Empire of Dirt — Thomas Stewart (Red Squirrel Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Empire of Dirt.  Thomas Stewart.  Red Squirrel Press.  Biggar, Scotland.  2019.

Thomas Stewart gets an awful lot accomplished in thirty-six short pages.  Empire of Dirt is both quaintly naive and brutally violent as Stewart deconstructs the world to suit his gaze.  Dead foxes and dead birds populate these poems as macabre and faintly menacing omens.  Stewart's Empire of Dirt is fecund with ominous portent.

We all know that suicide is painless, M*A*S*H taught us that, in Empire of Dirt Stewart explores various methodologies, they are explained, explored and exhausted.  Guilt and expectations are probably the real villains but in the universe Stewart's Empire of Dirt creates beware Eden's vipers and sharp as razor box-cutters.

Conkers

When I smashed the conkers

and laid them out,

when I felt their broken

pieces and gathered them up,

when I smelt the vinegar

of their cracked shells

and wanted to take them home

I thought of the head boy —

red-haired Einstein

most likely to succeed

went into the woods

behind the gym one day

with only meth and a can of 7-up

and a photo of his mum

and a long rope.

Beyond the tennis courts we heard

the police shout, cut him down!

with voices like flower vases

shattering.

When I left the conkers

and walked home

to pass a bridge

covered in ivy

I saw that boy

who tried to jump off the edge

but was stopped by a stranger,

I saw that dangling boy

in literal limbo

and heard the voices

of the other boys

shouting gay boy, faggot,

and when the boy abandoned

the bridge

his mother hid the pills

and all the belts

were locked

in Ikea boxes

and the house became

a safe space.

The boy found a box-cutter

when his mother

was at work.

When I walked through the park

and leaves wondered

with me

I couldn't remember

the name of the girl

that everyone forgot,

that filled herself

with her grandma's

paracetamol and sat between

the goal posts.

They found her in the morning,

a dog walker or near enough,

and the newspaper clipping

was short and un-sweet—

just kept calling her girl.

When I slept that night

on a wooden bed

I could smell the conkers

in the feathers of the

pillow, I could hear their

song in my dreams,

I could feel them broken

yet protruding

through the springs

of the mattress.

💫💫💫

Grief hangs over Stewart's Empire of Dirt like Al Capp's Joe Btfsplk's cloud in Dogpatch, or that stinky dead bird in that old poem.  Thomas Stewart does have a sense of humour but you're probably going to have to get stung once or twice before you can really enjoy it.

Stewart may be operating with his feet in an entirely different dimension, he currently lives in Scotland but the poor man calls Wales home.  This isn't the time to call on Saint Dylan just because he's from just down the road, although Today's book of poetry did visit Swansea once.  No, as my poetry brother-in-arms Stuart Ross and I were discussing just yesterday; it's useless to make comparisons.  Except of course when a comparison is absolutely necessary.

empire of dirt

I look in the mirror
and see a stranger looking back,
maybe I see my father,
dead and young,
covered in pollen,
never dress him in yellow
he said
the bees will always come

don't dress me,
paint my skin
in a colour I do not recognize,
paint the answers to how
my desires are
not what they once were,
paint it in dirt
run my rules in muck
they've changed anyway,
throw my limits in the filth,
scrub my face with mud,

send me to the forest
to a dark wood, to a log
of fallen leaves, to a cold cave
where I can scrawl my dreams
in blood and the sap of a tree,
where I'll rub dill into my wounds
and make music only the walls
engulf

send me to find a face
to win my body back,
pray
tell me that my body
will no longer lay mute, I remember it
like a child remembers its favourite food:
I know it exists
this body of mine,
where I do not wake to that knock
            knock,
where I can simply be,
this is surely an existence that can occur,

so let me be
in the woods,
let me scream to the tallest tree
and find a fairy or a fool,
let me fall into that dirt
and smell the soil of my youth,
let me pull the flowers' roots
and plant them somewhere on the horizon, let me
tangle daisy-chains, so that I may pluck
each petal and ask if he loved me
or not

this wood is my country,
my mother tongue, my climate,
if my body will no longer speak to me
let me place it in the belly of a tree
and barefoot I will walk on.

💫💫💫

It is the silliest of things, and I do hope Thomas Stewart will forgive Today's book of poetry an indulgence.  Believe it or not poetry babies, Today's book of poetry attended Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School.  I mentioned this to Mr. Stewart but am uncertain if he was amused.  And at that school there were teachers who taught me to love poetry so a little shout out to Don Quarrie, his lovely wife Bea and all the other teachers at T.A.S.S., a big thank you.

Today's book of poetry had our usual morning read when everyone got in to the office this morning.  The office has been a little subdued this week.  Blair Norman Sharpe, a local Ottawa painter of renown, a loved teacher, passed away after a long illness.  Blair had become a pal of ours more recently, I've been regaling the troops with Blair stories for the last year.  His bravery and killer sense of humour will not be forgotten.  Today's book of poetry sends our broken hearted hugs to his dear Brenda.

