Caribou Run - Richard Kelly Kemick (Icehouse Poetry - Gooselane Editions)

Today's book of poetry:
Caribou Run.  Richard Kelly Kemick.  Icehouse Poetry.  Gooselane Editions.  Fredericton, New Brunswick. 2016.

Caribou Run is one of those books that the more you read the smarter you feel.  Richard Kelly Kemick is 106 years old and has apparently spent every minute of that time studying biology, Latin, animal husbandry in the wild, philosophy and so on.  Kemick has also apparently learned the languages of wolf and caribou as well.

Caribou Run is a bursting wonder of a thing, a mash-up of encyclopedic voracity, beautiful reason and a poetic joie de vivre.  

The Love Poem as Caribou

It's hard to imagine. As doves, yes,

or even vultures. But there's nothing of a ballad

in the hard weight of antlers. You can't cut

into an ode, stripping its skin to bones cabled

with muscle, or search its creased face for something

you can almost explain. And a sonnet has never

made me see myself inadequate beneath

the bright light of evolution's long apprenticeship,

acutely aware of the many failings of my own form.

But maybe it's in how a love poem will cross

a body of water without being about to see

the other side. Or maybe it's in the deep prints

left in the drifts, that speak of how hard

it must have been to move on from here.

...

Kemick's Caribou Run is ostensibly about the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic and it is one beauty of a beast, obsessively and compulsively full to the brim, there is no limit to Kemick's poetic diligence.  His poem about the hurricane of mosquitoes turning the sky dark will haunt me forever.

We get to know the details of the multi-chambered stomach, a sad calving ground littered with calamity and the silent cows that follow.  But let's be clear, Kemick's caribou are not the miracle, the joy and wonder in Caribou Run is in the observations, not the observed.

A Thunderstorm Seven Kilometres

West of Old Crow, Yukon

Rising,the cumulonimbus swells against the stratosphere's hard shell,

spilling itself into a flattened sprawl: a cartoon piano hovering over

the freshwater flats. With increasing surface area, a negative charge colludes

         with the earth's own magnetism, grafting the ground positive.

This is what most people never realize: lightning comes from below as

      much as from above.

The negative sky, reacting to the positive soil, cascades step-leaders:

electric tendrils of fifty metres, unravelling for attachment, stretching

          for a circuit. The ground, in slower resurrection,

          grows forth splinters of light:

positive streamers, ribboning up

in search of their own electric awakening.

          Once a step-leader stitches a thread of plasma

                                                                and connects

                                                       with a positive-streamer

electricity ruptures from the thick sky. It is the only time

          the atmosphere touches earth.

          But the flash seen, the blue-white burn of lunar ice,

                                 is the ground channelling energy

               upwards, striking the cloud

into homeostasis. The channel,

in the shape of God's basilic vein, burns six times

                      hotter than the sun, boiling the sky to explode

a shock wave that rips the air apart,

          inflicts internal bruising on birds.

This meteorological movement, this visual presence of an

internal transfer, can, perhaps, be likened to the unexplainable

distance

of motherhood, which has within it something of a storm's great movement,

     its patient pursuit of the horizon.

...

Richard Kelly Kemick reminds us of Aristotle's eternal question "do animals die or stop living?", Well, try and anthropomorphize that.  Kemick does.

The office reading this morning was spirited.  Last night was Halloween and as luck would have it our head-tech, Milo, brought a set of costume antlers into the office today.  He insisted on wearing them all through this morning's read.

Today's book of poetry thinks that Caribou Run can run with the big boys, the big gals, it doesn't get much better than this when you're reading a book of poems.  Kemick had me rethinking certainties and looking back with awe.  Reason this crisp, rendered with beauty, doesn't come along all that often.  Richard Kelly Kemick flat out impressed us off our feet.

Upon the Autumn Equinox,

the Tundra Takes Inventory

Moss shimmering frost, streams clinking ice.

Puzzle pieces of slush around a boulder

that's rounded like a beached whale, the defenselessness

of a weight that can't contain itself. Catkins

passed over, crimson against brambled earth.

Muskox hair blown southwest from Banks Island,

and raven feathers, iridescent with twilight.

Sockets of ground squirrel holes, corkscrewed

beneath the sedge. A tensile horizon

and starlight rolls in like an optometrist's lens.

A woodpecker's hollow well. A fox paw.

A dryas trying to hold bloom, as the Beaufort

breeze undresses its petals, erasing itself into sky.

          The tall grass bends with wind, brushed

          like the swath of your hair in the breath

          the door made as you closed it behind you.

...

Today's book of poetry isn't much of a nature buff although I've spent my time in the woods and the wilds.  I am a Canadian and I do identify with our big, beautiful country, I can rejoice in nature and am touched when a poet brings me closer to it.

Today's book of poetry may stumble onto a more intelligent book of poetry sometime soon but it is unlikely.  Kemick is bursting out of the gate and onto the scene  all prodigy like and fully formed.  If books of poems were NHL goals Kemick would be having a Gretzky season.

