Where's David Manicom?:

Alex: Asking "Where's David Manicom?" is being a bit mysterious. So I'll begin by explaining. When I first got the idea for doing this jury I wanted to do a poetry shortlist at least in part because I think poetry needs it. We need more open forums for the critical discussion of poetry in this country. Publicity stunts like the Random Acts of Poetry events are acts of desperation. And while it's all very well to have poetry awards like the G-G's and the Griffin Prize to recognize excellence in poetry, the mere awarding of prizes adds little to the debate. I thought Canadian poetry needed, and deserved, more.

Most poetry in Canada is published by small presses that don't make any money on the books they publish. If it wasn't for a lot of committed volunteer work and government support there probably wouldn't be any new poetry published at all. And most of these small presses are grateful for any publicity or reviews they can get. I do most of my reviewing for a mid-size newspaper and I know that what poetry does come in is scarcely ever looked at. We run about four book reviews a week, and in any given year we might review two or three new books of poetry. And perhaps even that's a bit optimistic.

So when I got in touch with the publishers of this year's shortlist I received a welcome response. McClelland & Stewart, Brick Books and Gaspereau all sent out review copies, by regular mail, that I received within a couple of days.

David Manicom's Burning Eaves is published by the B.C. small press Oolichan. When I got in touch with them they also said they would send me review copies if I would just send them my mailing address. I did. Nothing arrived. A week later I e-mailed again and was told that my address, which is on a rural route, could not be delivered to! It was, apparently, just a mailbox. They also said that they didn't send anything by mail but only used courier. They couldn't afford to mail review copies. 

This was baffling. Why was sending books by courier cheaper than sending them by regular mail? Did they mail review copies to anyone? And why hadn't they mentioned all this when I first asked for review copies? 

I responded giving them a more detailed mailing address and saying that I would be happy to pay for the books and pay shipping charges. I would have bought the books online but there was a 2-3 week delay in shipping that item. In any event, Oolichan told me they would send the books by courier right away.

Nothing arrived. And I haven't heard anything from them since.

Now I understand small presses have next to no budget for things like publicity and marketing, but this was still disappointing. What chance has a new book of poetry got with such a minimal promotional effort behind it? Is it any wonder that when I phoned around a number of local bookstores, including both megastores and independents specializing in Canadian titles, none of them had even heard of Manicom's book? And this is after he was shortlisted!

[Note from Alex: A week after we wrapped this jury up, and several days after the results were posted, Oolichan e-mailed saying they had tried to send the books but that Canpar had returned them, saying they would not deliver to a rural route. I have left my original comments up to give some idea of the way I felt at the time, which is something that I think should be taken into consideration.]

Zach: Well, since I have a "real" address here in the city where all well-heeled urbane poetry-reading types reside, I had no problem getting this book from Oolichan. It's a shame if the publisher has indeed been negligent in promoting it, because it's quite a good book. This is David Manicom's fourth collection, and I have to confess that I hadn't heard of him before now, much less read his prior books. Whether this is Oolichan's fault or my own or just an inevitable thing in so large a country, I don't know. On to the book . . .

Manicom snared my attention right off the bat with the opening lines of the book's opening poem, "Reading Anglo-Saxon When Spring Comes Early":

Aquiver after the downward plunge, firelit silver -
A dagger in a table top, rude trestle, mead - 

The feasters sheered into vision from their venison
And victory songs by the sight of one slight sparrow

Passing from snowing darkness through their narrow hall
And into the night again. A life.

This is fine writing, the play of alliteration and internal rhyme mimicking beautifully the "Anglo-Saxon" text the speaker is reading. If the poem went on like this, it would be a neat kind of experiment in adapting an old verse form. But it doesn't. Just like the sparrow zipping through the "narrow hall" and out again, Manicom sheers from this mode to a scene in which the speaker is "pinioned on the bus from work," contemplating the ambivalent feelings that result from a goal achieved, then moves on to minute observation of the particulars of a spring come "before its time." This sounds, by my synopsis, like an incoherent poem that can't decide what it wants to be about, but somehow Manicom makes it work quite seamlessly; partly through the skilful aplomb of his line and partly through an imagination that can make these connections plausible, an imagination that perceives patterns and performs metaphor, "So that along the swelling pods [of not-yet-opened tulips] a blush of red, of white: // The seam / Of the cardinal, the sparrow, of the long, long horizon."