Blair didn't love all poetry but he loved the idea of it.

Today's book of poetry depends on poetry to get us through the day and Thomas Stewart's Empire of Dirt was just the tonic.  Stewart's narrator suffers, but there are also declarations that come from hard earned experience, declarations of hope, a search for joy.  That's pretty much what we are all after, isn't it.

real boy

this is a true story:

they said
you're not a real
boy until you cut
the wizard out of the tree,

it's a question
of which tree:
real boys might pick
oak, birch or beech,
and then boys
that pick alder,
elm or hawthorn
are unreal,

unreal boys hold the axe
and whisper,
cousin of Merlin,
give me some magic,

but magic
is not a boy's language,
here, in the boy's
toilets or there in the
changing rooms it is
the outstretched branch
welcoming you

to be a real boy

unreal boys, who hide
under their towels
or become black dots
on the rugby pitch

or study the mole
above their nipple,
or the drooping stomach
in the mirror

are the quietly
hungry trees
in the breeze,

if I were a tree
I'd be a white willow
by the bay, a salix
alba alone and sexless,
I would only know
the touch of my own
branches,

yet
as I long to be
a real boy
I know I am already
a tree, made of roots,
standing in the wind,
in solitude, exposed,
displaying my chest,
made of wood,
my bushy hair
and eyebrows falling
falling
past my chipped teeth,
across the scar on my
chin and the leaves
growing from
my hands.

💫💫💫

Toxic masculinity is a tough battleground and Stewart attacks the beast head on.  Today's book of poetry is here to tell you all that Thomas Stewart is absolutely correct, it takes all sorts of trees to make a forest.

Today's book of poetry thought Thomas Stewart's Empire of Dirt was aces.  Every time we read it we liked it more.  We'll be looking forward to more from Stewart.

Thomas Stewart

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Stewart is from Wales, he currents resides in Scotland.

BLURBS

‘A skilful, strong, and harshly innocent collection by one of our deftest young poets.’ 

     —David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award

‘There is an edge of violence to Thomas Stewart’s poems, but it is not gratuitous. These are the cracks that open in the surface of the world under his concentrated gaze. What they disclose is a deep sadness and a tenderness, alongside the slight scent of blood.’ 

    —Philip Gross, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize

redsquirrelpress.com

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

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Nineteen Fifty-Seven - Jim McLean (Coteau Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Nineteen Fifty-Seven.  Jim McLean.  Coteau Books.  Regina, Saskatchewan. 2016.

Jim McLean isn't about to concede an inch to fashion.  Nineteen Fifty-Seven reads like someone stepped on a very articulate cat's tail.  This is tough-guy caterwauling of the highest order. McLean isn't in a bad mood in every poem but there is a Joe Btfsplk at the corner of every page and a devil on his shoulder.

These poems are train yard secrets, hobo's taunts and Moose Jaw lullabies.  McLean has some serious narrative gifts and these poems let him show it.  McLean's Nineteen Fifty-Seven is packed to the rafters with salty wisdom.

Heartbreak Hotel

R. Smith & Sons contracted for the railway,

feeding the gangs of men who came each spring

from the unemployment lines and the jails

and the reserves and the soup kitchens and River Street

to lay steel in the raw early mornings with their pitiable

shabby suit coats and soft, mushy shoes,

a few with caps.

The foremen were tough and seasoned and had to be,

it was still, back then, a long journey

from Moose Jaw to Chaplin, Old Jim,

the cook, was ex-army, 77 years old, his muscle

turned soft, turned to fat, he used to say with regret.

Up at five every morning, first thing he taught me

was not to lean my elbows on the wash stand

when I scrubbed my face in the early dawn.

It was a military thing, I guess, and he would grunt

with satisfaction to see me bend at the waist,

elbows up, over the enameled basin.

It was easy for me to give him that.

He was a pretty good old guy, Polish,

he said he was. He watched, let you show him

what you were made of.

Bill was just about as old as the cook,

skinny as a rail, with a wife at home.

No business being there,
except he needed the money, I guess.

We'd peel potatoes together every morning
for the noon meal and again in the afternoon

to get ready for supper, and talk a bit.
We'd eat our meal after the men

had gone back to the track
or to their bunks at the end of the working day

and Bill would always eat too much,
as if he was trying to store it up,

yet he never put on any weight, he'd just
get sick and then be sorry.

Bill treated me all right
and I liked him but I never wanted

to get that old and be that poor. It was 1956
and I was a kid and on my own out there.

