In the first section of Mark Frutkin’s Iron Mountain, we encounter a Chinese poet-emperor who travels to find Guan Yin, the goddess of compassion. Instead he meets the Iron Mountain, and although he is “the greatest Emperor/ the world has ever known,” he understands that “the mountain towering above/ was here before [he] came,/ will remain when [he has] gone.” At first, he reacts with fear and anxiety: “My failure to bring order to my world/ stings me and causes me distress” (“The Emperor’s Poem”), but by the end of his journey his “heart is soothed/ by the sight of two wooden buckets/ resting side by side in the doorway” of a poor man’s hut (“Chaos”).

Although the poet-emperor leaves us at the end of the first section, his spirit is felt throughout Iron Mountain. He signals the futility of the attempt to find meaning in the world. The sense of this futility, however, does not lead to frustration or despair; Frutkin’s poems embrace the peace that comes with accepting a natural world that escapes all our attempts at order and measurement. The poet’s power to organize experience is always defeated by the eternal and unfathomable presence of the universe, “a place to fit ragged answers/ to ragged questions” (“Ragged Edge”). A place where “We never quite figure it out,/ the stars a chaos of intersecting/ grids, overlapping domes/ we have imagined, all of it./We have imagined all of it./ Measuring dust (“Measuring Dust”).

The poet travels throughout Iron Mountain in various personae, always caught in this dialogue with the universe. Sometimes he is the drunk who “[a]rgues with stars,/ questions their logic, their patterns,/ why this order and no other?”, who asks “[w]hat is the logic of this place?” and receives “Silence” as an answer (“A Drunk Addresses the Night Sky”). Other times he is the unnamed “he” of “Disappearance” who “has lost all desire to reach the highest peak,/ content that the mountains go on and on/ without end, as the stream beside him/ never ceases its gurgling/ like an infant learning to speak.”

Frutkin quotes Confucius, “‘The humane man loves mountains,’” and continues with “not to mention words that almost, not quite, rhyme” (“Fragments of Heaven and Earth”). Frutkin counsels a poetry that neither regrets nor struggles against its failure to assert finality. Though Frutkin seemingly addresses “Extracting the Bull” to cubist painters, I sense that it is truly other poets he wishes to reach: “Give me a single line/ from past to future/ passing through nowhere/ a present so fleeting/a bull so alive/ it hardly exists at all.”

rob mclennan’s harvest: a book of signifiers provides a sharp contrast to Frutkin’s thoughtful calm. Like Iron Mountain, harvest is a book of journeys, but whereas Frutkin’s journeys are slow and reflective meditations, mclennan’s are energetic bursts of discovery and gathering. With its wry juxtaposition of a modern shipping logo and a traditional painting of peasants harvesting grain by hand, the cover by Adam Swica heralds the peripatetic allusiveness of the poetry found within.

mclennan will, of course, be familiar to you (yes, I do mean you, Arc reader). He is one of those poets for whom the role of poet alone is not taxing enough. It is not unusual to find a single issue of a Canadian literary journal that contains poems and reviews by mclennan and reviews of books either written, edited, or published by mclennan. He seems less an individual than a species of creative energy that zigzags across Canada.

That energy is on display in this book. mclennan writes with economy—a line may be a single word, syllable, or letter—and yet he can range throughout the entire cultural field in a single poem, throwing in a concise Gertrude Stein allusion here, a sly nod to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts there. As mclennan travels throughout Canada he harvests small essentials from each place he visits, whether it is the public garden gates of Halifax that “swing both ways” (“phillopian tunes: for allison”) or the semi-mythical “dry cold” of the prairies (“saskatoon”).

Much of harvest is about the act of writing: “i write another line but where does it lead, can’t shake/ her face from my skull, try another line/ on gardening or some other distraction” (“it doesnt matter”). The act of writing poetry is controlled by a three-way struggle between the poet’s intent, his unintended but pressing associations and the demands of language itself. In “letter(s) to derek,” a longer poem written as a wedding present, mclennan notes “the end of summer & yr impending marriage. (I almost said/ doom, but that would be// a burn, & unnecessary,/ the next logical step/ from impending.” mclennan lets the flow of language dictate the direction of the poem, even at the risk of offending a friend. At other times, he stops this flow abruptly, relying on the suggestive propulsion of language. When mclennan ends a poem by telling us that a girl is “nineteen/ & too young/ to know that kind of” (“van goghs ear”), the emotional meaning is conveyed, without any of us having to wait around for mere grammatical closure. Language is forever wonderfully both in play and at play in these poems.