"

Richard Kelly Kemick

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Kelly Kemick’s poetry, prose, and criticism have been published in magazines and journals across Canada and the United States, including the Fiddlehead, the New Quarterly, and Tin House (Open Bar).

He has won the poetry prizes of both Grain magazine and Echolocation. He lives in Calgary.

BLURBS
"You hear notes of McKay, Steffler, and Purdy's Baffin Island poems in this extraordinary first collection, which is marked throughout by a pulsing, joyful intelligence. Richard Kelly Kemick delivers us onto the great lone land with the precision and beauty of his lines. The book is breathtaking."
     - Time Lilburn, author of Assinboia

"Caribou Run honours its titles subject by its sheer depth of research and by its willingness to explore the relationship between man and nature from numerous angles. Wisecracking, earnest, and charmingly obsessive, Kemick introduces himself here as a poet who believes in something larger than his own self, and so is a poet to watch."
     - Nich Thran, author of Mayor Snow

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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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Quebec Passages - Pearl Pirie (Noun Trivet Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Quebec Passages.  Pearl Pirie.  Noun Trivet Press. Ottawa.  Ontario.  2014.

"we followed the rules we set for
ourselves"

This line from Pearl Pirie's poem "a rail bed of feldspar" just may be Pirie's mantra.

Quebec Passages is the second book of Pirie's that Today's book of poetry has looked at.  The first, been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010) blog can be seen here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/09/been-shed-bore-pearl-pirie.html

And a disclaimer - I was lucky enough to read many of these poems in manuscript form, and was enthusiastic in response.

Nothing has changed.

Pearl Pirie seems to set projects for herself, dictates rules that demand poems of specific direction and focal point - but more and more the poetry of Pearl Pirie is becoming a clear, crisp beacon, they read universal and remain vulnerable.

hair strokes

     "things recede, everything recedes, everything is far away
     [...] the moon of contemplation on our backs"
     ~Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills

from every angle examined, yep, still 2 white hairs

as a teen you said: I want to love you till we're grey
we're there...

no, the whole head, and if you go bald, then too.

twenty years, you're still here, your hand thrust into my side,
rooting for a grip to hang on.

...

Pirie's nod to Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman let's us know that Pirie knows her history.

These interesting and articulate poems seem to come from a very deep well.  Pirie may be one of the best kept secrets in Ottawa.

Her dry humour just races around inside these poems like little landmines.  Some of them go off, when you are pouring tea, or turning down the sheets for the night.

Today's book of poetry is challenged by some of the visual poetry in Quebec Passages but isn't dissuaded.  I always hope to broaden my scope even when I'm reluctant to embrace.

Quebec Passages races past the reader like the witty barbs and bon mots of a strange but exceptional seating companion on a train.  Someone who is full of wisdom and a little piss and vinegar.  Someone confident enough to let loose with those assuring assessments, clinical appraisals and whimsical amusements.  They all fly by with staccato-clackety-clack of clockwork, or steel wheels on rails hitting seams.

after the meltdown at Promenade Plantee where shoppers and
suits averted their already preoccupied gaze we returned to
our flophouse de jour

waking to sun,
your hand on my back
was feeling a vertebra
as if testing for
a weak rung

...

Pirie's mature poems are Brautiganian whip-smart and as precise as pinched purpose.

She packs an over-sized emotional heft into many of these brief brios.

Pirie likes to laugh but has to move her tongue out of her cheek to do it.

moss is a velvet cape laid down

welcome back milkweed, lamb's ears,
grapevine and smallest of clover sprout.
good to see you up and about. apple petal.

verdigris pixie cup, dark umbrella lobbed
into the bush's sand, broken and turned
back on itself, oh, hello, rosette of lobes,

tar jelly lichen, what we saw once close up
we can draw in details from a distance.
we know a smudge is weather.

we breathe and know rain's close, we have
no word for the taste of air but know a shift
once our bones feel it. we notice best what

we have an easy word for. what we might
even believe. or else we're stranded in hail
in diagonal sweeps of musical sheets.

...

                       "or else we're stranded in hail
in diagonal sweeps of musical sheets."

That is such a great line.  Today's book of poetry remains convinced that Pirie will continue to cement her reputation as one of Ottawa's finer poets.  Quebec Passages is another big, solid statement to back that assertion.  It is a small book full of big ideas, humour and a searching intelligence.

Pearl Pirie

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pearl Pirie’s next collection, the pet radish, shrunken is with BookThug, March 2015. Author of been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010) and Thirsts (Snare, 2011) which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Pirie has over a dozen chapbooks, most recently today's woods (above/ground, 2014) & polyphonic choral of civet tongues and manna (unarmed, 2014).  Host of Literary Landscape on CKCUfm.com, she organized Ottawa’s Tree Seed Workshops 2009-2014. She gives workshops and talks on poetry for various organizations. She blogs and photographs Ottawa’s rich, amazing literary scene.

BLURB

"Part of the appeal of following Pirie’s work over the past few years has always been in not entirely knowing where her work might go next, shifting between narrative forms into more traditional engagements with haiku as well as more experimental forms of language and visual poetry, playing constantly with different shapes and possible sounds. [...] [T]hrough her curiosity, her work manages to accomplish a series of unexpected moments and startling, even jarring, images."

