Stan Rogal: Smoking the City, by Bryan McCarthy

Smoking the City, Bryan McCarthy
McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1965

 

                                                   Yea Yea
                                                              the city burns!                              

                                                    I drag it into subterranean
                                                                                   lungs
                                                    like holy
                                                    marijuana
                                                   — Smoking the City

Who was Bryan McCarthy and why should anyone care? A fair question. After all, he had only one book of poems published in his lifetime, Smoking the City, which I’d obtained from a used bookstore several years ago for the ridiculously low price of two bucks, hardcover. I dragged the copy from my bookshelf recently to give it a re-read, just to see if it stood up to my earlier admiration, considering that my own approach to writing poetry — as well as my personal taste in the genre — has altered over time. The good news is that while I have some trifling complaints, I still enjoy much of McCarthy’s book. Encouraged, I decided to dig a bit deeper into his life to discover more of who he was and what he was about, my curiosity driven by a couple of nagging questions: how did this seemingly unknown person manage to get published by McClelland and Stewart, and why only one book, given its initial praised reception?

          I sought out the oracle, Google, for more information, and found next to nothing about McCarthy, which shouldn’t have been too surprising knowing that Google is often sparse in content when it comes to Canadian personages, especially poets. Referring to the preface in the book itself I learned that McCarthy was born in England in 1930 and emigrated to Canada in 1956, where he took a job on the Mid-Canada radar line, fifteen hundred miles NNE of Montreal. After that he moved to Toronto where he became an editor with a chemical processing magazine. Then, for some unknown reason that I could discover, he moved to Montreal where he decided to try his hand at poetry. Crazy idea, or what? During his time there, he managed to meet up with, and be influenced by, such literary notables as Irving Layton, Al Purdy, and Milton Acorn. How’s that for fortuitous company? In McCarthy’s words, these poets had “forged a poetic idiom that was viable and modern. They’d ruthlessly purged all traces of Nineteenth Century romanticism from their work; in the grain and imagery of their verse, was an awareness of modern life, and the language they used related to contemporary speech.” This keen observation of his, was (for me, at any rate) worth the price of admission and made McCarthy’s own poetry worth more than a casual glance, and deserving more than a mere footnote in the short history of Canadian verse.

          Via the influence of these poets, he began to read voraciously the works of Miller, Orwell, Celine, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Mailer, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti, which might account somewhat for the existential bent with traces of surrealism in his own compositions: “batwingy tenement-passage / where the air / creeps up behind & / jumps you with its urinated blanket.” As well, he and an unknown business partner (plus Milton Acorn and a few others) opened a hangout called The Place on Stanley Street in Montreal, a coffee house-cum-jazz joint (McCarthy himself was a saxophone player and jazz enthusiast: “heads spinning like pineapples / on slow turntables / Coltrane’s sax shimmering / snarling in your sex / everyone hugging jigging jabbering / down / in that hot-lit / yellow cellar —") that apparently attracted every outsider east of San Francisco. The establishment folded in about six months with the partner absconding with the meager proceeds. So much for the artistic camaraderie of like-minded souls. McCarthy states that he had made the scene for a short period, then opted for the middle way, lived quietly, taught at a high school, then married in 1964.

          Which brings me back to my original question: how the heck did Smoking the City come about getting written and subsequently published by a major press in 1965 accompanied by blurbs such as: “Bryan McCarthy’s poetry is written in that no-man’s land between passion and paranoia, at the extreme edges of the human personality. Viciously contemporary, he aims his poems at the reader’s inhibitions and then fires. In his concerns to save man from sex, violence, and inhuman society, he writes desperately, as if he were that last poet alive.” (John Robert Colombo). And: “He has walked down the bright corridors and looked into the deepest abysses, and he has written authentically of those experiences. His is an exciting new voice in Canadian poetry. He will go places and take us along with him.” (Irving Layton).

