What's New?:

Dani: While it's a variety of trees that tie the pages of Underwood Log together, the book reminds me of one tree: an aspen. More specifically, it reminds me of an aspen grove, one of which is considered to be the largest living organism on earth.

Each tree in an aspen grove is a genetic twin to the next.  All of the trees will turn colour at the same time and die at the same time.  Essentially, a "forest" of aspens is not really a forest at all, but a large number of genetically identical stems rising from a common root system. How does this tie in with New's book? Well, although almost every page has it's own coordinates and has the reader traipsing across the globe, the pages are all linked together by the narrator, the traveler.

While linked by some underlying themes, this book is not linear by any means, which initially made it difficult for me to read as one poem; however, at least the pages seem to mirror one another in tone and spirit. No matter if the reader finds himself or herself in Kitsilano one minute, and in the land of the kookaburras the next, there is a sense of cohesion in the pages of Underwood Log.

And so, after I saw each page as a stem of a larger root system, it was easier for me to accept the book as one long poem. However, I'd much rather read it "Choose Your Own Adventure" style, instead of reading it from first page to last.

I have to admit that I didn't initially like Underwood Log. However, I soon found myself picking it up again and again, reading a page here and there. There is a subtle song in this book that comes through after reading it a few times.

As for the poetics, there is a nice sense of rhythm in the poem, especially the singsong nature of the following lines:

(apple pie, curd pie,
coconut, cherry,

rhubarb, rhubarb,
raisin-rasp berry -

listen:
9-year-olds

singing the schoolyard,
skipping double dutch and

happy, till O-U-T spells
out-you-must-go:

they're learning
borders as they grow

This passage is quite playful, while others are more serious, with their Homeric references and observations on foreign lands. The poems set in British Columbia, to me, are the most heartfelt, full of feeling, and have the strongest images:  "back again: a froth of salmon-pink / tips sumac into spring: tomorrow". I had a harder time with the more cerebral lines, the ones that relied on thought only, with little imagery:

give over -
you do not need to be here,

the masters tell you
that only absenting

promises enlightenment: detach
sit under the BO tree-- you must

dispossess yourself
to find the ONE:

While most of the poems seem to be meditations on the places that New has been, it's his occasional resolute statements that anchor the book in my memory. I've walked around for a couple of days thinking about the following lines:

face it:
as soon as a forest gets a name,

Sherwood, say, it stops being
wilderness: you go there, it's

full of the story-people, Bo-
peep and the dragon, with

stout heart and full quiver to
drive the point home, Transylvania:

This is the kind of staggering insight that I look for when I read any book of poetry, and what makes me want to champion this book for the GG. While I don't typically gravitate toward longer poems (I belong to the Sesame Street generation), this one didn't require a one-time marathon read from the reader. You can pick up this book anytime and go with it. Maybe that's what New is trying to say - you can start a voyage from wherever you're at and at whatever time strikes you best.

Alex: Underwood Log is a sort of globe-trotting poetic atlas, so I guess it's fitting that my responses to it were all over the map. I had high hopes. I liked the idea of a single book-length poem that the back cover suggested would be "reminiscent" of works like "William Carlos William's [sic] Paterson." I'm a big fan of Paterson, and long poems in general, so I was really looking forward to it.

Initially I was a bit disappointed. In contrast to the bold pronouncements that launch Paterson and tell you exactly what Williams is all about ("No ideas but in things," "a local pride . . . a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands," "A man like a city," "to make a start, / out of particulars / and make them general"), Underwood Log seemed kind of vague in its origins. This isn't the same as saying it was just obscure and difficult. The first line in Dempster's book is "I cherish the explicit," and yet The Burning Alphabet is, at least in my opinion, as poetically complex as any of the other books on this shortlist. He's just more direct. Underwood Log, on the other hand, begins with a sort of introduction or proem (like Paterson), but I couldn't see where it was heading. It basically just introduced the book as a travelogue. Now that in itself isn't a bad thing, but I couldn't shake the sense that this is a book with some kind of argument, that sees itself as being about something. Such an argument is, in fact, almost a necessity for a long poem. There has to be some sort of unifying principle at work that brings it together. And here it is just too vague. This is the ending of the proem:

for only by going away, gambling your life
into the halting underwood,
can you or I,
chilled and welcome, once
again
return - 

This didn't work for me. I understand the pun throughout on Underwood as both forest growth and those clunky old typewriters - who can every forget them? that bell signaling the end of a line! swinging the carriage back by its long silver arm with a heavy thunk! pulling apart the jammed keys! - as suggesting that the poet, like the traveler, has to go away and enter into new environments in order to re-create them (that is, metaphorically, "return"). But "gambling your life" seems a bit over-the-top. And the concept itself didn't seem strong or direct enough to carry a poem.