This book impressed me a great deal. Manicom turns that intelligent sensitivity to so many different subjects, ranging from the domestic to the erotic to the cosmic, and the writing is consistently gorgeous. He didn't stop me in his tracks as often as Bowling, but he also made nowhere near the same kind of egregious false steps.

I could say more, but I'm curious first to hear what you fellahs think.

Steven: I don't think I've ever read an opening to a book of poems like this one. You see this dagger still quivering on its point deep in a huge refectory table, and you're pinned to the moment as the "one slight sparrow" of that very moment flies out the window. That's brilliant. And brilliantly done with the propelling force of a truly rhythmic diction. Here's an imaginative writer with a clear vision and the skill to pull off even the trick of mixing up times - from the castle to the crosstown bus - that in other hands could have been maudlin or cute. 

In a brief thirty-seven lines of couplets Manicom gives out most of the themes he's going to deal with in his book - how "time" is, in both the curved sweep of a river around a town, and in "the slap of cards and steamed / Winter dumplings of doomed Beijing"; the reach of his own voice as it "Calls out to a certain distance / And then can reach no further." 

He constantly and effectively repeats his figures - the trajectory of the sparrow repeated in the windowbox flowers all facing one way; the dagger, and the silver of its blade repeated in the light on the Outouais River; the river's sweep around the town and the tulip bed that "surrounds a garden's centrepiece of stone". And he plays these little tricks like following up the title poem "The Burning Eaves," with another poem with the line "A burning skin encloses, heaves / At its pins". 

Obviously I've got this one at the top of my list. There's so much so deliberately done, so controlled ("my longing to unlace this thought without motion") and the sense that even taking the risk of preening in this rich language is worth the play: 

it's tropical tail the feather in its cap, 
Snake-flick after slinging of wings, as if to fail 

At the art of flight - then a quick little lick
In the middle of things. 

The control in this type of diction is proof enough for me of maturity, but also of wit, and it gives the writing that feel of being "awake / to the undercoat our language slurs away." 

I may have had to trudge out in a Toronto storm (deadly to Torontonians, good for the garden elsewhere) to buy my copy because of Oolichan's puzzling inability to get things together, but I don't mind at all.

Alex: I like the opening lines too. "Sheered into vision" hooks you. You have to think about Manicom's use of language, go back and sort out what he's doing. And when you do it repays the effort. It certainly brings that Anglo-Saxon chestnut of a story back to life.

Now there were a number of poems I had to go back over and could not sort out what he was doing. There is some obscurity and stretching after remote analogies here. But Manicom's comfort with various rhythms and his striking use of language can be downright thrilling. How can you not like this description of sexual aftermath (and keep in mind how often, and how poorly, this has been done before):

The bow
Undone
Sweetest
To the taste
With your
Slick ether's
Aftermath,
Bow sprung,
Slack
And undone,
Sweet
With the lack,
Tilting back
With the ache
And ache's lack
To come.

Or take these wonderful trees:

Months afterward the most disfigured trees
Surprised him with prolific crops of seed.

Awkward, elbowed - the remaining boughs of maples
Went green, then brown with bristled clumps of keys,

Each local breeze releasing into sundogged air
A hurried flight of flashing scimitars,

Single-bladed dervishes to thickly stud the lawn
And clog the troughs and drainpipes out of season.

You can call it formalism, but stuff like that just makes me want to read it out loud. The sheer talent on display is impressive. The emotional tempo is very well-handled. The poems tend to end on a strong note, but in a way that doesn't draw attention to itself. "The Burning Eaves" is a good example. "All grief is captured by the acts of love, / In how we work to hand things back and forth" are the final lines. And this is a poem about washing dishes! The moral sentence at the end could be jarring, but we've already been through the fire blazing in the poet's eyes and the murky sea of the sink, so it seems balanced. I don't think this is a totally successful poem, mainly because it isn't clear how we move from the sun to the dishes to general reflections on grief, but at least it reads well.

I thought the imagery was sometimes overdone and gimmicky. He throws so much colour at you, and flits so quickly over his images they don't always stick. On the other hand, it's certainly never dull.

NEXT: On to John Terpstra . . .