Yet I can understand what a reviewer of another of mclennan’s books meant by referring to his “unsettling cerebral detachment.” His formalistic playfulness is off-putting at times, as one searches a poem in vain for a connecting image or rhetorical thread. What mclennan risks, besides offense, is not incoherence, but egotism, as the poems become nothing more than a reflection of the poet’s mind.

A visit to Geronimo’s grave in Oklahoma was the apparent inspiration for Armand Garnet Ruffo’s At Geronimo’s Grave. Despite this, the (surprisingly few) poems that deal directly with Geronimo are the most disappointing, both poetically and politically. While Geronimo was a “[f]ierce, tenacious, master of guerrilla warfare” (“At Geronimo’s Grave”), we don’t really get to see much of that side of him in this book. His courage in fighting back is described in reverential tones; we get the distance of admiration, when the closeness of anger might be more to the point here. Imagining Geronimo’s return from the dead, the best Ruffo can muster is “but now there are rumours/ things have got even worse./ This he finds unbelievable./ How can it be so?/ He’s heard they are now poisoning/ the earth mother herself” (“In The Sierra Blanca”). Such language is by now tepid and overused. It has lost its poetical and political force due to the historical tendency of North American poets to use “Indians” as, as Louis Simpson once put it, “a fantasy of sophisticated twentieth-century people who were trying to find ways out of the materialism that was everywhere around them.”

I prefer Ruffo in his revolutionary mode: “The bottle I’m holding/ is actually a homemade bomb,/ a poetry bomb,/ that will soon shower/ the sky with words/ they can no longer ignore.” (“Drum Song”) I want more poems like “I Heard Them, I Was There,” in which Ruffo writes in the voice of an early white invader, one of those who “came in droves, by wagons, by train, by boat,/ womanless, ready for anything, but wanting wealth.” Although he dreamed of “relaxing in a hot tub/ with a cigar in mouth and glass in hand,” instead he sits alone in the “shivering cold,” unsure of what he is now looking for, only knowing that “it has something to do with death and darkness,/ disease and dream. Something to do with me/ looking back at myself.” Here is Ruffo’s poetry at its most vigorous. Here is subtle anger, vengeance tempered with empathy.

Or the naked eroticism of poems like “Bear”: “So he begins with toes, feet, moves to leg/ up inside of thigh./ When he gets to the tenderest part,/ she whimpers for him/ to stop.” Or poems like “Detour,” with its rough energy and evocative mixture of poetry and prose: “Once upon a time I rode shotgun for a trickster kind of guy who thought we lived in a western, and it would always stay that way.” I want less overused phrases like “the walking wounded” (“World View”) and more righteous angry words that crackle and smart: “If this bottle bomb/ explodes/ word shrapnel/ flying every which way/ responsibility hitting them between the eyes” (“Drum Song”).

Even if Stephen Brockwell weren’t such a fine poet I’d still be on his side because of what he writes in his biographical note on the back cover of Cometology. Brockwell is “one of the few poets in engineering, medicine, or computer science who [believes] that poems [are] both an acceptable model for reality, and at times more expressive than partial differential equations.” Students of intellectual history will know that the view of poetry and science as antithetical is a relatively recent notion. They will also know that, taking the longer view, it is poetry that has the greatest intellectual pedigree, and that modern science is a junior upstart that has yet to really prove itself.

I therefore welcome Brockwell’s fusing of scientific language and thought with the language and matter of poetry. It is not that Brockwell is downgrading science—far from it—rather he recognizes that science, just like poetry, ultimately depends on acts of human perception, and therefore cannot claim a closer relationship with reality. In three closely linked poems, “Recent Discoveries,” “Classical Observations,” and “Early Beliefs,” Brockwell combines scientific observations of comets with the myths that the sight of them has engendered: “Aster hippeus: the horse star/ flays the solar wind with its tail;/ it was not recognized as rock and ice/ but as a serpent of the atmosphere/ as we once believed wild horses/ were serpents of the field” (“Early Beliefs”). Each of these poems ends with an inventory of the comets’ “tools of study”: “dust mass spectrometer, multicolour camera,/ radio telescope,/ magnetometer,/ binoculars,/ contact lens” (“Recent Discoveries”), a list that in each poem ends with that foundation of observation, the “eye.”