Then there is the question of just how well the whole thing coheres. The poem has a rambling structure, consisting of a bunch of short poems ostensibly "set" in particular spots identified by their longitude and latitude. Home Base is Kitsilano (49°20' N, 123°10'W), but the rest of the poem goes tripping about the world, even venturing at one point to the North Pole. One thread New uses to tie things together is to work in a reference to a tree in every poem. I thought this was clever in a casually Oulipan kind of way, but I didn't think it was enough. The fact is, I didn't think any of the poems made me see the place being described. Of course, maybe that wasn't New's point. It's clear from some poems that he isn't describing anything local, or  has drifted from the map coordinates. I don't know about you folks, but after a while I didn't even bother looking at those (not that they meant much to me anyway, without an atlas to consult). And so I was left wondering about the point of it all. This is not a collection of travel sketches. So what is it?

Mainly, I think it's a verse essay on writing as landscape (as opposed to writing the landscape, which would be a different thing than this book entirely). In the beginning there was the wilderness, but the trees didn't have names and there were no paths cut through the woods. Poetry, or at least language, settles this vast unconscious:

a path through the bush is not possible unless
singing invents one:

     or dreams do, those that
     drum the edges of settled territory

"A forest is language," according to one of the book's epigraphs, but it still has to be written. Writing the forest makes it safe ("a path in the wood paints / safety"), which is sort of like expurgating a text. Face it, "as soon as a forest gets a name, / Sherwood, say, it stops being / wilderness." Writing is woodwork:

you prune memory instead, whittle a
syllable, lop a word away, open thickets

ruthlessly, and burn - 
writing is

     overgrowing,
     peeling down to undershirt and image:

     the carver chipping idly at old wood,
     the arborist among the Gravensteins

     binding new stock onto standing roots,
     the old poet reading:

This reminds me of Pound's characterization of Whitman's poetry as a block of wood for later poets to carve. In any event, he's not talking about some place in the South Pacific (where I think this poem is located). Like Compton, New only seems to be writing about place. In fact he's both projecting and drawing within. He's showing how the wilderness out there and the wilderness within share an identity. People breathe and so do trees. Breath is the basis of poetry

     the
sigh of silence empty then a   

     breath, then a
     breath, then an

          afternoon
          snow:

as well as photosynthesis ("the trees breathe, / and you - I - with them"). Emily Carr painted trees that looked like totem poles. She painted totem poles that looked like trees. It goes both ways. I take it this is what's behind New's playing with pronouns, as well as the second epigraph's collapsing of the distinction between subject and object, man and nature.

There were things about this book I had to respect. But I would say they were things I respected rather than enjoyed. Overall it left me cold. I guess it's an easy shot at a poet who is also a scholar and critic, but it seemed almost academic, like it was a book meant to be studied. Is it a self-portrait of the poet at his Underwood whose "calculation / cases the vernacular in ice"? None of the poems really stuck in my head. I found Underwood Log to be an impressive effort, intelligent, and (occasionally) rewarding a close reading, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Shane: Now here’s a genuinely ambitious book - 129 pages of long poem. The stakes heightened, I might add, by the book cover’s synopsis in which Underwood Log is compared in the same breath to Williams’ Paterson and Walcott’s Omeros. It’s an inaccurate comparison - New is no Walcott, not even a Williams.

First, the matter of form. Any poem might be compared to a high-wire act, a performance in which there is a certain amount of talent and a certain amount of daring. Now think of the long poem and the wire lengthened 129 times! The long poem is a matter of endurance: can the poet sustain the spell, can the poem hold the reader’s attention? There aren’t many Canadian long poems of note, and as a nation we seem to be a nation of sprinters, writers of the once-off, the occasional. It would be interesting if a critic would linger with this circumstance a little longer . . .

But did I like the book? For me, there’s too much of a free-floating quality to the content of the poems, anecdote and reflection seem to haphazardly flow one into another.  The persona of the poet in this book seems almost disembodied. Perhaps consequently there seems to be no overarching direction to the collection, although somewhat paradoxically direction - where and how we go in life - is one of the book’s major themes. Page 14 begins,

(traveling to find the story, naming
points instead, co-ordinates of moment,

you pitch yourself in space,

And page 22 begins, 

Or read in Timothy Taylor’s book, about
one man standing

fixed on a single moment,
knowing motion (the infinite coordinates

of an intimate landscape,
sweeping away in all directions)

and knowing this:
whoever is always moving is

never here
or there:

There’s much, much more of this sort of thing, like the fact that New posts a compass direction at the top of almost every page. But by switching directions so frequently, New generates no momentum.