          Except he didn’t go, but abruptly stopped. It was almost as if a group of enthusiastic beaux amis had snuck into his room while he slept, stole a selection of his poems, put together a manuscript, then hit up a pal at M&S to publish the book while McCarthy remained oblivious, or aloof, even as the tributes poured in. Al Purdy wrote: “Bryan McCarthy distills nightmares from his own nightmares, and nearly-genuine lakes of blood from a puddle of vomit on St. Lawrence-Main. His contacts with the city and other people seen to me surrealistic, and perhaps the more real because this is so. No other poet in Canada looks at urban life this way, sees so much one-sided horror, is so alienated by his environment.”

          While deriding such literary icons as John Newlove, Raymond Souster, Frank Davey, and Louella Booth, critic Edward Lacey said: “Mr. McCarthy’s language and imagery are of course the common idiom of a certain kind of modern poetry, borrowing from science fiction, cinema, technology, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Fearing, etc., etc., and perhaps I dwell unduly on them. But I find these poems very powerful stuff, strongly conceived and sharply executed, especially after the incoherencies of Newlove and the insipidities of Davey. The imagery is fresh and accurate, the language both spare and brilliant and there is a masterly use of repetition, cumulative effect, and symbolism. The poet, the rebel against the system, is pursued and destroyed by the police of society. The theme of catatonia is explicit here: “Nobody moves / we are mad / catatonic — / welded into our madness.””

          Further praise ensued, so what happened? Richard Lemm surmised: “Bryan McCarthy palavered his way to local celebrity for Smoking the City and the central table at the CafT Bistro on Mountain Street, then simply faded out like a plume of marijuana smoke, or, for that matter, like most Montreal poets in the anarchic sixties.”

          Further rumour had it that McCarthy at some point moved back to England where he slowly lost his mind, a one-hit wonder, or, a freakish accident that existed for a brief moment to be observed (experienced) by a reader, an audience, then gone up in flames, nothing left but ashes. Consider his poem, “Poem for Reading”: “This is not a poem I read / very often / It’s not a poem at all but a kind of visual / accident / At the same time it’s a very / mysterious poem — / I want you to observe / very carefully / exactly what happens / and to observe / your own / interpretation of this.”

          The poet’s words spill across the page as a visual accident that serves to create the further phoney device that is the “mysterious” (what?) poem. Next, the poet introduces an object that is supposedly “real” and “recognizable”: “Look: a ten-dollar bill — / it’s genuine — no deception. / And here’s / a box of matches” (one can’t help but think of Magritte’s famous painting titled The Treachery of Images that depicts a pipe and a statement below that reads “This is not a pipe” and how it might apply here). This is followed by: “Now observe / your feelings / carefully.”

          Rather than attempt to elicit a particular feeling or spoon-feed a message — as is often the case for much of today’s poetry — the poem (the poet) invites the reader to step inside the poem, to examine it closely, see how it works, figure out what’s actual, what’s artifice, and judge for themselves how it affects them, intellectually and emotionally.

          And what’s going to happen when those matches are lit (as they must, dear reader, be lit, yes?). I mean, how differently do you react to a poem being produced on a page as opposed to a ten-dollar bill going up in smoke?

          Lacey ends his review with this: “There is a certain limitedness in the range and even the style and language of the poems in Smoking the City; they really are all facets of one another, and Mr. McCarthy cannot go on writing this way indefinitely. It will be interesting to see what a poet of his verve and talent will produce next, provided, of course, that he doesn’t lock away his wings and elect for a very Canadian silence.”

          A very prescient consideration, not unlike the more sensationalist sentiment from one of Neil Young’s songs: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” though Bryan McCarthy has (perhaps) managed to accomplish both with his small book.

          My, my, hey, hey.   

         

         

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.

Kim Fahner : antibody, by Rebecca Salazar

antibody, Rebecca Salazar
McClelland and Stewart, 2025

 

 

 

In Rebecca Salazar’s antibody, the collection that follows on her equally stunning book, sulphurtongue, the poems are rooted in the physicality of human bodies, and grapple with the damage that can be done to a person through sexual violence, PTSD, and trauma. In a place of such darkness, where does one find slivers of light? After a wounding comes healing and then a reclamation of self, identity, and power. That’s where light lives in dark places, and that’s what is conveyed in antibody.