The cook liked the way I could carry whole sides
of beef, his own strength gone,

and he gave me lots of other things to do
but my main job was to wash dishes

I washed those dishes from the meals of those hundred
or more men three times a day

with water hauled from the tender and heated
boiling hot on the stove and I sang

alone, away from everybody, at the top of my lungs
with my hands in the soapy water up to my elbows

every song I knew, Hank Snow and Williams
The Platters and Webb Pierce and I can't remember them all

and, of course, Heartbreak Hotel, by that new guy,
that I played every day on the juke-box

in the Chaplin Cafe beside the tracks when I bought a Coke
and sat on a stool like teen-agers you would see

on television and learned all the words for singing later
away from everybody

...

Any poet who hearkens the spirits of William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and Charles Bukowski is going to get a piece of my time.  Throw in an entirely sweet 80th birthday ode to the King, Elvis Aaron Presley and Today's book of poetry is a your new fan.

Jim McLean travels back and forth in time with these poems, we see him as a young man and earning the regrets he'll carry later and then full circle we hear the mature older man's wisdom.  McLean's hero carries some heavy water in these poems but there are no "woe is me" moments.  McLean is old school all the way.

My Brother, Who I Looked Out for
When We Were Kids

it was the tenth or the fiftieth
or the hundredth time
we brought him to the house
and called his sponsor who didn't even want
to bother with him any more he said
he just want to kill himself, there's nothing
you can do

and it was true, he looked like death, his skin
translucent, waxy     I said
you've got to get straight, get a job
and he laid there on the couch and said
I can't work out in the cold
I need an office job, an executive job
and that was bad, because I knew then
how hopeless things were

and he promised, for the hundredth time
to stop drinking and to go to the meetings
and we piled groceries into bags
and I drove him to the place where he lived
Wong said he owed last month's rent
and I paid that and the next month in advance
and I made him give me a receipt

he sold the groceries
because somebody saw him an hour later on the street
with his woman and said
by the way they were falling down
they must have got hold of something
it was a thing to crush you
we couldn't do anything and we couldn't stop trying

finally, my father came down from the Coast
he ended up drinking with him, told us
we didn't do anything to help him
when he said that he was lucky he was my father
he bought two tickets, took him back
to Vancouver on the train
afterward he wrote a letter, saying things
hadn't worked out saying he'd been
wrong, saying he'd left and he didn't
know where he was

a long time later he wrote again telling us
about how he'd come across
a newspaper item, just a few lines
buried in a back page that said he died
alone in some flophouse and that the city
had buried him as having
no known next of kin

I wrote my father a letter, he needed something
was looking for something
from me and told him we all had tried
I said he had taken that wrong turn
and but for the grace of God
it could have been me
it was nobody's fault

...

Today's book of poetry had a good time rooting through Nineteen Fifty-Seven because Mclean doesn't really ever take his foot off of the gas.  These poems pound through the gears and when you come out the other side you know you've been taken for ride.  This is a robust read filled with characters you've already met, people you already know.  McLean's tales are writ large and aren't afraid to stomp their feet as they march across the page.

McLean's Nineteen Fifty-Seven both convinces and reminds Today's book of poetry of just how beautifully horrible we humans can be to each other and how redemption is only a poem away.

My Father's Hat

I bought a hat, a fedora
and bent down the brim

on the front right side and trained it
with a binder clip

The first time my sister saw it she said
My God, you look just like Dad

and I looked in the mirror
and she was right

and I thought about all those
little pieces of paper he used to fill

with strange cryptic columns
of numbers and I thought about

how one day he threw everything away
his job, years of service

sold the house, moved us far away
from our school and our friends

like we were being punished for something
like he was punishing himself

It was hard at first
but we were young and resilient

and bounced back, some of us
and I learned not to blame him

or myself or the world and searched
until I found all the little pieces

and put them back together and never
threw away anything important

and I remembered, years later
stopping to visit him in Vancouver

sitting mostly silent until a decent interval
had passed, getting up, saying

I wanted to walk along English Bay
while I was here and he, surprising me

offered I'll go with you
and as we watched the tide he said

You've done all right for yourself
which is about as close as he ever came.

...

Jim McLean must be one tough old son of a B, there is some hard railroading in these poems, the toughest kind of love.  It's clear McLean kissed the wrong gal once or twice and feels some sort of way about it.  This is hearty, vibrant and compelling narrative poetry with a brylcreemed ducktail full of memory on the side.

Jim McLean

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim McLean had a long career with Canadian Pacific Railway and with Transport Canada, living and working in various Canadian locations. He is an original member of the Moose Jaw Movement poetry group, and his work has appeared in magazines and anthologies and on CBC Radio. He is the author of The Secret Life of Railroaders and co-author of Wildflowers Across the Prairies. His illustrations have appeared on book covers and in several literary and scientific publications.

Jim McLean

reading Elvis Agonistes

from Nineteen Fifty-Seven

video: Coteau Books

coteaubooks.com

541

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.