Which brings me to one other thing I disliked, namely Underwood Log approaches stream-of-consciousness in its method. Though I don’t object to that per se, I do think there has to be a master plan, a purpose, and that’s lacking in this book. In fact, aimlessness and drift seem to be the very point of the collection. There is a central poetic intelligence free-ranging on topics that are, at best, tangential. There’s Hansel and Gretel here, Darwin , Kitsilano, Anne Rice . . . it’s a veritable kitchen sink of a poem! Here’s New in pure associative mode on page 84, where I think the poet has a "you" eventfully climbing a tree, although I can’t be sure, and I can’t see why the tree needs to be climbed, but to the poem:

think monkey-puzzle, think
getting off the - ow - ground,

grabbing on and bloodied, zero
besides: art earthbound, eh?

the heart of it, what the ear
hears, argon and air, even

i, i, and i, o.d.,
bone, and lost victory:

you live the edges, rasp and
bristlecone- pining

for a centre you don’t believe in,
pinnacle and being: being something,

nothing, twisted branches on the
same i.v. - take your dreams

to the nearest emergency room: they’ll
scour you out: think monkey

puzzle , broken sleep, letterpress and
seizing -

Confused? So we go from a "monkey-puzzle," a Chilean nut-bearing tree, to falling from that tree "ow," a pun with "art earthbound," then on to something that doesn’t quite follow, the sound of  "argon and air," which might, I suppose, be the stuff one falls into when one falls from a tree. Next is "i, i, and i, o.d" which I think somehow places the narrator in the poem, but for what purpose I cannot tell, the abbreviation o.d. meaning either "once daily" or referring to an "officer of the day." Again, why I can’t discern. "Bone" is also obscure, perhaps it is meant to serve as the human analogy for tree branch, although "lost victory" perhaps relates back to o.d, why again is lost on me; the later "bristlecone" and the pun of "pining" relate back to the monkey-puzzle tree, I suppose, but the purpose is obscure. Then there’s a whole hospital metaphor ("i.v." and "emergency room") that perhaps means that the "you" of the poem, the reader, is somehow existentially ill ("pining / for a centre you don’t believe in, pinnacle and being: being something, / nothing"), and also physically ill (I gather our tree-climber fell, what with the "ow") but what makes this excerpt ultra-bizarre is the insertion of letterpress at the end; where did it come from? In fact, a better question is: where did this entire poem come from?

Eclecticism is one thing, but for a poem to succeed, its parts must be integrated into a whole, be more than the sum of its parts. Underwood Log read, to me, like a lot of neat components. As a long poem, it doesn’t really cohere. It reads a lot like a poetic diary, a summary of the poet’s daily reflections, especially those parts that deal with nature. Swaths of this book resemble the unexpurgated diary of a naturalist. Perhaps this feel is due to the nature of the personality of the ghazal itself, the form which New chooses to write the whole book in. But I’ll get back to this.

Though I think this book very competent on the whole, I was unable to detect any really breathtaking moments, any particularly apt metaphors, and there definitely wasn’t, beyond the occasional pun, much verbal playfulness on display. The poetry was serviceable, but only so good. No lyric highs, no transcendence, only a sure delivery of thin anecdote interspersed with thick reflection. That said, there also is no lexical sag in this long poem, no sections that offend sense. I think that’s a tremendous accomplishment when one considers the length of the book.

Like Compton , there is much reflection and little action, making some parts a little bit of a snore. There’s just no narrative tension, and his chosen form of pseudo-ghazals remedy that a little; this form is an inherently energetic one, to my mind, and moves what action there is along reliably. Yet the ghazal, where individual couplets are supposed to be discrete units of sense, not necessarily having any relationship to other couplets in the poem, makes for a high randomness factor for Underwood Log. Now to be fair New doesn’t stick to the traditional rules, there is some spillover of sense from one couplet to the next, and there is variable poem length. But perhaps my major objection is that each individual pseudo-ghazal bears no real relationship to the next. There is no flow, no thread, and hence I can’t invest much of myself into this book as it is billed, which is as a long poem.

In summary, I think it a very interesting book, good in its way, just not powerful or memorable enough for me to nominate it as this nation’s best. I’d like to leave a book with at least one poem, even one image or metaphor, that strikes me as inalienably right, and that didn’t happen for me. That said, it’s better than Processional and Little Theatres by a good measure, and I give it a slight edge over Dempster because it’s more consistent and because it’s a much more difficult work to pull off.

Is it just me, or do you guys share my feeling that, as a whole, this year’s nominees are a little dryasdust? Shouldn’t one of these books be exciting?

Alex: I think the great curse of poetry in our time is its dullness. But perhaps more on that later. It's clear we were both a bit confused as to what this collection was ultimately about. And without any clear coherent purpose or larger structure it just sort of piles up and becomes repetitive. Maybe that's the point, that this is a journey without direction, just a going-out and a return that isn't really a journey at all but a series of mental re-imaginings. But it's not always an exciting exercise.

Shane: You know, I think this book is like those things you're obliged to do because they're good for you; or, in a strange metaphoric way, I think New is like a laxative. God, after the initial pain, do I ever feel good that I got all that out.

That good feeling (largely of accomplishment, for I just assimilated over a hundred pages of long poem) tends to reflect well back on the work in question. I feel like the book is better than it actually is because it's ambitious, because it is one big challenge, even if I do estimate it a failure.

But at least New can say, hey, I wrote a damn long poem and I did so creditably.

Mmmn- shredded wheat.

NEXT: The last word on Olive Senior