Reviewed here:
Revolver, by Kevin Connolly, Anansi, 82 pages, $18.95
Crabwise to the Hounds, by Jeramy Dodds, Coach House, 70 pages, $16.95
The Sentinel, by A.F. Moritz, Anansi, 88 pages, $18.95
The 21st century so far has proved incredibly fruitful for Canadian writers of poetry. Many of our most-recognized senior poets continue to publish masterful new work, and the level of accomplishment and sophistication expected of our emerging poets is continually rising.
All of this, of course, is wonderful news for Canadian readers, and this year's Griffin Poetry Prize short list is proof that the happy trend continues.
Jeramy Dodds is the newcomer here, but he's no token newbie. Crabwise to the Hounds is a first collection, but it is impressive enough for this list without seeming diminished by the work of Dodds's elders. To his credit, he honed his skills over a long apprenticeship and did not rush to publish as early as he probably could have. The result is a debut that easily rivals any I've read in years.
Most remarkable about Dodds's writing is its resourcefulness and versatility. He has learned from both traditionalist and avant-garde schools of modern poetry, and has done so without developing an ideological attachment to either extreme that would only limit the imaginative possibilities of his poems.
At ease in either world or in-between, his poems resonate physically with cunningly crafted language while they successfully amuse the intellect. He balances form, content, entertainment and ingenuity without giving any indication that any ingredient is more or less important than the others. His Two Riders, Four Werewolves is a Beckettian script for the unfortunate meeting of the titular characters. In fewer than 60 words, Dodds manages to create setting, characterization, action and suspense, all executed with onomatopoeic fervour, psychological depth and narrative complexity.
And in a poem like the spectacular Moorhen, he demonstrates that his ear is finely enough attuned to the world to tell us, “The tubas are full of fog and fallen thoroughbreds,” and also that he is wise enough to know “you/ can't tell someone just how lonely he is,/ but a moorhen sure can.”
If Dodds is the beginner, Kevin Connolly represents the poet in mid-career, as Revolver is his fourth collection. Coincidentally, he was also the editor who ushered Dodds's collection through the press, so it should be no surprise that Connolly, too, juggles an experimental sensibility with an appreciation for traditional verse craft. The stated conceit behind this book is that each poem “is written in a different form or vocal register – ‘revolving' through poetic personae and possibilities.”
This approach isn't much different from Connolly's earlier works – he has always been interested in trying on different stylistic hats – but in Revolver the intentionality of his chameleon act is at its most explicit. The title poem, for example, is a sonnet, while Pull is a sestina. The voice of Clean Head is elegiac, while Litany is equal measures absurd and satirical. Because the aim of the book is to be an assortment, or sampler, it is impossible to summarize or to select a poem or quotation to give you a sense of the whole.
What astounds the reader is the virtuosity with which Connolly wields all the poetic tools at his disposal. And this artistic multiplicity is not some elaborate masquerade. Connolly isn't pretending to be 45 different kinds of poet. Here, he is 45 different kinds of poet, and each is the authentic Kevin Connolly. Perhaps he sums up the overall effect of his metamorphoses best in the final poem of the collection:
... all of it just adding to the
mother load, the surfeit of beauty,
which on this day is just a fancy way
of saying lots, too much, skidloads, plenty.
And so we come to the most experienced poet on the list. For nearly 40 years, A.F. Moritz has been building one of the most consummate bodies of work in contemporary English-language poetry. In The Sentinel, Moritz's poems invite favourable comparison to the work of Shelley, Lawrence, Stevens and Ashbery. Yet he is always his own poet, always of his own era. He is a “complete” poet in that he has equally prodigious command over the “right-brained” elements of poetry – musicality and mathematics (i.e. rhythm and metre) — as well as those of the “left brain”: image, metaphor and so on.
See how harmoniously these elements are interwoven in the first stanza of his poem Return to the Fountain:
Before these skies that are the eyes of the many
blind and dead somewhere. Before these stones
travelling at random slowly on the lot
with all their shadows: clots of blood, minstrels
wandering the juvenile earth. Before the songs
like spools of ribbons, white and blue, for wrapping
wrinkled bulks. Before the whirled slings of minutes,
I used to write to you of fountains.
The Sentinel is filled with moments like this: graceful, adroit, surprising. There is something reassuring in art of this calibre; it reminds us how things matter. Moritz's voice is unmistakable. His readers, his admiring peers and his reviewers have long felt this, but it has become so obvious that it must finally be said: A.F. Moritz is one of the true master poets of his generation.
Paul Vermeersch is poetry editor of Insomniac Press. His fourth collection is forthcoming next year.
