Sprawling themes, intimate language

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This article was published 22/02/2025 (581 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From deep time to the Anthropocene, the poems in Jaspreet Singh’s Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock (NeWest Press, 152 pages, $21) are concerned with meaning-making on a cosmic scale. For all the daunting scale of his subject, Singh approaches the cosmic and endlessly consequential with an intimate tone that simultaneously honours both knowledge and mystery.

In The Epoch and the Rock, Singh knits together dream vignettes that bring together concerns about climate, culture and relationships. Here, he uses the twist of surrealism and the space between dreaming and waking lives to convey something of the truth and contradictory tensions of life in a time of multi-system collapse: “Eating apples in the Anthropocene means eating fossil fuels / Wait something sounds wrong this one is not a dream.”

The stakes in the collection are high enough to meet the scale of Singh’s thought. He lays them out most explicitly in Iktsuarpok, wherein the speaker says, “I’d like to take / care of the nervous system of at least one / person.” The care he posits, though, has repercussions beyond the immediate one person with which it begins. Rather, Singh uses language and neuroscience as expanding metaphors: “and listen /around the corner to the voices voices / of neurons mending/ voices/ not yet called by that name.”

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Stephen Collis’s latest tour de force, The Middle (Talonbooks, 176 pages, $19) meets the political and environmental chaos of the moment not with order, but with careful thought about migrations and cross-species alliances rooted in citation, which he likens to “rewilding.”

Following from his ongoing writing about climate change, Collis approach to the subject draws from epic, myth and song: “And so Brân sailed not through waters/ but through an orchard long in bloom/ [… .]/ these sighs of spirits of those whose homes/ were burnt or dashed by flood or bombardment// a journey through the underworld/ to marvellous isles and back.”

The second of the three long poems is explicitly a contemporary adaptation of Dante’s Purgatorio, using the middle lines of the epic’s tercets as its backbone. However, there are echoes of Dante throughout, both in images and in migratory structure. “Not for want of trying/ the sea boat and night of memory,” he opens the third movement of Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written: A Blazing Space.

Images of migration — epic, surreal and quotidian — propel these poems: “The forest/ wandered/ slowly,” he writes in the title poem. There’s an understated tension in these images — between moving (on) and putting down roots — reverberating throughout the book, reinforced formally in the final sequence, wherein Collis gradually but sustainably lengthens the line, and begins to incorporate a migratory “/” which causes the line to exceed itself.

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In Ox Lost, Snow Deep (Anvil Press, 96 pages, $20), Alice Burdick moves between observational and aphoristic modes across the 13 longer poems in the collection. By taking the matter of everyday life and torquing it, Burdick both asserts and demonstrates, “I have something to communicate/ with you. It’s the shock of existence.”

Burdick conveys this shock of existence in the way she refracts empty language through a prism. In Great Village sequence, she repeats a number of these to punctuate the speaker’s observations of her surrounds: “Grasping at snobs. Submerged/ in the century flood,” and again, “Grasping at slobs./ Sweaty brains, bifurcate/ a loose conjecture at the ramparts.”

“Patterns matter, pay/ attention,” she writes in Practice, and this holds true in the content of the poems, but it’s also true of the rhythms: “Hold on to rhythm./ It’s a small option/ in this big time.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.