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Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences
By Jan Zwicky
Gaspereau Press, 73 pages, $18.95

All poets, the good ones anyway, develop in the course of their work a philosophy. A quality of light in which things are perceived, thought out, written. Philosophy, like light, is not static. It moves among the days, glinting off different rooftops and sections of the fields, breaking through and dimmed by clouds. Darkness is part of it. And at times it's excruciatingly bright.

Jan Zwicky's new work is another slant to a philosophy practised at least since her scholarly work Lyric Philosophy, published in 1992. Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which won a Governor-General's Award in 1999, marked a poetic turn in a project furthered by Wisdom & Metaphor and Robinson's Crossing, nominated for the 2004 GG in categories of non-fiction and poetry, respectively.

If references to the disciplines of poetry and philosophy seem difficult to separate out here, it's because they are. Zwicky's project is the writing and thinking of poetry as philosophy. Each poem of Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is a moment in the long day of this thinking. Together, their approach to image, form and the ethics of address considers the question of how one is to write these moments.

In Wisdom & Metaphor, Zwicky writes that "philosophy is thinking in love with clarity." Wittgenstein, she believes, is close to the heart of the matter when he posits that astonishment is thinking. Thirty-Seven Small Songs suggests poetry's capacity as a mode of astonished clarity, and the poem as the giving-over of astonishment rendered through disciplined thinking and expression. Such work is not about the experience, but an attempt to write the experience.

I can't avoid Wallace Stevens, the old bird, hooting from the trees: "not ideas about the thing but the thing itself." Or, as close as we can get to it. Zwicky's book is this kind of thought-gesture. Ideas are not negated or neglected, but on the contrary rise up more fully blown for not being defined. They bloom in the silences of looking and of thinking.

The question becomes, then, how to write these silences — the "is not" implicit in what "is." It's really hard. The 37 small songs of the book's first section are brief odes to things, moods, sights and events that endeavour, in singing their presences, to summon the still point of absence. Here is Small Song for the Moon in the Daytime in its entirety:

Only when the sky is cloudless
and the house stands silent in the early afternoon.
Only when the casement is flung open
and there is no hand.
Only when death holds you to its quartz eye
and the wind is nowhere to be found.

What is called forth is not only the absence at the core of perception, but the silence implicit in language. Ideally, that which cannot be written speaks from the interstices of what is written. Words are a little bit like stepping stones across a river, which allow us to walk out, be surrounded by a wild element and not drown. This is what poetry shoots for.

The poems of the second section, Seven Studies, are longer looks by way of their lingering suggestions, if not in actual length on the page. They possess the associative quality of a mind dwelling on the space a body occupies. The first stanza of Study: August Fields reads:

Above the fenceline,
drifts of crows, the sky a blue breath!
,on the glass pane of the afternoon.
In the distance, house and barn,
,the bronze bell of their silence:
no one in the yard.
What strikes me, besides the sure, quiet way the lines step, break and land, is that no one is in the yard. No one is there.

The final section, Six Variations on Silence, summons silence most explicitly. The poems are small, simple images written in three or two lines. This is the first: "The door to the season stands ajar./ Though it, crickets sing,/ grass ripens in the flat stones of the walk." Left pages are blank, a pause in thought that, though wordless, is full.

All the poems of Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences are spare and measured. Many of the songs contain the ode's direct address — "O stone!" and the like — as well as the characteristic questions and exclamation points. They recall the Songs of Federico Garcia Lorca, who, as a musician, like Zwicky, was attuned to the importance of silence in and around music. In all of this, the book also bears the sensibility, formal influence and technique of Japanese poetry in translation.

Inasmuch as Zwicky's work here is about present absences, the silence alongside language, darkness inside light, it is also about time. How the moment of perception opens into the deep time of thinking. About duration and simultaneity. The way, in contemplation, one may get the briefest glimpse of being without words. Or find oneself somehow thinking about Giacometti, childhood and Gillian Welch all at the same time, while considering a completely unrelated vista. It's intriguing, and very weird.

I cannot write that I believe every poem in this book works. But even considering why they might not raises some important questions about looking, thinking and how possibly to write them. For those who write poetry, or anything, for that matter, for those who read, for those who pay attention, these questions are crucial.

Karen Solie is the author of Short Haul Engine. Her second collection of poems, Modern and Normal, is due out in late August. She lives in Toronto.