At the start of the book, there is a dedication that also serves as a trigger warning to readers. There’s an honesty here, and a clear voicing of what has traditionally been silenced, as Salazar writes: “To fellow survivors, this offering: these poems relive in graphic detail the experience of sexual violence, silencing, pregnancy loss, chronic illness, and suicidality. What matters more than this book is your consent, your agency in choosing whether or how much of it you read.” The poet, then, at the very start of the collection, reminds the reader of the power of their own agency: it is their choice to read (or not read) onward. For myself as a reader, I read it in little bits, moving forward and then going backwards, dipping in and out as I felt necessary. It was a good lesson for me in how to think more critically about how to manage what could be a challenging, emotional poetic read.

In “True,” the speaker says they study the stories of true crime podcasts, researching men like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson “to read in retrospect how you/groomed me,” realizing as time passes that a memory must be recalibrated “to fit this profile” of “step one love-bomb,/step two gaslight step three nitpick step four blame shift step five break down step six death threat step six death threat step six death threat.” The poem continues, documenting an “explosive narcissist” who is “stoking flammable girls,” grooming them. “True” is logically followed by “Canon,” which takes on the voice of a condescending male editor or professor—someone who enjoys wielding their position of power to female students in the academic hierarchy, perhaps—all in italics: “my face launches a thousand/lawsuits for harassment,/but sweetie, you need me;/just look at your line breaks./allow me to edit your/unasked consent, break/your imagined hymen over/quibbles about hyphens.” Power struggles that exist because of patriarchal organizations have long been exposed by many women writers in their work, but these two poems remind the reader that not many things have changed, even with the rise of feminism over the years. Instead, the patriarchal rot settles in and roots itself in a toxic manner. It is in the voicing of these transgressions and wounds that the poet empowers herself, encouraging her readers to do that as well. Silence does nothing but perpetuate the toxicity; speaking up is the only way.

Struggle, and then survival, play a major role in antibody. Nothing to do with chronic illness is romanticized or glossed over to make it sound less challenging. In “Anaphylaxis,” the speaker spits out reproachful words: “tell me I’m overreacting/this body refuses/to breathe air with yours,” and hypothesizes that “survivor flesh rejects a world/that will not let it live/what can the gut derive/from whiteness and abuse.” The speaker is about to “tattoo this spell               in epi-pen & pfizer on my seizing thigh,” raising their voice in favour of masking up and fighting for greater accessibility. In the face of the dissolution of thoughtfulness around the world, the reader is left to think of what it means to be marginalized by trauma, or by chronic illness, or by a society that seems less and less caring: “I dare you/tell me i overreact/as my skin blooms with hives/ & just try/to shove your matter/down this swollen throat.” Female victims of abuse often—wrongly—find themselves defending their accusations when they ought not to have to be re-traumatized by giving voice to the truth of the offences committed against them. Speaking up against the silencing is so much of the triumph of antibody.

Some of Salazar’s strongest poems are ones with words and names erased. “SLAPP/article i, “SLAPP/article ii”, “SLAPP/article iii”, and “SLAPP/dissolution” are a series of poems that thread their way through the pages of antibody. Text has been redacted so that thick black bars blind the reader, leaving them to imagine names or places or specific references. SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) are defined by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association as “lawsuits, or the threat of a lawsuit, directed against individuals or organizations, in order to silence and deter their public criticisms, and advocacy for change.”

These blacked out, erasure poems are echoed in other poems like “Oilspill,” when the speaker’s voice begins with: “i name ________ and the world ends./run. stop writing & live in margins./never settle longer than a day, carry no comforts.” To speak up means that a woman must risk being further marginalized and re-traumatized. The legal trials that are meant to serve as retribution and justice for victims who speak up are not that at all. Instead, “our trials/taught us well to mince steps, locate drag marks/of a body pulled below.” Those who stand and speak up in support of the victim try to pull her from “apocalyptic waters” and “skirt sinkholes,” end up birthing her “back/to shore, her naked legs necrotic with black welts.” Their rescue of the woman who has dared to speak up lands them on the supposed safety of a well-established shore, but soon enough it is clear that the aftermath of a trial will “churn the beach into a tailings pond,/a petri dish where we, the specimens, are pinned.” Like dead butterflies or insects, to be marked and categorized, the fight seems sometimes too much to bear. One need only look at recent legal cases of public note in Canada to see how the women who speak their truths are retraumatized and punished. Still, speaking up is exactly what must occur for things to change.   

