Wordplay, photos a perfect pairing

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This article was published 27/11/2021 (1752 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dennis Cooley and Michael Matthews’ Gibbous Moon (At Bay, 166 pages, $29), sees the poet (Cooley) and photographer (Matthews) collaborate as the writer’s words slide against masterful camerawork.

Cooley has been astonishingly prolific of late, creating some of his best poetry in recent years, and the collection finds him in a slightly more sombre mood than usual. Clever wordplay is still on display: “night goes dark / so slow and raw / it could be felt / oil soaks into.” Note how the word “felt” works both as a verb and a noun, for differing meanings.

The photographs are similarly stunning and somewhat sombre, almost impressionistic still lifes, gorgeous patterning that seems at once lush and stark.

The book is oversized, immaculately designed and lavishly constructed, a full-colour poetry collection with the gloss and glamour of a coffee table art book. A perfect holiday gift for the poetry or photography lover in your life.

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Ghosthawk, by Matt Radar (Nightwood, 124 pages, $19), is a startling and complex book that reinvents the nature poem in five sections that mirror one another, nestled between two four-line short poems.

The first and last sections contain a suite of poems composed of three-line stanzas, each of which seems influenced by haiku in nodding toward nature while crashing tight turns from one subject to another in a twisting, snakelike rhythm.

The middle three sections are long poems: a sequence of unrhymed couplets ending with “one,” 10-line stanzas that flow one to the other, and then another sequence of unrhymed couplets ending with “gone.”

The book’s construction is thus simple and elegant but offers complicated interconnections and echoes, a remarkable achievement with a real uniqueness in its voice — perhaps the voice of a man “who promised / he’d haunt us as / a hawk when he died, // then died.”

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Iceland is Melting and So Are You, by Talya Rubin (Book*hug, 92 pages, $20), explores climate change through effectively crafted elegies for now-gone ice.

The concept is simple and slightly absurd, with a dark tone shot through poems that otherwise don’t necessarily take themselves overly seriously, despite being fairly serious and often bleak. Rubin has a keen control of tone but refuses to set the tone, a tactic that keeps readers unsettled, as they should be.

Rubin’s also got a great eye for details. In one poem, “My grandmother gave us pieces of / Hubba Bubba gum to stuff in our mouths // so we wouldn’t utter a word. We smelled // like fake grape.” If you ever had that gum, you know exactly what she’s talking about, and can probably smell it now.

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Moments of Happiness, by Niels Hav, translated by Per Brask and Patrick Friesen (Anvil Press, 64 pages, $15), is another fine collection from the Dutch poet’s body of work, which revels in small, calm words that hold more depth than they first seem to hold.

As an example, one poem raises the spectre of the social and the political, literally choosing sides, but develops toward a strange ambivalence in the choosing, so that it’s ironically hard to know where the speaker stands. “The man who spends seven years building a cottage / and finishes by smashing it to pieces in a rage. / That’s whose side I’m on.”

Jonathan Ball won a Manitoba Book Award for his short story collection The Lightning of Possible Storms (Book*hug, 2020). Visit him online at jonathanball.com.