One of the pleasant surprises about these nominees for the Lampman Award is the variety of styles, perspectives, and forms represented on the list. A healthy heterogeneity is the strength in any literary community, and a nominee list that reflects such a range deserves acknowledgement. Diverse biographies are always interesting; a poet’s expertise in matters other than prosody often informs the work in intriguing ways. Mayne is a senior poet and retired professor from the University of Ottawa, Dabydeen is a Guyanese-Canadian whose three-decade career spans a number of international publications, McMaster has a spoken-word and music career performing with with Geode Music and Sugar Beat as well as her work as a “page poet,” and Brockwell is a software designer who also edits the on-line critical journal www.poetics.ca.

A renewed interest in form has swept Canada’s literary world in the last handful of years, and the results have proved intriguing. While Seymour Mayne has been writing his “word-sonnets” for considerably longer than the trend would suggest, nonetheless it is a pleasure to see Ricochet, with its striking verticality, make the Lampman shortlist. Each poem in Mayne’s book is fourteen words long, with one word occupying each line, so that each poem’s long thin appearance is striking visually, lending a tone of dream-like urgency to the subject matter. As slim a volume of verse as ever graced a shelf, Ricochet has the held-breath quality of haiku and some of the meditative philosophy of that better-known form. Reading these poems exercises the eye, and the desire to read horizontally instead of vertically has the effect of drawing the reader into an altered consciousness. The best poems in Ricochet wisely allow a quality of silence to resonate in the tower of words; Mayne has honed this odd form to a sharp inner core of thought, like a needle probing consciousness, or an arrow waiting to be fired. “Hellbent” and “Fossil Fuel” take lacerating swipes at dogma and consumerism, respectively; “Earful” and “Cat” are witty evocations of silence. The lean, stacked look of each poem and the pressured gasp of empty space surrounding each word sometimes presages a struggle to control the diction and figure of the language, but when Mayne’s word-sonnets work, their spare lines fill the page with the breath they commandeer.

The breath is also a force to be reckoned with in Susan McMaster’s Until the Light Bends. Beginning with a sequence titled “Hanging Transparent,” in which a jittery and fractured subject moves in and out of panic, McMaster shows the reader the violence of a shocked pause turned tender, trapped in dreamscapes that are less surreal than painfully parallel to the perceivable world. She follows this opening sequence with the resonant and melodious “Sonata for Watcher and Shades,” a narrative in five poetic “movements” which gracefully performs up to the challenge of rendering music in poetry. “This Question of the Mouth” (written for the late Kingston poet Bronwen Wallace) and the devastating “Courage / Coeur de rage” lay the groundwork for the elegiac long poem that anchors the collection. “Ordinary,” a lyric inquiry into a friend’s illness and eventual death, is kept rapturously afloat by McMaster’s deliberately intense manipulation of line breaks and her unwavering eye for compassionate detail. Love and death are the fundamental subjects for poetry, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to explore the snarl of grief with freshness, but McMaster’s repetition of her strongest lines, as though a refrain in the music of dying, takes on the beat of accusation and constant self-scrutiny that sharpens the sympathetic gaze of the poem. Invoking the imagery of fecundity, she notes the dying woman’s love for “buttons of green silk” on the chaise that becomes her bed, her jade earrings, and the “green glass bowl on the table” filled with “apricot, pears” that in their turn, become a memento mori: “It is pear worm. / It is death date… / She knows her end.” Working with the fruit metaphor so often used by medical personnel to refer to tumour size, McMaster uses the simile “as large as a pear” as an ironic pairing of the moribund and the vivacious. Her strategy works to familiarize the dying body to the reader while estranging the speaker from the “ordinariness” of the death. Also excellent is McMaster’s depiction of the mourning friend tumbling into grief like a waterfall with a “mouth full / of roar.” Until the Light Bends has an unusual quality of ceremony combined with a sense of swift strokes; I was surprised to hear on the accompanying CD that McMaster gives a measured, careful reading of “Ordinary” that belies the poem’s energy on the page. On the page, McMaster’s work is strongest when she experiments; her intelligence and willingness to take risks create a sense of size and occasion around each poem, the courage to have le coeur de rage.

Both McMaster and Mayne’s volumes have fewer than a hundred pages each, but Cyril Dabydeen’s Imaginary Origins has the heft that befits a volume of selected poems. Containing poems written between 1970 and 2002, the collection highlights what Dabydeen calls in his introduction an “insider and outsider perspective.” The poet is a man of his word, for the most interesting poems in the collection fall into two groups: memories of his childhood in Guyana, and his often ironic take on Canadian landscape and history, including some particularly wry looks at identity politics. The childhood work, particularly the thoughtfully mythopoeic eponymous poem, are connected by the image of cows, sacred and otherwise, as a pragmatic reminder of rural roots and the father’s position as a keeper of cattle. Indeed, the first poem in the book is called “Taurus,” originally published in a book titled Goatsong, and Dabydeen’s discussion of his poetic persona as the goat that was fathered by the bull introduces the kind of playful and defiant personal history that appears over and over again in this collection.