Salazar reaches into an ancient and rich metaphorical body of knowledge and wisdom that is constructed of divination tools—in the archetypal imagery of the Tarot, in astrology, and other ancient teachings. Here, too, there is a reclamation of old teachings that were passed down through the maternal lines. In “Too Late to Say Antediluvian,” the poet writes: “carmen and I bring molten spruce boughs/to the shell of the abandoned church,/adorning crook and crevice with the frizz/of withered branch. i lay my tarot on the altar/where the catholics once broke bread.” In the ruins of an old church, there’s a witchy reclamation of power, an upending and reworking of who has the power to tell the truth, the story. In “San Carmen,” a poem-prayer, the speaker says: “queer ancestress,/brown paper doll torn into convent/schools across los andes, pray for us”, “let us not/be known for silence taught us/by our fathers,” and “let our bodies never/line the gilt floors of school chapels/to be trodden on by men who claimed/our childhoods as communion/to be spilled.” It ends, triumphantly: “let none choose/for us how we choose to breathe.” No man, religion, or organizational structure should define what a person chooses to identify as, or try to push people into categories with labels on them.

Rebecca Salazar’s antibody follows on the heels of the excellent work that the poet was doing in sulphurtongue, crafting a collection of strong queer, feminist verse that encourages the reader to be brave enough to speak up against many types of systemic violence that result in societal and individual wounding. In giving voice to our truest selves, even in the face of intimidation and patriarchy, antibody offers us many reasons to celebrate persistence, tenacity, and the clarity of a voice that speaks up against silencing.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website at Kim Fahner -Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Teacher.

Kim Fahner : Forecast: Pretty Bleak, by Chris Bailey

Forecast: Pretty Bleak, Chris Bailey
McClelland & Stewart, 2025

 

 

 

 

One of the poems in the middle of Chris Bailey’s new book of poetry, Forecast: Pretty Bleak, begins with a single line that echoes in the reader’s mind: “I want to tell you things of this place.” This is something that Bailey explored in his previous collection, What Your Hands Have Done (Harbour Publishing, 2018), witnessing and documenting the place that he knows so well—a fishing community on Prince Edward Island. It’s not a romanticized telling, and it doesn’t read like a glossy tourism advert, which is why Forecast: Pretty Bleak is likely so evocative and tends to draw the reader in. Anyone who’s lived in a town that has an economy based on a resource (like fishing, mining, or logging) will likely find this book resonates. They are all different industries, but the same types of hard working, down to earth people who pay attention to the rhythms of a daily life as they work away at a task to pay bills and take care of their families live in such places.

In the centre section of the book, titled “We Talked About This,” there are thirty numbered poems that establish the setting of the community in which the poet lives and works. The reader gets to know Will, Kenny, Tom, Kyle, Bianca, Brandon, James, and a cast of other people who make their living from—or adjacent to—the sea. Bailey creates the setting using vivid imagery and metaphors, writing “In the lane, mud, the burnt black/grey ash stain/left by garbage lit against a shrinking snowbank. Crows gone.” Then, he continues: “Birdshit streaks shingles on the house’s/south side. Crows pick lobster shells clean/in a garden yet to be tilled.” Later in this same section, the poet writes: “Yesterday, weather on the horizon/toward Cape Breton. Sun rising.//Slate-coloured clouds, their camber,/great columns of rain across the Strait.” Bailey moves from the rhythm of a community’s daily life to the danger of fishing the ocean: “My father’s hand is crushed/between a trap and hauler claw./Blood blooms in latex glove./White slough of dead skin.” In a moment, the job of fishing can go wrong, threaten lives: “You’d be loon-foolish to not be nervous/come Setting, all that weight, so much/rope gone over, all in thick fog with a rock/on from the north, and the tide against you.” A day’s work on the ocean can turn quickly: “When we go to sink the traps that first day:/nor’west wind, water whitecapping. A man in a kilt/stands on flagstone, plays bagpipes, his song/sounding like a funeral to each boat sailing out the run.” Nothing can be taken for granted, especially not a safe return to shore.

