THE STREAM and other poems by Dennis Tourbin
Sugar Beach by
Camille Martin
Published by
above/ground press, 2014.
In 2012, some
fourteen years after his passing, Dennis Tourbin was honoured with two,
long-overdue exhibitions: a three-venue celebration in his hometown of St
Catharines and a cubist-focused show in the Ottawa Art Gallery. Now that the
former (and larger) showcase of his collagist oeuvre, entitled The Language of Visual Poetry, has relocated to the Carleton University Art Gallery, continued
interest in Tourbin peaks again with newly published, previously unseen poetry.
THE STREAM and other poems collects three margin-hugging entries that touch on
familiar Tourbin muses from within a dream-like travelogue.
The title poem
details fishing for brown trout near Millbrook, Ontario, but as each summer
finds the stream undergoing certain changes (and therefore imposing new fishing
strategies), Tourbin recognizes in it an overlooked universe. The current holds
fish but also the memories we harvest through language:
A body of water.
A wondrous sound.
The water, like
static,
the stream
continuing on,
into eternity,
non stop,
everlasting,
trying to discover
the meaning of
infinity…
This idyllic current,
resuscitated from the past, acts as the first of a few carriers that replenish their
meanings; Millbrook as memory, water as static. The train in “Morning in Paris” proves another conduit capable of
skipping the divide, traversing the gulf between France’s media-occupied capital
and the more sensory-illuminated countryside. Imagining an alternate reality
wherein Algerian terrorists succeeded in detonating Air France Flight 8969
doesn’t influence Tourbin’s escape to Deauville as much as the endlessly replayed
news clips prepped to entail either outcome. As his train basks in the green and grey
landscape, Tourbin feels the strain dissipate:
On the train
French lovers
kiss,
touch each other
lovingly,
no thought,
just the passion.
The News has not
yet
reached them.
The rain has not
wet their lips.
In time all the
News
will be
catalogued,
become
meaningless,
just another
bullet
to the head
of another
innocent passenger
going who knows
where…
Keep in mind,
Tourbin wrote this poem in 1994. Pre-Internet, if you recall such a time.
We can neither chalk that last stanza up to broad cynicism nor read it as a
byproduct of the lassitude we greet headlines with twenty years on.
Closing poem “In
Her Apartment in Paris” offers “the stream” yet another meaning: of routine street
happenings Tourbin watched replenish themselves on a daily basis. That
repetition transforms the window glass into a television screen as well as a mirror,
occasionally reflecting on the author’s own uncertain mortality. Layered but
plainspoken, “In Her Apartment in Paris” hinges on an explosive moment that
deserves to be experienced, not narrated. That said, THE STREAM and other poems
creates a small whirlpool of Tourbin’s most celebrated preoccupations: terrorism,
media, identity and, yes, fishing.
Never one to
forget the individual gaze amid complex, national calamities, Tourbin’s vision
is being posthumously celebrated at a time we miss him most – this “media age”
of phone-tapping governments and lingering terrorism fears. These are adventure poems, seeking out beginnings and endings that no
science or language has come to terms with. What THE STREAM and other poems accomplishes in Tourbin’s absence is a
sense of finality, an eventuality he knowingly snuck within the static.
Occasionally I
read too much into a title and end up rewinding my own assumptions; that
happened with Sugar Beach, Camille Martin’s new chapbook. As it turns out,
Sugar Beach isn’t especially concerned with one of Toronto’s newest
recreational hangouts. The title poem’s cold, streamlined setting conjures the
industrial backdrop but with an air of fantasy the author entertains, then
vanquishes. As outdoor scenes from whimsical French paintings come face to face
with “now’s black pigeon, head jerking across white sand”, Martin’s voice
unearths juicy angles wherein gruff realities lie dormant. Or, as “Sugar Beach”
puts it:
[…] – lady and
slipper
freeze-framed at
the apex of symbolic order
before gravity
once more kicks in […]
That voice of
cynicism acts as the unifying principle in a collection made up from two
separate manuscripts (R Is the Artichoke of Rose and Blueshift Road). For each
hint of levity, there’s an instinctive, gravitational response. Many of these
poems take a crack at constructs or wave their hand through illusions.
“Doppelganger’s Lament” reads like a poetic verdict handed down to some
middle-aged reflection, guilty of imagining an alternate life. “Endless
Regression of Heavens”, reprinted below, alternately looks at global warming
through the amassing recurrence of chicory blues:
Glaciers dribble
foreign rocks
as dawn releases
chicory blue.
Its fickle hues
waltz round equator,
spool, top, dizzy
moon, gainly
as the patter of
millipedes ruffling
toward a country
with no flag
but fields of
chicory blue. Horizon,
chromatic with
moments. What
of the next and
the next, plunging
into myth evolving
in the deeps?
Haunting the deeps
while manning
the crow’s nest?
With each finite
duration we arrive
closer by half
to a famished
constellation,
blinking beast
perpetually devouring
a platter of
chicory blue.
I included the
whole poem for two reasons: Martin regularly dangles a line between stanzas
that I’d rather not scissor, but also, “Endless Regression of Heavens” finds
her language, rhythm and tone wholly at peace together. Wonder and tragedy
fastened in an ouroboric cycle, rendering the epic concise.
I don’t think it’s
a coincidence that the poems that leave the more lasting impression – I’ve
mentioned a few already – each consist of couplets, triplets or quatrains. This
structural foresight lets Martin’s loaded language breathe while giving the reader a more hospitable passageway in. Otherwise we
tangle with “No Such Identical Horses” and “More Jars Than Lids”, single chunks
of verse that escalate in figurative leaps (the latter piece, even after
several approaches, I have only a shaky handle on). These poems trace Martin’s
deductions and you can sense a developing logic but the brawniness of
communication feels coded. In other words, I suspect the author’s stance on a
scenario without ever learning the details.
It’s possible that those vague boundaries are intentional. After all, Sugar Beach has oblique
poems which open doors as well. The same could-have-beens that paint
“Doppelganger’s Lament” into a corner hover unspoken and strangely on “Blink”:
Light is not
inevitable.
Overshot it
or not yet there.
Nothing, for that
matter. In any case,
not arrived.
Anything
could have been
otherwise.
As with the other,
more minimalist poems that I believe stem from R Is the Artichoke of Rose,
“Blink” floats free of margin and context. Yet the plain speech Martin utilizes
here allows the poem to connect on a number of levels. The trajectory in
question, the ominous object of “light” and the beckoning negative space of
“otherwise” are consistent with Martin’s gruff lens – always seeing the conveyor
belt behind the pixie dust – but there’s room for intuitive analysis, too.
For its variety
alone, Sugar Beach is a noteworthy collection. It finds an eclectic balance
between Martin’s interests and offers a sneak peak at potential, future titles.
My preference for certain pieces over others can be partially attributed to
its mixed bag foundation but mostly I found the best poems were those that
let readers roam her observations and branch off. Martin’s an original voice;
that’s clear across selections from both manuscripts. But too often those
observations feel hedged in, predetermined by an oppressive gravity.
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