Pages: 1 2 3 4

Sharawadji

by Brian Henderson,

London, ON: Brick Books, 2011

88 pages, $19.00

In the notes to his tenth book of poetry, Sharawadji, Brian Henderson explains the meaning of the term in a few ways, but the one that captures what he does in this collection is that a sharawadji effect “takes one by surprise and will carry the listener elsewhere, beyond strict representation—out of context.” The definition is in the context of music, but it works beautifully for what Henderson accomplishes in this arresting collection.

The book is divided into four sections; “Twelve Imaginary Landscape,” “Night Music,” “Like the Sound of a Grass Fire,” and “Previews.” The first and last sections are prose poems while the second and third are free verse. It’s rather hard not to swoon when the first poem, “Perfecting Thirst,” contains the line “Trilobites of prayer punctuate the walls like shrapnel.” And then Henderson just keeps it coming—page after page with lines that make you stop and slam into new thoughts and visions.

Henderson is clearly at the top of his game, and there’s no such thing as a wobble in this book. Most of the time, the poems are simply awe-inspiring, and while it’s hard to choose favourites, I’d have to say that the whole second section is truly remarkable. It’s a series of poems about the speaker’s mother’s death from cancer, and Henderson makes emotion ache across the page. In “Unresectable, 11 May,” he writes:

[ . . . ] Your veins

sprouting plastic lines, small

purses of potassium and morphine

feeding the debt your body’s racked up,

skin nearly the early colouring

of flowering dogwood bloom—

The ability to show the outside while revealing the inside is staggering, and over and over, Henderson uses a dense abstraction to paradoxically make his language concrete. The 18 poems in “Night Music” are a testament to love and family.  “Collection of Photographs” has a heart-breaking stanza about the mother’s death:

Everything has a kind of space around it,

a kind of invisible purity

that’s easily transgressed, every

moment, and each stays

remembered or not, mutilated

or not, as if now I were made of forgetting.

Doesn’t that make your heart clench?

The third section focuses on imagery of water and trees—the natural world is a magnificent spread of beauty—flowers, birds, and even human beings combine in a celebration of life is all its many forms. In “Every Part of You Has a Secret Language,” Henderson starts by saying:

It is not like anything, vivids, lurids, smoke, some truth

imitating the shiver of music, the river that empties itself

into what we call, for want of a better word

the mind [ . . . ]

These are poems to be returned to repeatedly.

Like the other three parts, the fourth explores beauty and death. And Henderson has mastery over the prose poem, wrestling it into a lovely and loving shape of ideas, with remarkable cadence, the rising and falling rhythms matching content. Henderson can take polysyllabic scientific terms and make them sing. “A Momentary History of Time, or The Sheer” contains the words “cadmium” and “trichloroethylene”—and they work. The science imagery seems perfectly natural, even when the words are not in everyday use.

Sharawadji is a luminous collection offering extremes of emotion balanced by extraordinarily thoughtful phrasing. I found myself frequently tugged in at least two directions—dazzled by the displays of emotion and envious of Henderson’s sagacious use of language.