Poetry Reviews

Candace Fertile

Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry
edited by Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson
Your Scrivener Press, 2009.
142 pp. $18.00.

The work of over thirty poets is collected in Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, which takes the ecological devastation and rehabilitation efforts of Sudbury, Ontario, as its starting point. The two editors, Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson, are both poets themselves, and Anand holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Ecological Change at the University of Guelph.

Each editor has written a rather lengthy and dense introduction to the book, and the tone of both is academic and deeply serious. They have also chosen to divide the poetry into three parts although recognizing that the poems transcend the artificial boundaries. My tendency is to skip introductions and go straight to the substance of books, and I’d recommend that for this volume. Introductions with footnotes indicate the scholarly approach of the editors, which may be at odds with the desire of readers to engage with poetry.

Dickinson, who teaches in the English Dept. at Brock University, uses language familiar to anyone in an English department: “We have used the term ecological poetry in this anthology with ecopoetics in mind. If anything, by emphasizing the two words, it is our intention to foreground the poetics of ecological dynamics and the ecology of rhetorical and formal poetic procedures.” If such prose appeals, then readers may find the introductions helpful.

The three parts of the book are titled “A Triumph of Tubers,” “Pristine Modernity, The Dream,” and “A Leaf That Looks Like a Mouth.” Dickinson explains the reasoning behind this organization in painstaking terms, and both editors follow the conventions of an introduction to an anthology by trying to mention several of the poems contained within. I simply got anxious to read poetry.

And it is the poetry that makes the book worthwhile. As the first anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry focused on environmental issues, Regreen should be snapped up by anyone interested in contemporary Canadian poetry. Many of the poems have been published, but to have them gathered in one volume is a treat.

The range of poets and styles is remarkable. Readers of Canadian poetry will find familiar names--Don McKay, Ross Leckie, Katia Grubisic, Robyn Sarah, Olive Senior, Christian Bök, to name just a few--and perhaps will discover a few new ones.

The first poem in the book, Rhea Tregebov’s “Elegy for the Wild,” sets the pace: “On the bus north to Sudbury the land fills me up. / I think we think we’re more important than we are. / [ . . . ] I want to keep looking till I’m done. / Country. Beautiful country. Beautiful wild country.” The simplicity of observing the wilderness through a bus window and appreciating it is counterbalanced by another passenger’s complaint that it’s “just trees and sky.” But the beauty wins.

Brian Bartlett’s “Leaving the Island” is a staggeringly gorgeous poem about how a landscape is shaped by humans and then changes when the humans depart. When a lighthouse keeper leaves the island, “Leprous paint flakes off a lighthouse,” and “Yarrow rises / through the gaps between separating slats / of a landed boat.” Bartlett projects into a future—a time after World War III—when maybe a few poems are found, Styrofoam still refuses to decompose, and the waves continue their pounding.

Robyn Sarah is represented by three poems, all excellent, and all having to do with making and filling spaces. In “As a Storm-Lopped Tree,” Sarah develops one of the overall themes of the collection: how things change. She writes: “As a storm-lopped tree corrects its shape / over a few green seasons, so time / closes around the hole in itself / left by the terrible event.” While destruction is the catalyst for many of the poems, the collection tends to be hopeful about human beings’ ability to learn and adapt. Armand Garnet Ruffo takes up that idea by looking to the past: “ . . . we knew that death / had not vanished into thin air / as eagerly announced, / knew it would take a new kind of thinking / that was actually old / ancient.”

The most experimental piece is from Alison Calder and Jeannette Lynes’ Ghost Works: Improvisations in Letters and Poems, an intriguing foray into creative construction. The pair riff off emails exchanged and shape poems from words in the emails.

The final piece in the collection, Christian Bök’s “A Virus from Outer Space,” concludes the collection with stanzas celebrating the power of language and its possibility as medicine. Certainly that’s what Regreen in its entirety does: binds the power of language to the potential for positive, life-affirming change. Words are tools in the hands of these poets—tools for shaping thought and action.

Book of Mercy
by Leonard Cohen
McClelland & Stewart,
$18.99 (no pagination)

Book of Mercy, a collection of 50 short lyrical pieces, was originally published in 1984, and it’s lovely that M&S has reissued the volume. The well-deserved adulation heaped on Leonard Cohen during his last world tour indicates how important a figure he is in contemporary poetry and music, and Book of Mercy combines many of the ideas that Cohen has wrestled with throughout his career.

More than a quarter-century after its initial publication, Book of Mercy strikes one as fresh, challenging, and mysterious in that elusive Cohenesque way. Often what he says seems incomprehensible, and that’s part of its attraction. Cohen has always grappled with big issues: love, death, spirituality, connection, poetry, music, sadness, in essence what it means to be alive. He doesn’t answer the question of the meaning of life, but his attentiveness to the question leads readers to ponder the topic. What could be more important?

The 50 pieces are described as “contemporary psalms” on the cover, and that’s as good a label as any, if one needs a label. A psalm is a sacred song or hymn, and so the form Cohen uses matches the content beautifully—and of course, because Cohen is incapable of not being poetic, his psalms are prose poems that employ repetition, rhythm, and respect for diction that is palpable.

It’s obvious that I am a Cohen fan, even though he often mystifies me. Or perhaps because he often mystifies me. Whatever confusion Cohen engenders in me, he also makes me think and feel. His interest is the spiritual is not one I share, and yet, when I read anything by Cohen, I cannot help but consider the metaphysical.

The psalms in this book speak to different gods or powers, while they question the brutality of human beings in their allegiance to one god or system. Overall, gentleness is Cohen’s manner and hope for humanity. A gentle acceptance of others is crucial to any kind of spiritual health, along with a gentle acceptance of one’s own situation. In #10, for example, Cohen says:

You placed me in this mystery and you let me sing, though only from this curious corner. You bound me to my fingerprints, as you bind every man, except the ones who need no binding. You led me to this field where I can dance with a broken knee. You led me safely to this night, you gave me a crown of darkness and light, and tears to greet my enemy. Who can tell of your glory, who can number your forms, who dares expound the interior life of god?

Typically, Cohen manages a humble boldness with every line he has written in this book.

And while Cohen exhorts us to gentleness, he is also adamant about the problems human beings have created. The fact that he is a Jew and a Buddhist is understandable as his religious interests cross many boundaries, and #27, for example, deals with the problems of boundaries: “Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation—none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy.” The piece excoriates those who deny Mercy.

The cadences of Cohen’s pieces contribute hugely to their effect. Like prayers or hymns, the works in Book of Mercy use meter effectively to both calm and exhort. In #35, Cohen writes:

I turned you to stone. You stepped outside the stone. I turned you to desire. You saw me touch myself. I turned you into a tradition. The tradition devoured its children. I turned you to loneliness, and it corrupted into a vehicle of power. I turned you into a silence which became a roar of accusation. If it be your will, accept the longing truth beneath this wild activity.

And truth is what Cohen has always lusted after. The search for truth is a truth of its own—and sacrifice and suffering are mediated by mercy.

Those of us who grew up with Leonard Cohen’s work may well already have this volume, but it’s well worth pulling off the shelf and rereading. And rereading. And for the younger generations (who are often profoundly affected by Cohen), this book offers them another side to the artist they have come to love.