When Dabydeen holds the magnifying glass up to the vagaries of Canadian selfdefinition, the results are thoughtfully hilarious. “Canada Day” amuses with its “nationalist” discovery of the “instant geography” of an erotic partner’s body, recalling the question that has never really needed a spoken answer: how do you make love in a new country? A poem like “Legends,” in which the speaker imagines himself an ongoing piece of Canadian history, is fortified by “Living Without Pretence.” In each of these poems, Dabydeen parodically claims to be both the Prime Minister and the Governor-General, a position whose power is undone by a posture ripe for satire. “Lady Icarus” provides a bleaker look at immigration laws, and impresses with its devastatingly light touch on a tragedy. Dabydeen steps into post-colonial territory with several Robinsonade poems, culminating in the blunt speech in “Post- Cannibalism” that carries “meaning more solid / than I care to think about, / all things being signified.” And all things in Imaginary Origins are indeed signified, from Dabydeen’s take on the colonial sugar industry that marks Guyana as a supplier in “Sir James Douglas: Father of British Columbia” and “Evolution Song,” to his exploration of the most iconic of Canadian literatures in “F.R. Scott Walked In,” in which the late, great Lawyer-poet appears “like Hamlet’s ghost” to argue a point of law “after the second amendment / at the meeting of the League of Canadian Poets’ / meeting in the City of Saints.” While the Atwoodian “Seeking Light” invokes Dabydeen’s years in the Lakehead district north of Superior, “Death of a Coniferous Man” rattles slyly like the bastard love-poem of Atwood and Leonard Cohen. Though Dabydeen modestly suggests in his introduction that each poem is concerned with serving as “a moment’s monument,” the location of each poem in this volume of selected works suggests something more akin to “a moment’s mammoth start” from his poem “Foreign Legions.”

The winner of the Lampman Award for 2004 is Stephen Brockwell’s Fruitfly Geographic, and the beauteous whimsy of the yellow-bordered, pseudo-National Geographic cover is a good introduction to the material unfolded within. Priming his poems with an epigraph from Marshall McLuhan—“electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors”—Brockwell constructs his text around the idea of a biological field excursion, though the technological nomadism that he invokes is more than a little anthropologically inclined. The first section, “Trip Reports,” begin as international travel letters that weave the exotic and the local in a series of snapshots. Particularly strong are “Penang,” with its blend of grotesque beauty, and “Aukland,” which prances to the tune of an all-night dance. But this section is not afraid to be homesick, even in a poem on the pragmatic use of memory in “Mediation on the Cold From the Home Office.” Brockwell reminds us in this poem that “[t]o survive the Canadian winter / you must remember the black flies of spring.” showing all forms of tragedy swirling in a gaseous green light of promise. The “trip” from which the poet “reports” is haunted by the memory of the father, who appears in several of the poems as a reviled-and-loved figure whose pleasures were counted too few in his lifetime. When the section ends with the description of a “Step Dance” as a series of firm and precarious footings, Brockwell lets paternal force have the final line with the ambiguous “I danced on my father’s ashes.”

The next section, “Visits to Museums,” cannot quite escape the legacy of the dead father, but recuperates it in the mentor figure in “Three Deaths of Hippasus of Metapontum.” This long poem is one of the collection’s finest, ritualistic in repetition and elegiac into its inquiry into the necessity of mortality and the ways of dying. A later poem, “Mountain Prayer,” though vastly different in style, functions as a combination of a declamation to an earthly god and a ritual regeneration of the mentor figure. Beginning with no less than 24 mock-evangelic invocations of the paternalized muse, personified in the dedication as Peter van Toorn, Brockwell blends humour and divinity in calling “O alphabet elf supreme! / O small-framed fame chaser! / O barrelchested behemoth tasting chimes!” but later specifies a more familial feeling, calling him “an inventive father, / fathered by an inventor, / father of poets on every corner of the city.” The description of the mentor poet “riding the mind like the wind / with open ears” is a lovely tribute that also acts as an exorcism of the father’s ghost. The “inventive father” encourages forward movement, not the tug-of-war of memory, reminding the speaker of his own role as a father, as well as his responsibility to the word.

The final section, for which Brockwell’s book is named, is pleasingly reminiscent of Lampman’s sharp lyric eye for flora and fauna on his now-famous hikes in the country surrounding the National Capital Region. While this is not a requirement for winning the Award, the appropriateness of natural history as subject matter lends Fruitfly Geographic a kind of symmetry. The final poem encourages readers to return to the close-up of the fruit fly on the cover, with its body of “possible geographies” and worlds within worlds:

The veins on the fruit fly’s wings map the rivers
of a small corner of Minnesota and Ontario
as they may have flowed or yet may flow.

Out of fruit, out of nothing, the fly beats its wings
a thousand thousand times before hands clap it
not into history, for that would take a scrawl
darker and longer than its 6 point semi-colon
rinsed from the palms, but into diminishing silence.

There is much to like, and to think about, in these stanzas: the surreal juxtaposition of microcosm against macrocosm, the philosophy of physics, the epistemological stain, all combined in an attentive ontological lyric. Up to his elbows in ink and paper at the Mermaid’s Inn, I think Archie would be pleased.

⁰ Arc 55, Winter 2005