Pure Product
by Jason Guriel
Montreal: Signal Editions, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-55065-254-3, 49 pp., $16.00 paper.

"It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works." -- Ezra Pound.

Pure Product is a short book, no more than 49 pages and 38 poems in all. I present that not as a negative criticism, but as a reminder that we pore through enough bad or so-so poetry, occasionally stumbling on one or two good poems in a collection, for our minds to hunger for the pure distillate of the poet's mind. Editors and poets who apply such a standard to their selection of poems do their readers a favour.

That prudent discrimination reconfigures into an economy of style and structure in Jason Guriel's poems that should leave readers nicely satiated. Guriel seems eager to give us all he has of his craft, without cluttering it up with poems extraneous to his intent or his talent. He also fulfills one half of Sir Philip Sidney's prescription for poetry that remains essential more than 400 years later: to delight the reader. A great example: "On Derek Jeter's Batting Stance":

That right hand he holds
up (as his left taps home
once with tip of bat)
isn't redundant movement
but rather a tic
that's integral to the homer
he's about to hit. It
faces the fans (that right hand)
like some crossing guard's upraised palm,
a balm to sooth cheers
or at least hold
at bay visiting boos and jeers.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . It's an antenna a-
tremble, an initial feeler, weather-
vane of a licked finger. In a
second, he'll add that hand to his swing. (12)

Pure, non-redundant movement is not just the point of Guriel's description, it's the guiding principle for his poem's construction. Rhythmically poised, lines quietly suspended yet wakeful at the turns, not a word wasted; this poem, like others, embodies that single-mindedness of purpose needed to capture "the thing," coupled with the cool agility of a contemporary poetic mind that is, by turns, ruminating and playful:

But if you could isolate
the thinginess
from its thing
the distillate
would be as abstract
as the slapback echo
of just-plucked strings
in the King's Ur-recordings
for Sun Studios,
or the pushback
of a Coke can
before it gives
way to your compacting grip. (13)

Is he having us on a little, too? Perhaps. Guriel is an up-on-the fence, Look-Ma-no-hands kind of poet whose virtuosity can both thrill and annoy. Where other poets are merely approximate, Guriel is precise; where others take a stab at clear, hard images Guriel almost unfailingly hits his targets dead centre. It's not just that he's good at describing particulars; Guriel has that ineffable thing known as style, created in part by an extraordinary display of syntactic ease and control, and a startlingly fresh use of re-enactive rhythm:

Thinginess is the width
times length times height
that boosts babies up
to the eye-lines
of grownups at dinner. (13)

The brevity of Guriel's book finds its thematic counterpart in the smallness of the things he writes about and the fineness of touch required to describe them - as in the "slight sleigh bell/ of a pocketed change purse/ or an old-time till's single tap/ of triangle." (46) More intriguing is how this preoccupation with the small and delicacy of expression work together to provide all too rare glimpses into his emotional life. A good example is his description in slightly minatory fashion of the "fine initials" on the clasp of his father's snuffbox, which "grate against our/fingerprints' grain/like an engraved last gasp." (11)

Guriel's restraint in matters of the heart is more than offset by the free, open, and playful manner in which he captivates us generally. He is a superb technician. He is ambidextrous in open and closed forms. But that doesn't prevent me from saying how much I hope to see more of this subtly expressed, emotional side--perhaps using, as he does to such great effect, the still serviceable device of the objective correlative. One of his best poems "Shopping Cart, Abandoned on Front Lawn," does just this, evoking feelings of isolation, powerlessness and decay.

It's cool and idle
as if still in the frozen foods aisle.
But the cart, out of its element
in the elements, can't hold sunlight
which the cart's cage, panning for gold, stupidly sifts,
ruling the grass below into a grid of shadow--
subdivisions the ants won't obey.
And the cart, during rainstorms, can't hold
in the tears or the wind
which, like Muzak, goes in
one ear and out the other.
It will, in autumn, break the fall
of falling leaves
but can't cart the dead away without a shove
and so the death toll mounts... (44).

David Kosub reviews poetry and fiction and publishes a weekly blog <http://www.speakingofpoems.blogspot.com/>. He lives in Victoria, BC.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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