Dreams live in Brockwell’s work too. He speaks for many of us when he laments what is forfeited by the waking mind: “An ending, an image, is lost in illegible/ transcription as I walk out the door without my keys” (“White Noise”). The fine-tuning of perception that being a poet requires sometimes means that we lose one world while keeping our eyes and ears open to another. It is something like this that causes Brockwell to become “a spectator/ who fails to intervene/ not for fear of violence/ but to perpetuate the experience” (“Compulsive in the Public Library”). This is poet as detached observer, so caught up in the act of observation that he is even willing to permit the destruction of books.

The gains that come from Brockwell’s quality of observation, however, are perhaps worth that sacrifice. What Brockwell takes from his scientific training is a precision of language, a concern with exact observation: “[t]he shadow of the moth/ will cast its inverted star on the bare floor” (“Moth Glitter”), “transformers emit thick knots of light, layers of blue neon, rhythmic/ surges of humming,/ the scent of ionized gas” (“Farm Animals”), or “a lip of bark/ consumes a strand of barbed wire” (“Honey Jar”). Sometimes, however, that quality works against the poems, when Brockwell relinquishes all sense of poetic musicality in the name of precise details, leading to lines of achingly dull statement: “The water level is low” (“Taunting the Boar”).

If for nothing else, however, enjoy this book for the delightful section, “Constructive Geometry” (wonderfully illustrated with whimsical line drawings by Dan Marion and technical drawings from Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces). Brockwell satisfies both poetic and scientific senses here, with his imaginative, but mathematically grounded, examinations of various geometrical figures like the “Point”: “when I draw the line/ you can’t be counted on:/ everything to everyone— / yes, you take a position/ but you carry no weight.”

Of these five poets, Asoka Weerasinghe is perhaps the most “traditional.” Although he does not stick to rigid forms in Butterfly Poems], strict rhymes appear in almost every poem. (There’s even a few end-stopped couplets!) Many of Weerasinghe’s poems double as songs. “The Ballad of Long Point” “samples” “[_I’se the b’y that builds the boat” and then rolls on with its own rhythms: “The music played/ and the music heard,/ chicken cooked/ and its flesh devoured,/ the clock struck three/ and our time wasn’t free/ to stay with the LeRoy’s any longer.” In “Full Circle” communities split, and migrate in opposite directions, only to meet again, greatly changed, thousands of years later, a great dance given energy by a continually varied chorus: “We were on our way/ to come a full circle/ a thousand years ago,/ when Vikings met Skraelings/ in Newfoundland-Labrador./ It was at Strait of Belle Isle/ that the Vikings came ashore.” Weerasinghe writes with colour and delicacy in the ripely sensual “Glebe Love Poems”: “the taste of mango-butter/ on my tongue after I ate/ rare red meat from a pink/ oval shaped porcelain dish,/ the sight of the morning/ swash of batik-silk pinkness/ between your thighs/ and the naked body/ I wanted to touch.” An unborn child is “all cranberry flesh/ floating like an astronaut/ in a liquid-cushioned womb,/ dancing to the rhythms/ of mother’s Mambo steps” (“The Mambo”). There is room for political emotion in Weerasinghe’s great dance of words, whether it is angry compassion for slain child soldiers: “this corpse speaks to me/ still warm and his mouth foams/ with his mother’s milk” (“‘Tiger’ Child Soldiers”); or informed empathy for the immigrant women who clean Heathrow Airport and remind Weerasinghe of “the once colonial Indian debentured labourers/ […] brought to work in Ceylon’s tea gardens/ and in pans of white salt.” As Weerasinghe grimly remarks, “[t]he British are good in creating labour-cults” (“London’s Heathrow, Terminal 4”).

At times I did wish for a little more experimentation, a little more pushing at the bounds that Weerasinghes’s rhythmic impulses create for him. But perhaps poetry critics are sometimes like the guest who is always trying to change the music at the party; we are politely asked to leave, as the dance continues behind us.

⁰ Arc 49, Winter 2002