There’s a tension created by the idea of distance in many of Bailey’s poems, a distance that is both geographical and emotional. A love—for both a place and a person—is something that stretches like an elastic, an ebb and flow that pulls between Ontario and PEI. The draw of work and school in the west emerges in poems like “Starting Out”: “Your father’s eyes were pointed to Thompson then,/nickel mines. What they filled with was seawater,/mackerel blood. The scales of herring used as bait.” In “Moved Cross-Country,” the speaker notices the sharp contrast that Ontario provides to PEI, writing: “Lobster traps are décor here. Fishing is for sport.” Returning home, though, means a contemplation of what the notion of hard work means in a person’s life. In the last poem of “We Talked About This,” the poet writes: “You know what work is. We talked about this/before: an act of love. What puts food on the table,/electricity in the filaments…What else could work be?” The value of work comes in the ways a person can “raise four walls and be grateful,” demonstrate love in a tangible, everyday way. Sometimes, work and duty pulls harder at a person than love does, so that work wins out even when you don’t want it to. Sometimes work is woven into love and duty, and to the place where family history is so firmly rooted.

The sense of distance and tension between two lovers is constant in Forecast: Pretty Bleak. In one of the untitled, numbered poems, Bailey writes: “You send pictures of yourself, a video,/and say, I was thinking of you…Is this/how distance is supposed to be?/My eyes shut and I am with you./Why would I want to open them here?” Then, in “You’re Always Leaving,” the poem begins: “She says this, and it’s true:/ leaving the Island, that cradle/that once held you as a father/holds his child’s dog…and you’re always//leaving Ontario: the mainland and promised/new beginning with its cheaper bread/and same-priced potatoes and the place/you rent whose rooms are clear-sky blank.” It ends with “You’re always leaving/though you never want to go/and she don’t seem to want to keep you.” That long distance struggle in a relationship is also present in “Love Letter Written in a PEI Spring,” and in “Toronto,” with its first line: “She hates it here, but don’t think she will/be here long. How she speaks to you/about leaving…This wish she picks/as a herring scale from your hair, blows/away in hopes for it to come true…She cannot let go.” What this gets at, in many ways, is the pull between places, as well. A person can be born in one place and drawn to another—hoping it holds something more rewarding—but that same person can also find themselves torn between two loves, or two histories, or two geographies.

The other thematic aspect that’s present in Forecast: Pretty Bleak is the idea of what ‘home’ represents when you move away from it geographically. The speaker’s father says, “Home is a place the door is never shut” and that voice and its sentiment echoes through the collection. Home is a place that is filled with family history, tales, and the notion of what it means to live on the ocean, to inherit a life that is full of honest, hard, and often dangerous work. When the weather shifts, and a fierce storm moves in, and the house is “a thrumming low-toned tuning fork” while “Broken branches hold house siding./The roof has shingled the yard,” home is the place full of the people you most love and worry about.

Chris Bailey’s second collection, Forecast: Pretty Bleak doesn’t feel at all bleak, but rather is realistic in its rhythms and observations. I keep thinking of Bronwen Wallace, who often wrote about how the extraordinary events in a life are discovered by just trying to be more mindful of the ordinary daily routines that we so often take for granted, or just miss in our rush to get from place to place. Bailey’s poems encourage readers to take notice of his observations about the worth of place, family, work, home, love, and even the bittersweet ebb and flow of distance between people and places, but also leave them considering those aspects of their own lives.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. 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. She may be reached via her website at http://www.kimfahner.com

allison calvern : Robert Gibbs, poet, novelist, short story writer, professor, editor, and critic

Robert Gibbs, poet, novelist, short story writer, professor, editor, and critic
3 February 1930 —October 20, 2024

 

 

 

The living room in Robert Gibbs’ house was lined with bookshelves, and there were stacks of books on tables and on the floor. There were more bookshelves in the adjacent dining room, and stacks of books on the dining room table, on the chairs around the table, and on a sideboard—or maybe it was a buffet, I don’t remember; I only remember the books. To move through a room, or from one room to the other, was to follow a winding creek bed, flowing with literature, all of it accessible and teeming with life. Robert could locate from within the shelves and stacks the exact book required to underline whatever point was being made at the time.                 

