowers dying at our feet.” These memories, these absences that are made present, are scattered through the collection in a bittersweet fashion.

Everything here is tied to the natural world and landscape of the prairies. In the landscape, the poet finds comfort and respite. In “Qu’Appelle,” Day writes of how the fields express absence “as flowers, blue notes/resolving to a cadence,/the prairie’s memory/of that moment.” In “Passage,” he writes of how a journey “is not an ending.” This poem is about loss, about illness and mortality, and how people survive after the ones they have loved deeply have departed. There is, he writes, a “summer land,” where “you and I can rest in tallgrass,/and your heavy spirit/can finally find its sleep.” After turmoil, there is a place where a mourner can “follow you/to where your troubles pass/as birds.” If you’ve set foot in Saskatchewan, you’ll likely know this sense of freedom, of how the landscape unlocks the sharp clasp of pain and opens you up to some kind of peace.

There are just ten poems in Julian Day’s Late Summer Flowers, but they feel as if they are windows opened to catch a summer breeze, opening themselves up to encourage the reader to blossom, too. It is a strong debut collection, and I look forward to seeing a full length book of Day’s work sometime soon.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Julian Day : Skylarking, by Mark Callanan

Skylarking, Mark Callanan
Anstruther Press, 2020

 

 

          St. John’s poet Mark Callanan is the author of two previous collections and a chapbook, and Skylarking (Anstruther Press, 2020) is his first publication in almost a decade, since 2011’s Gift Horse (Signal Editions). In its ten poems, grounded in the lyric, Callanan explores through recollection the ways in which distance focuses understanding, and how youth and restlessness echo through the rest of our lives.

          Callanan plays on the title “Skylarking” in a number of senses – several times with its definition as horseplay (as in “The Rider” and “Skylarking”), but also in a very literal sense, as the vehicle in the opening poem, where the speaker and their friends drive a rusted old Buick Skylark carelessly, invincibly past their small town, flipping off other drivers, a twelve-gauge in the trunk, finally arriving at a road outside town, where hopping out of the car:

          … I jumped a culvert,
          hung a pop can on a spruce
          tree near the shoulder. The day
          was dying. Crows gathered
          on the highest branches,
          elemental, perched exactly.
          He took aim. I claimed
          the driver’s seat and waited.
                     (“Shotgun”) 

The poems as a whole represent snapshots of a larger childhood: of being flung over the handlebars of a bike, remembering the “blind animal fear / of what comes next / and what comes next / and what comes after” (“The Rider”); of watching from the periphery, “knights on horseback / surveying a castle under siege” as developers tear down trees and clear an area central to the speaker’s youth (“Mount”); or watching a baseball game in person, trying to make sense of distant figures and the drama of the game without the cadences of TV play-by-play (“The Score”).

Most startling of all the poems is “Science Camp”. In it, camp counsellors slouch their way through their summers, getting drunk in secluded parks and babysitting “the children of parents obsessed / by the notion that summers spent / in idleness are summers wasted.” On the last day of camp, they take the kids on a day trip to a local medical school, to see, “lungs / butterflied like chicken breasts” and “a hand that made a fist / when with a fist you tugged / the tendons like a bell-pull”, and where after,

          … something
          in my circuits changed,
          became rerouted or plain
          burnt out by the thought of us
          all trudging back through
          heavy rain, having seen
          the things of which a man is made …

“Science Camp” harkens back to Gift Horse and its examinations of mortality after a near-death experience; it’s difficult not to read those poems and then see the events detailed in “Science Camp” as emerging from the same source. To the kids, this is just another camp trip, an involuntary way to kill some time on a weekend in early July; but to Callanan, with the benefit of distance and experience, it’s a lesson on impermanence, in the ways our parents warned us when we were children (and which we immediately ignored); and how our roles so suddenly, so jarringly can change, as in “Skylarking”, in which the speaker recalls their own childhood injuries, whether horsing around the house with siblings or flying off a bike into gravel; the realization, having become a parent in the time since, that, “finally I know / the cost of joy awake, aglow”, the italicized text, from George Meredith’s “The Lark Ascending”, another nod to the title of the collection.

A current of restlessness runs through the poems: whether the ease at which a shotgun is unpacked, loaded, and readied; the unreality of watching from the nosebleeds as a pitcher falters under jeers and catcalls; or the grotesque way a preserved hand grasps beyond death as its tendons are pulled and released. Callanan circles back in the final poem, ending the collection the way he started: on the road, the poem’s opening stanza seeming to build once again towards escape. But whereas “Shotgun” finds its home in that space owned by youth, friendship, and unspent energy, “Road Trip” starts there and offers a return. As the speaker and their companion set out, quest-like, on the highway, they find it – the revelation, their quest objective, the “text beneath the text” – only briefly, before it quickly slips away, taking its leave “at a motel / where we stopped to rest”. Drifting over to the shoulder, they stop, let traffic pass them by, before the knowledge settles that it’s in this they’ve found their home: in the drive out and back, in its rhythms and repetitions, but also in the easy familiarity of each other, revisiting over and over “what we knew, the same / old tropes that come at us / again, renewed”.

 

 

 

 

Julian Day lives in Winnipeg. He is the recipient of both an Arc Award of Awesomeness (March 2021), as well as Editor's Mom's Choice in the 2019 CV2 2-Day Poem Contest. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming at Arc (online), Barrelhouse, and Banshee, and his debut chapbook is Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021).