A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent - Stuart Ross (A Buckrider Book/Wolsak and Wynn)

Today's book of poetry:
A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent.  Stuart Ross.
A Buckrider Book.  Wolsak and Wynn.  Hamilton, Ontario.  2016.

These are my words.

                                                                 They existed before I was born

                                                                  but not in this order.

                                                                                       David W. McFadden

                                                                                       "My Words/Hamilton"

Those of you who read Today's book of poetry with any regularity will already know that Stuart Ross and I are the closest of friends.  We've been friends since before most of you were born.

So please take that into consideration.

Now please forget what I just told you -- so that I can categorically tell you without pretense or prejudice, how truly splendid a pleasure bomb Stuart Ross has bestowed on us with A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent.

For many of us Stuart Ross has been the most original and imaginative voice in Canadian poetry for some time.  His wit and ironic palette are second to none.  And now he's gone and done it, Ross has added two new twists to his considerable canon.  Access to his massive and generous heart and a concerted effort to tie into a more direct narrative.

The results are stunning.  Today's book of poetry is convinced A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent is not only Ross' best book, and that is saying something, but one of the very best I have read in years.

Pompano

And my mother is on the balcony

and my father is making cheese sandwiches

and my mother is writing a letter

that my father will discover

two months later in their bedroom

in Toronto, the morning

we're to bury her

she writes that

she is on the balcony

and he is making cheese sandwiches

and she says she feels treasured

and if ever there are grandkids

tell them she'd've loved them

and in five years my brother

dies in my sobbing father's arms

and my father one year after

and I cannot find the letter

my mother wrote in Pompano

but I remember the word treasured

it's how she felt, she said

     and palm trees sway in the hot breeze

     and butterflies called daggerwings drift past

     and sand skinks swim through millions of grains of sand

     and I - I am a pompano

     I am this fish and I search

     for that letter in my mother's hand

     beyond the Atlantic coast

...

Make no mistakes, this is still a Stuart Ross book full of unexpected magic and rubix cube logic leaps of faith.  There are poems Today's book of poetry see as political and powerful and brilliant beside intensely personal laments of grief and quiet moments of joyous relief and celebration.  Ross has it all packed in here.

Today's book of poetry sees A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent as far more deeply personally revealing than any of Ross' previous work, there are poems about all of Ross' family, the living and the dead, and a tenderness that will shake your opened heart.  And there are also the usual myriad of resplendent guests popping out of Ross' generous compendium like popcorn.

Virginia Woolf, David W. McFadden, Ron Padgett, Stephen Crane, Boris Spassky, Mark Laba and his entire family, Kurosawa and Dagwood Bumstead too, they are all in here and that is just scratching the surface.

Mentioning Sir David W. of McFadden makes Today's book of poetry think that A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent started one afternoon forty years ago or so when Ross skipped school, spent the afternoon in a library and discovered SAINT DAVID M and A Knight in Dried Plums.

Make Big Monkey Writing Poems

Big Monkey watches over me

as the blistering clouds bang

against my window and I dream

of you again and you are alive.

We are in a snow fort on my lawn

on Pannahill Road and we pretend

we are soaring through space.

The rumble of a 1967 Valiant

station wagon passing by

my driveway is the roar

of a meteor hurtling toward

earth and narrowly missing our

craft. We know now that

everyone will die except us,

because we are in space. Except

our ship has turned into a womb,

its hot, sticky walls pressing

against us until we can barely

move our arms. We are crushed

together like conjoined twins,

and because you are dead, I 

wonder if I too am now dead

and I call out to Big Monkey

but he is bent over my desk,

rolling a sheet of yellow paper

through the platen of my

1952 Underwood, so intent

he cannot see us in the TV set,

our palms against the screen

from inside, and vertical hold

starts slipping.

...

This morning's reading of A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent in the Today's book of poetry offices was fire-cracking-tear-jerking-awe inspiring-explosion stuff.  About a dozen guests piled through the doors first thing this morning.  Both Milo, our head tech, and Kathryn, our new Jr. Editor, invited friends and family because they both adore Mr. Ross.  They have collected almost everything of the mountain he has published.  The reading was a dazzle as people took turns flashing it all out into the open like fireworks.  There was real snap, crackle and pop.

Stuart Ross has done something marvelous in this astonishing book by giving us almost full access.   Today's book of poetry is enthused by Aaron Tucker's suggestion that this become a poetry franchise, Tucker suggests A Sparrow Still Come Down Resplendent, Keepin it Resplendent, The Sparrow Re-Returns and so on.  We love this idea.  Ross' fertile home planet has sent us a gem.

The Hanging

My grandfather yells his Polish English

as my pyjama top swings

from the banister above

and his sewing machine

is silent in his dark room

and my mother puts her hand

on the back of my head,

tells me, "He saw the pyjama

and thought it was you,

that you had hanged yourself,"

and I went to my room,

gazed out at the snow

blanketing the Nefskys' roof

and pictured myself hanging

my pyjama sleeve tight

around my throat,

my grandfather pushing my feet aside

as he lumbers up the stairs

to eat his lumpy porridge.

...

Today's book of poetry loves the three poems I selected for today but there is so much more going on in A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent.

Today's book of poetry rarely makes requests but we are making one today, a social experiment if you will.  Today's book of poetry would like each of you readers to repost this blog today, just flip that sucker over.  Why?  Because Stuart Ross is an unsung Canadian marvel as rare as hen's teeth, because Stuart Ross, in A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent has exposed an emotional bridge into Ross world that allows the reader to walk in with ease, once there the dancing starts.

I love Stuart Ross like a brother and have admired both him and his work all these long years.  When you read A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent you are going to want to join my club.

Stuart Ross

Photo:  Laurie Siblock

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stuart Ross is the author of fifteen books of fiction, poetry and essays. His many dozens of chapbooks include Nice Haircut, Fiddlehead(Puddles of Sky Press); A Pretty Good Year (Nose in Book Publishing) and In In My Dream (BookThug). Stuart is a member of the improvisational noise trio Donkey Lopez, whose CDs include Juan Lonely Night and Working Class Burro. He is a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective and has his own imprint, a stuart ross book, at Mansfield Press. Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario, and blogs at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

BLURBS

"Stuart Ross uses humour as a subversive weapon."

     - Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star

"Ross's book is, among other things, a quite polemic in defense of the miscellaneous, swimming againt the stream and against streamlining."

     - Alessandro Porco, Northern Poetry Review

"What I personally found myself most drawn to, however, were the poems (and there are many) where the imagistic bravado and willingness to play are married to a deep sense of martality and quiet grace.  It takes a special sort of poet to make a reader feel profound empathy for the shattered dreams of a young hamburger, as he does...I Cut My Finger is a strange, beguilling and beautiful book."

     - Nick Thran, Poetryreviews.ca

Stuart Ross

Reads three Cobourg Poems

Video:  Wally Keeler

wolsakandwynn.ca

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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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