House of Anansi Press, 2007
Read by Darren Bifford
Dennis Lee’s new book is, I suspect, untranslatable. Even competency in what goes these days as Standard Poetic English may not be sufficient for comprehension of the maneuvers and stylistic risks Lee takes with enviable gusto. For almost random instance:
Terragon tilth, or
heartwork in kinderpolis.
To couch in the knit of the sinew, to
ponder refolient scrub.
To gawp at what thrives without us
Hence the initially peculiar sense that, whatever the risks, many of these poems require an English translation in order to understand their meaning. But “meaning” is not always a useful notion in poetry; especially in works that seem either uninterested, or critical of, standard semantic conventions.
Forget, then, that I couldn’t get through one of these short poems (averaging about 6-10 lines) without a dictionary — a medical and geological dictionary at that. I trust Dennis Lee. A poet with his mind is not interested in obscurity for its own sake. These poems are trying to hit a very particular, very disturbing and exacting reference. One gets the sense that they abandon conventional semantics because the conventional is the commodifiable, and the commodifed is ubiquitous in our time; it includes the earth, our lives and the language we most ordinarily and sometimes poetically speak. But it is precisely against hackneyed meanings, as well as the evident despair such a condition engenders, that this book offers its dissonance as partial cure:
Combing the geo-pre
frontal, scritch-
scratching for relicts of yes
It is interesting to compare this work with Civil Elegies and Gods. Both are works I’ve loved. But if there is a fault in them, it is probably that the weight of the themes and Lee’s judgments can occasionally collapse of the wild cadences of the poems into didacticism. But here the concept of “yesno” that this collection assumes as its title recalls the reconciliation of opposites we see in the austere ethical stand-points of Dogen or Heraclitus.
With a yes, with a no, with a
yesno:
sonics in simuljam.
To habitate crossbeing.
To ride both reals at once
I think Lee is working in the spirit of such company. Lee continues to take seriously his own poetics of cadence, and has escaped any serious trace of the didactic. Yet these poems are, in the best sense, instructive in the way I always hope poems to be: they show something of crisis and hope.
