Selected Poems
by Robert Bringhurst
Halifax: Gaspereau Press, 2009, ISBN 9781554470686, 263 pp., $27.95 paper.

In this volume, Robert Bringhurst brings together poems from collections dating back to 1967 with more recent ones, including polyphonic experiments in performance-type sequences written in two or more voices. Concepts in philosophy, mathematics, mythology and religion find their way into the poems, as do images drawn from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, botany and geology. Music, not surprisingly, is never far from the patterns of thought. Whether choreographing a physical movement or dramatizing an idea, Bringhurst has a subtle ear for nuance and frequently uses musical patterns of repetition in his verse. He frequently employs elemental images drawn from the natural world, be it a mineral in the periodic table or a traditional image used in classical typology such as a "bird," "shadow," "mountain" or "lake."

"The Beauty of Weapons" encapsulates human achievement and, ironically, civilization. While the ability to make tools and written language are frequently cited as evidence of intelligence that distinguishes humans from animals, this poem uses the "weapons" image as one of civilization's most notorious advances in tool-making. Significantly, however, "the satisfying feel of the weapon/ of the fast traverse/ of the anti-aircraft" is "not in the notes," and thus a blind admiration and respect for this ominous offshoot of civilization is seen to leave out much. Accordingly, an interaction of mind, body, and machine as an extension of the body, creates its own seductive allure, as Bringhurst dramatizes it with mesmerizing precision in the following lines:

a dark beauty, with a steel sheen,
caught in the cocked
mind's eye and brought
down with an extension of the hand. (17)

While music and measure implicitly come into play in the reference to intervals and the silence after the gunshot in "The Beauty of Weapons," mathematics becomes a focus of philosophic inquiry in "Ciphers." What could be more fitting than the synthetic imagination that can apply mathematical equations such as "1+1=1" or "1+1=2" to elaborate on the tenuous filaments that comprise verbal logic and certain philosophic questions about, for instance, the origins of creation and increment? Or consider the quaint but oddly congruent application of the "squid" example to test the applicability of related philosophic questions of expression and identity:

These are mistakable for
portraiture, or
for self-portraiture, or,
to the eye of the squid-eating whale,

for the squid, who in the meanwhile grows
transparent and withdraws,
leaving behind him his
coagulating shadows. (24)

While the squid "writes" with its "ink," these accidental writings or "artefacts" may be viewed somewhat skeptically.

Bringhurst's fascination with philosophy becomes apparent in his titling of poems and sections after famous Greek philosophers. The suite "Herakleitos" comments on the relations of man and "gods" in ultimately secular but intrinsically mythopoeic terms:

Dead men are gods; men are dead gods, said
Herakleitos. Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal.
The birth of the one is the death of the other;
the dying of one gives life to the other. (38)

Using patterns of repetition that dramatize the perpetuity of the process that aligns man with the gods, Bringhurst eulogizes death as, without it, "the gods die," i.e., men create their gods out of their own kind, who have somehow transcended themselves through their earthly achievement. By "dying, we mother and sire// the other: our own and only/ incarnation." A note of irony that anchors this grandiose mythologizing, however, enters the last bleak line of the poem in which we are reminded of our fate regardless of godlike achievements: "Wind stirs his ashes."

Aware that his poetry is seen as lacking a human element in its far-sweeping philosophies and mythologies, Bringhurst implies deserved self-criticism in "These Poems, She Said." With poignant self-irony, the poem states, near the beginning: " . . . These are the poems of a man/ who would leave his wife and child because/ they made noise in his study":

. . . These
poems are heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which, if they love, love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said . . . .
                                         You are, he said,
Beautiful.
           That is not love, she said rightly. (75)

The good-natured homeliness of the speaker's recognition of his own shortcomings in the epithet "rightly" in the last line is quite winning.

That criticism set aside, and the parameters of his vision established, Bringhurst's ability to distill meaning in stylized, semi-allegorical or universal structures becomes one of his strengths throughout this collection. For its musicality and pure poetry, in which the phrases repeat with variation and the images speak outright, consider "Parable of the Lake's Edge":

Old woman, a man
must stand on his shadow
to fish from the shore
of the lake of daylight.
Morning and evening
the shadow is moving.
Morning after morning
a man must rename
the sun without breathing.
Morning after morning
a man standing still
as a stick at the lake's edge
must gather the dance
in his hands without moving. (108)

Here "a man's" evanescent "shadow" carries the weight of the figure's focus and understanding as a reflection of himself in relation to the sun and the changing world.Although feminists might bridle at the chiding, almost biblical invocation of the "old woman," Bringhurst's poetry could not do without such tools for simplifying a world and organizing its understanding in the few lines he allows himself on such a large canvas. Nevertheless, his reversal of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" to suggest that the swan takes on the power and not Leda after all, may be read as a chauvinistic, if not misogynist, interpretation. (Actually Yeats's version may be the more contemporary with its elevation of the feminine perspective in taking "on his knowledge with his power.")

In the polyphonic sections, "The Book of Silences" is influenced by eastern religion, "Ursa Minor" by First Nation mythology, and "New World Suite" by world philosophy. Although "The Blue Roofs of Japan," with its writing superimposed over writing, is at times illegible, I imagine that this work might come to life with a live reading in which individuals take on each voice and dramatize the work.

Some of my favourite poems appear in the final section, "The Living," which reverts to a more traditional approach. The poems "The Finch," "Birds on the Water" and "The Geologist's Daughter" are truly gems. Consider the quiet insight that arises from the speaker observing a community of finches in which one of the birds with a damaged beak is met by the flock's accepting insouciance, a behaviour in marked contrast with our own polite evasiveness in the presence of a disfigured one. "But I never / hear them talk of one another," the poet observes. "They sing. And that is that." (248)

As a tragic paradigm for our lack of vision of minute (and larger) realities, the haunting image of the bird flying into "your eyes" and a larger consciousness akin to God or death and infinity is dramatized in the following stanza:

Birds break their necks
flying into your eyes
in the perfect belief
that the brilliant interior world
is as spacious and seamless and real
as the world outside. (249)

Here, as elsewhere in the collection, Bringhurst's ear is accurate and the verses perfectly choreographed to suggest the bird's doomed symbolic flight.

The chilling suggestion of the last poem in the collection, "For the Geologist's Daughter," is softened only on the surface by its wit and irony. Creating a formal dialogue on the subject of apocalypse (in a suggested chain of such events), "The philosopher of music/ says to the musician of ideas":

What-is will be what has been
soon enough, and then

its having been will sing
its silent song as long
as no one listens. (257)

Accordingly, man is not as momentous a creation in the history of the earth (let alone the universe) as he perhaps imagines himself, and even the weight of his so-called carbon footprint may have been exaggerated in the largest perspective.

Bringhurst is a poet of lyric and epic proportions who will not be forgotten (though his more experimental polyphonic poems may be relegated to the back pages of literature and a more select live audience).

Gillian Harding-Russell lives, reviews, edits, teaches and writes in Regina. Her latest collection of poetry is I forgot to tell you (Thistledown Press, 2007).

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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