      —rob mclennan on Quebec Passages at Small Press Review

Pearl Pirie

Poet, Editor, Publisher

with thanks to Illume Espresso Bar

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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.

The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane - (Harbour Publishing)

Today's book of poetry:
The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane.  Patrick Lane.  Harbour Publishing. Madeira Park, British Columbia.  2011.

Today's book of poetry has seriously floundered in attempting to write about Patrick Lane and his collected poems.

How do you write about your heroes?

This monumental collection is a pure object of beauty before you open the covers.  Harbour Publishing have done their boy proud.

Oh yes, the poetry.

The Image

Now that he was older
the artists had begun to paint him, and the photographers,
the clever ones with their miniature machines came
and arranged him in gardens and poolrooms, bars and verandas,
to capture the images of who he was, who they thought
he had been. Most of the artists were his age
but some were younger, beautiful young men,
and woman with large hands, their hair pulled back
tight, their clothes unruly. He liked them best.
He liked the way they would walk around him
after spending days and nights with his books,
his poems, the way they would stop and stare
while painting him, all his words in their minds,
all the suffering intact, precise and imaginable.

...

You can pretty much jump in anywhere to harvest the rich vein of work Lane has been pounding out since his work was first published in the sixties.  Twenty-seven books of poetry so far.

Just so you know, from Today's book of poetry perspective, Patrick Lane is the poet of the people. Horrible moniker to lay on anyone but in this case it fits.  His very approachable body of poetry is working class no-nonsense and as erudite as the golden tongued whisper of the angels.

Grief

He sat at the foot of the low bed and watched her cry.
It was not like Rome burning and it was not
like the spare fires he had built
when he was alone in the wilderness,
the ones he sat away from, the ones he put out
when he was tired of watching.
Her grief was of another kind, an event
that was merely ornament, a thing
that perishes as it is made, as a performance
in a northern town perishes line by line
with no one to remember it, something less than art
as time is less than merit. He had made her love him.

She hadn't wanted to. He had shaped her love
by shaping himself, giving himself to her
in the exactness of her integrity, becoming
her, and so, becoming less, their time
together an intimacy which was only imitation.
Sitting there he felt the same
as when he was a child and dressed
in his mother's clothes, his posturing
in front of her mirror, the inaccuracy
of that kind of dance.

He understood his gluttony, the wanting more,
his greed for her loss, the pain
she seemed to love more than him.
She did not tell him to go away, and
she did not call out to him.
What he had was what an observer has,
the man who gazes alone from a private box
protected by velvet curtains, a glass of good wine beside him,
the play going on and him with no rights, one way
or another, the man who watches with detachment
as a critic does, having no stake in the event.

...

I had the privilege of meeting Patrick Lane once.  It was back in the late 70's.  I was driving taxi in Peterborough and writing my little poems.  I got a call from my high school drama teacher, for some reason or another she was meeting Patrick Lane for drinks and was inviting me to join.  Of course I did.  Pretty sure I was able to get another young poet, Richard Harrison, to join me.

And that's the end of that story.

I've met Acorn, Purdy, Layton, Birney.  And just meeting those men took my breath away.  But Lane has always been the poet whose work paralyzed me with pleasure most.  Of all the giants, he is the giant that makes the most sense to me.

My intern disagreed.  You will not hear from that intern again.

Last Water Song

It is not the water you tried to find when you were young.
That was the water that lost you.
You climbed trees to look and the water was there.
You walked on the earth and the water was nowhere.
That was the losing water.
This water is the finding water.
It is cloud searching water.
When you are old it comes down.
It stretches out on the earth.
It says follow this water.
First water is woman water.
The belly of woman has this song.
This water was the first learning song.
This water is the last learning song.
It is the cloud under the earth.
Now you climb down roots to find this water.
Now this tongue is a root.
Open this mouth in the earth.
Now sing this water song.
Now you are the last water.

...

For many of us at the Today's book of poetry offices Patrick Lane sets the bar for the rest of Canadian poetry.  The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane should be an essential for every poetry collection in the country.

Patrick Lane

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.

BLURBS

"Like the classic Buddhist, Lane finds in the recognition of life's horrors, or the terrible things men do to men and even more to other beings, the reason for an ultimate compassion, for a desire to nurture love where it survives."

     George Woodcock

"Patrick Lane is our most essential poet; tough, tender, fearless, and beautifully dangerous. For decades he has been our guide to darkness, and our provider of unexpected flashes of brilliant, almost blinding light. Now gathered together in one spot, the poetry of his life enhances and energizes us, and takes us to places we would never go on our own. Lane is a true Master."

     Jane Urquhart

"Lane's poems have a lucid, generous eye for the unsung and excluded, an abiding dignity in their rhythms of blind continuance, compromised peace."

     Ken Babstock

"...a breathtaking achievement of moral and poetic genius."

     Tim Lilburn

Patrick Lane @ 2008 Calgary Spoken Word Festival

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