Living Things
by Matt Rader
Vancouver: Nightwood Editions, 2008, ISBN 978-0-88971-223-2, 79 pp., $16.95 paper.

From its first poem, Living Things pulled me in. "The Great Leap Forward" is formally rigorous, sonically textured, and empathic; a sort of evolutionary overview of earthly life from its beginnings to its current late age or "wintergreen" (12), it serves as both invocation and invitation to savour the poems that follow. The book lives up to its promise. Whether he's writing about a tree, a frog, a mink, or a compost heap, Matt Rader finds the right key to make his subjects sing.

Fittingly, in a book about nature, Rader sometimes invokes the Romantics. Many of these poems are sonnets--often inventively altered. "Compost" is a sonnet written mostly in couplets, and the sequence called "The Imposter's Guide to North American Plants" (including "False Solomon's Seal and "Fool's Onion") is made up of twelve-line poems--in other words, false sonnets. Rader adapts or adopts other stanzaic structures as well. "You, Louis MacNeice" consists of four stanzas rhyming in an ABCBBA pattern, echoing MacNeice's own "Sunlight in the Garden," while "The Ocean Voyager" is a version of Rimbaud's "The Drunken Boat" written in four-line stanzas rhyming ABAB, as in the original French.

The book is rich in internal rhyme, slant rhyme, alliteration and assonance. I started reading silently but was moved to read a second time aloud, just for the pleasure of the poetry's music. A few lines taken at random from "Domestic Work" (14) should serve to illustrate the density of alliteration and assonance:

You are doing the dishes as you do every night
After dinner and every morning before work
And the light dim over the sink where you sink

The words themselves and the scene couldn't be simpler, but the layering of sound is complex and carefully patterned. And this is not a case of sound-play for its own sake. Invariably, sound serves the subject. Later in the same poem, the repeating sibilants reinforce our sense of the slippery, soapy water:

Our silver instruments of custom and manners
Lining the sink like straw in the cowshed stall,
Soiled with saliva and foodstuffs your fingers

Rader uses line and stanza breaks to similarly strong effect. In "Emergency Broadcast System," when the "picture goes blue for half a sec-/ond longer than I'd expect . . ." (49) the reader is caught in the speaker's moment of panic. And in these lines from "Common Carrier"

i.
Together, together, together, tethered
container to container, a caterpillar
with no chrysalis except to get there
and unload the cargo. I go forward.

ii.
I go backward . . . (25)

the reader participates in the movement, justifying Stephen Heighton's description of these poems as "kinetic."

In Living Things, I heard the debt to Babstock, back through Muldoon, Heaney, Larkin and MacNeice. But the poems don't feel derivative, because Rader's subjects--and his take on them--are distinctly his own. This is a west-coast writer who doesn't just observe his world; he inhales it and then embodies it, with poems written from the points of view of many animate and inanimate things, including the trees and plants native to the region. Two years ago, I left the west coast for Ontario; Rader's "Lives of the North American Trees" sequence took me back to the rainforest more powerfully than most photographs.

If form and rhythm provide the backbone and the tensile strength of these poems, the poet's loving consideration gives them their heart. By turns witty, exasperated, coolly observant, elegiac and tender, each poem in this book expresses, in its own way, a determination to "see into the heart of things." For Rader, nature and all the objects of our making and unmaking deserve attention; his speaking trees and weeds are our equals.

Susan Olding is a closet poet.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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