He had saved a few square feet on the dining room table for his lap top and its faithless companion, the printer, which was a mystery to him. I went to Staples for toner cartridges, and installed them for him, but I was never certain how he got the beast to print anything if I wasn't there to coach him through the process.

We drank many cups of tea together, and at least once we had cocoa, which Robert made the old-fashioned way—milk in a pot on the stove, a scoop of Fry's cocoa, and a spoonful or two of sugar stirred in. The sun streamed in through the back window, turning the cluttered kitchen into a golden oasis, and we talked as we usually did, about a particular poem, maybe, or about one of his novels, while his metal spoon circled the bottom of the pot, willing the cocoa to dissolve. When the milk was sufficiently scalded, and everything mixed to his satisfaction, Robert poured the piping hot cocoa into the two waiting mugs, like a pro, not one spilled drop, and we retired to his living room. He took his chair, and I took the other one—which must have been his brother’s chair when he was alive and living with Robert. There was a book already there for me, something historical Robert wanted me to see, a detail leftover from our last visit, and we settled with our cocoa into the conversation of the day.

Robert was born and grew up in Saint John; his family was not wealthy enough to send him to university, but with scholarships he got a few degrees, including one from Cambridge. He taught for more than twenty-five years at UNB, taking care of his brother all the while. Robert was the director of UNB’s creative writing graduate program, served as editor of The Fiddlehead, and, upon his retirement in 1989, was named Professor Emeritus. He might as well have been named Human Emeritus, for all the kindnesses he bestowed to his students and to colleagues over the years.

I often invited Robert to be a featured reader at odd sundays at molly’s, and he was always persuaded to come, gracing the mic with his lovely, quiet demeanor. M. Travis Lane said of Robert Gibbs that: “. . . he usually devotes himself to asserting the value of the ordinary.” She called him “a gourmet of the minimal  . . .  an acknowledged master of the anecdotal poem.”

The Essential Robert Gibbs, published in 2012 by The Porcupine’s Quill, has a wonderful selection of Robert’s poetry, thanks to Brian Bartlett who chose them. I wish I had been one of his students.

 

 

 

Bibliography:

Gibbs, Robert. All This Night Long. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1978.
---. Angels Watch Do Keep. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1997.
---. A Dog in a Dream. New Brunswick Chapbooks 14. Fredericton, NB: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1971.
---. Driving to Our Edge. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 2003.
---. Earth Aches. Fredericton, NB: Wild East, 1991.
---. Earth Charms Heard So Early. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1970.
---. “English Poetry in New Brunswick, 1940–1982.” A Literary and Linguistic History of New Brunswick. Ed. W.R. Gair. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1986. 125-44.
---. I’ve Always Felt Sorry for Decimals. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1978.
---. A Kind of Wakefulness. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1973.
---. Kindly Light. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 2007.
---. A Mouth Organ for Angels. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1984.
---. Personal interview. 20 June 2009.
---, ed. Reflections on a Hill Behind a Town: An Anthology of Poems by Founders, Editors and Close Associates of the Fiddlehead to Mark its 35th Anniversary. Spec. issue of The Fiddlehead 125 (1980).
---. The Road From Here. New Brunswick Chapbook 1. Fredericton, NB: New Brunswick Poetry Chapbooks, 1968.
---. A Space to Play In. Toronto, ON: League of Canadian Poets, 1980.
---. “Three Decades and a Bit Under the Elms: A Fragmentary Memoir.” Essays on Canadian Writing 31 (1985): 231-9.
---. The Tongue Still Dances: Poems New and Selected. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books/Goose Lane Editions, 1985.
Gibbs, Robert, and Robert Cockburn, eds. Ninety Seasons: Modern Poets From the Maritimes. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1974.
Nowlan, Alden. Early Poems. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1983.
---. An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and Selected. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Toronto, ON: Irwin, 1985.
---. Road Dancers. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1999.
---. White Madness. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1996.

