On to John Terpstra:

Alex: I have to say this is a flat out beautiful book. Kudos to Gaspereau Press.

I got the feeling that I was missing something in the poetry. I mean missing something on at least two different levels. In the first place, there is the matter of style. Terpstra seems to me to be the least "poetic" of any of the writers on this short list. He doesn't have strong imagery and there were a number of times when the writing seemed like prose cut up to look like poetry on the page. That sounds harsh, but it was the feeling I occasionally got. Perhaps he was experimenting. I didn't have the sense that he was trying to achieve a "conversational" rhythm, in which case it doesn't matter to me at all if nothing scans. This was something different. In the title poem, "Disarmament", for example, you find lines like these:

They rise as the unseen vapour of supplication and intercession
Our lives are the prayer given up against a cycle of violence.

and

Our enemy currently lives behind a door
on the seventh floor of the same downtown apartment building.

This is very flat and prosaic, without any rhythm I can hear. But I have to say I might be missing something. In the "Acknowledgments" Terpstra says that this poem, along with many others, has been accompanied by music. He also says that the "Cantata for Advent" is a real cantata and has been performed to music. So there must be a music here that I'm not hearing.

Looking at the big picture, I also pulled a blank on the religious sensibility of this book. Perhaps this is the same thing I thought didn't work in Bowling's book. And, again, this is a very personal reaction. Obviously Terpstra is pursuing religious themes throughout this book and if you're not on that wavelength then you're not going to get into it. I found much of it sounding like Eliot (the later, liturgical Eliot that I don't think anyone enjoys very much). Elsewhere the themes are very similar to the other poets on this shortlist, Borson and Zwicky in particular. Memory is what it's all about this year. I like the physicality of Terpstra's evocation of place and past. But his metaphysicality didn't work for me.

Zach: Yes indeed, Gaspereau is at the forefront of book design in this country. A small quibble, though: didn't much like the ultra-big first letter of every poem, found it visually distracting.

As for the content, I agree with you, Alex, that Terpstra is prone to prosy lapses; the two line-pairs you quote could each be boiled down to a single line and be stronger rhythmically for it. As for the music, well, it's easier to disguise rhythmic hiccoughs in song than in speech; a singer can stretch or compress syllables in a way that a speaker, or one's own mental voice, cannot, at least not without sounding strange. Part of the reason that the lyrics of a lot of great songs look pretty flat when you see them printed. I feel that a lot of Terpstra's poems are a couple of drafts shy of done, because of lines like the ones you quote. And in poetry like Terpstra's, which as you say is pretty unassuming in terms of imagery and metaphor, rhythm - which is the most fundamental element of all verse in my opinion - is that much more important.

That said, I find that when Terpstra's on his game, his poems are quite rhythmically persuasive, in a plainsong kind of way, as in the opening sentence of "Silence":

In the church where we go to now
there are patches of silence
that open up beneath you,
and closing your eyes
you may feel your grip loosen on the wheel
as you wake to the realization
that for the past six days you've been driving
against the white noise of wind and engine,
steadily over the limit,
and like a four-lane highway
where the bridge is collapsed,
you've hit the open gap
between one minute and the next,
and suddenly you're airborne, plunged
slowly into the stream below,
but unharmed, standing in the middle of a landscape
that looks very much like early childhood;
and gazing up you see the traffic
of the previous week come diving
over the same edge, in pursuit,
but instead of burying you
in their tons of wreckage, they suffer
an inexplicable reduction in body weight,
and float down to the water
like falling leaves,
where they are gently carried downstream.

This passage illustrates both where Terpstra goes right and how he doesn't quite go right enough. A bit more editing would have made this a very good passage, but it's clogged with unnecessary adverbs (steadily, suddenly, slowly, very much, gently) and phrases like "suffer / an inexplicable reduction in body weight" and "as you wake to the realization" could and should have been condensed considerably. (This is usually where free verse goes wrong, where its liberty becomes more of a bane than a boon. Obviously I don't know how Terpstra goes about his business, but if I were writing or editing this sort of poem, I'd be tempted to set the whole thing in blank verse first and then maybe loosen it up afterwards, once all the excess had been excised.) Little things like that make a big difference in poetry and there are enough little things like that in Disarmament to make it a decent book when it could've been a good book.

A terrific book, however, I don't think it could've been. One poem - "The Easy Way," a very moving elegy with a wonderfully handled conceit - stood out as exceptional. Otherwise, I was rarely bothered, but also rarely excited. Like you say, this might in part be due to subject matter, but Hopkins' and Donne's religious poems don't bother me on that account. But then Hopkins and Donne are virtuoso performers in a way that Terpstra does not even attempt.

Steven: I think what it is is, Terpstra constantly undermines what he starts. There are any number of well cadenced, well rounded, poetic lines in Disarmament that catch my ear, only to clog it up with clunky follow-throughs:

There is no water flatter, or more still,
than the water that is contained within the blue walls
of the randomly shaped swimming pool

Constantly, he moves from a great set-up - as in the formal, balanced and simple first line above - to a stumble ("that is contained" - the root of that "prosiness" you guys talk about, as though Terpstra were worried his English grammar teacher was going to grade it), and then to the catastrophe of the "randomly shaped" lines that seem say he's in denial of the beauty he sets up.

I would love it if there were more of the vibrancy of lines like these:

The general populace in their Sunday best
(for it is Sunday)
in bright tableau against a tiered rock wall,
receive and stoop and turn and stand, and turn
to receive again, as the plastic jugs and pails
pass hand to hand, down row by row from the top,
where, today, the tap runs clear.

But Terpstra's ear keeps failing him. In the middle of the book, in a place of obvious importance and echoing the title and theme of one of his earlier books, "The Church Not Made With Hands", he ties together seven poems with the phrase that runs through them, "the church where we go to now." The grammar teacher shrieks in dismay, and anyone hearing that in idle conversation wonders, "did he say that right?"

The other thing that bothered me about Disarmament was the way Terpstra seems to reach for something at his peril, then pull back to the Hallmark sentiment and the "churchy" lingo. He can go from the simple grace of

Drought, famine, fire and ice
have reduced the population by half;
someone is suingthe manufacturer,
and no one is perfect

to the irritating

In the church where we go to now people come and go
three men and a woman, two women
and two men, an infant, a teenage son
enter the cloud of witness,
they stand beneath the arms of a tree
and say, Yes.

I haven't heard the pieces that were set to music. Reading them on the page, especially the last sequence of poems. "Two Couples, Four Voices," I can't imagine a music that could carry them. Plain diction has its charms, but it's that lack of music, or the canceling of the music that so often starts to rise up in these poems, that keeps me at bay from what these poems want to say.

NEXT: Finally, Jan Zwicky