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The Scare in the Crow
by Tammy Armstrong
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2010
112 pp., $18

The Glassblowers
by George Sipos
Frederiction, NB: Goose Lane, 2010
104 pp., $18

Tammy Armstrong was nominated for a Governor-General’s Award for her first collection, Bogman’s Music, and the promise established in that debut is sustained in The Scare in the Crow, her fourth book of verse. George Sipos’s second collection, The Glassblowers (Goose Lane, $18), follows the success of his debut, Anything but the Moon, which was shortlisted for British Columbia’s Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.Armstrong is a generation younger than Sipos, and so she tends to look more outward than inward, while the opposite is true for him.
Raised in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, next door to the U.S., Armstrong has also lived on the West Coast. Though she is definitely – defiantly – an East Coast poet and novelist (now resident in Fredericton), she is resolutely not provincial, even if her poetry is eyeing the local, giving it scrutiny – in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop (whose centenary we celebrate this year). One can glimpse the Bishop style in “Below Estey’s Bridge,” a poem that meditates on old tombstones scattered over a riverbank: “From the bridge’s spandrel / and banks of pigweed, / headstones with sandblasted errata spilled / over into the river scuff….” It’s the appearance of the exact, unexpected word (“spandrel,” “scuff”), but also irony: “Along the banks, I have scanned / these headstones for my own … // name … // and my surprise when the dates hinge and recede….”
Maybe there’s a touch of Ted Hughes in the nature studies. European starlings are “delinquent tax evaders / searching for cavities to nest”; numbering only 60 at first, they “stand now at two million, / speak in something / black-gated, less bardic. / These vagrant drill-soldiers / / smear the sky with labour song.” See also Armstrong’s poem on the “fiberglass geese” hung aloft in Toronto’s Eaton Centre; they are a “peregrination” that has found “anchorage in the pleasure dome’s / ceiling beams, a hovering in the light’s unmooring….” Her eye is excellent; her ear is sharp; but poems can end flatly, as is the case with the poems on the starlings and the geese. Similarly, “Girls with Sharp Scalpels” offers terrific images (“Perched on silver stools, / we pried the organs free / until the glut of formaldehyde / fogged the room in tension headaches”), but the end is uninspired: “They’ve spent centuries amidst the basement midden, / waiting for home renovations, / waiting for us to find them [frogs] warted in regalia.” But one must set aside quibbles and recognize the stellar quality of what Armstrong gives us – an always stimulating and always vivid set of insights.

Sipos is Executive Director of ArtSpring, a visual and performing arts centre on B.C.’s Salt Spring Island. Now 62, he authors poetry that shows a lifetime of careful thought. Like Armstrong, he has a gift for turning precise images: “Moths circle the lamp, / beat their heads against glass, / make the same points again and again / with the vehemence of old arguments.” They “repeat / the little melodramas of bodies / flung against an indifferent current.” That zinger – “melodramas” – makes one pay attention. But the close of the poem is also fine: “their stubborn / trajectories refuse to concede to the night, / till one, gone astray, / collides with my chest. / I feel it pause, / bewildered in the dark, / its unseen wings / caught between faith and doubt.”
“On s’est perdus de vue” is another nice poem, drawing a connection between the screening of a film and the end of life: “ ‘Cut, cut!’ I’ll hear you say. / ‘It’s ended.’ // Yes, I know, I’ll say— / but look, / here we are in the credits.”

Like Armstrong, Sipos also sneaks “Midden” (a dung heap or shell pile) into a poem, perhaps because the two share Ross Leckie as an editor. But I do like how the poem ends (in an allusion to Ezra Pound’s Cantos): “Beautiful, perhaps, / all these fragments; everything / we could possibly love / scattered here.” Not every poem works. “Lilacs” begins better than it ends; ditto for “Pro-Life at the Ex.” But these are considered, sensible, and pleasing lyrics, whose subtleties may dispense with passion. One must applaud a poet who can write of “open water / untenanted by anything conscious / except these two swans.”
P.S. Goose Lane Editions has published my poetry.

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