 

 

 

 

 

allison calvern, creator of odd sundays at molly's reading series, once interviewed Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the top floor of City Lights Books in San Francisco.

rob mclennan : Shima, by Shō Yamagushiku

Shima, Shō Yamagushiku
McClelland and Stewart, 2024

Another full-length debut from this spring’s McClelland and Stewart poetry quartet is Victoria, British Columbia-based Shō Yamagushiku’s book-length poem, Shima (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), a collection built as a collage-text of memory, witness, family history and scrapbook, detailing, as the press release offers, “the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community.” Opening with the prose-set “Shima,” the book collages a quartet of sections—“amerika-yuu,” “yamatu-yuu,” “uchinaa-yuu” and “yanbaru-yuu”—which combine into a long poem comparable to a book such as the late Barry McKinnon’s infamous I Wanted To Say Something (Prince George BC: New Caledonia Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), which was itself an essential long poem of leaving, collage, family history and recollection. “Uncle,” Yamagushiku writes, “Forgive me for shining this light / into your graveyard of an eye // Where are you?” And a few lines further: “You are being vaulted into currency / carved of timber bones, this relic // that you will become, you thought // you had a choice [.]” Comparable to McKinnon’s long poem, but one might say that Yamagushiku’s narratives stretch out into an abstract as well, offering narrative concreteness across a far wider canvas. Even prior to the first piece, Shima offers a definition of the title: “shima, n. 1. A village; a community. / 2. One’s home village. 3. One’s fief. / 4. An island.” The definition informs, but says little, with the history of this Japanese city buried under the weight of what remains unsaid, but for through Yamagushiku’s lyric. Paired with the opening quote by the late Etel Adnan, from her collection Paris, When It’s Naked (The Post-Apollo Press, 1993)—“An ancestral forest within me stirs my / memory and makes life untenable.”—Yamagushiku frames a collection named for this ancestral city, writing around exile, utilizing family/archival photographs and the endless strands of history. “a vastness // disappears // abandons me,” he writes, early on in the collection, “to a cloudless night // all the stars // turn sleep’s path // away from me [.]” As poet and critic Harold Rhenisch offers as part of his own recent review of the collection, published online at The British Columbia Review:

Shima is a book of the sea from an island village in the Okinawan archipelago, and a portrait of that community from the sea. It is about taking a breath and swimming between them. There is also a forest.

The book rises from the Ryukyuan diaspora. It eventually steps back from the turned shoulders of some of Sho Yamagushiku’s ancestors and goes to sea. Before him, there were the Amas, the free-breathing, deep-diving fisherwomen of Okinawa who have been sustainably harvesting shellfish from their ocean for thousands of years.

Shima is a comprehensive collage-work around colonialism and its multi-generational effects, exile and its obligations, providing a compelling family story across four countries and a century of displaced lineage. “July 6, 1904 – Taro leaves Tanna / on a boat bound for Mexico via / New Caledonia. He works the / coal mines as a contract labourer / for La Compañia Japonesa Mexi- / cana de Comercio y Colonización / in Coahuila, Mexico. Taro flees / from the mine’s exploitative / labour conditions with a group / of Okinawan workers across the / border into the United States. / His daughter’s son fathers me.” The text offers echoes, repetitions along threads of fragments held with emotional and lyrical heft, composing a kind of reclamation across these strands of history and loss, from their original displacement to Japanese internment, of soldiers and occupiers, and a refusal to forget family bonds, and origins. This collection is multi-layered and complex, and as subtle as it is powerful, composing a stunning work of empathy and history across the form of the long poem. The collection begins with a six-stanza prose poem that provides the opening salvo of a bookended image of quiet intimacies: the narrator’s father, pulling the narrator’s hair. As the piece opens:

My father stands in his yard holding my hair. Down the sloping crescent, a tangle of strands fastens me to a rainbow. The border dissolves at my feet, feet break, and we disappear. I am far away now, blistering. My father is still holding. Each month away from that ledge gathers in my scalp, drying into dust.

Every evening my father plucks my hair. A cloud of disturbed thoughts darken the sky, bats flying from the recesses. With the hair on my scalp my father finds a rhythm. A love so stretched, without a limit, I feel as though I might bleed.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a trilogy of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). He is reading in Toronto on Wednesday, but you probably already know that.