All Books

Everything Colin Browne has made up or invented in The Shovel seems written in prose; everything in it he has “unearthed”—from research, the stories of others and source texts—appears as poetry. In this extraordinary book, he has inverted the way we have been defining and privileging forms of language in English for the last century; self-expression becomes prosaic, the recording of history, poetic.

While The Shovel contains a range of styles and voices—everything from concrete poetry to “recollections of things past in tranquility” to delightfully humourous accounts of the poet’s accidental encounters with prominent philosophers—this book lives and sings through its epic passages. Ezra Pound defined the epic as “a poem containing history,” and in these necessary poems Browne is a restless prowler through history’s layers, sudden veerings and terrible, wonderful intersections. The Shovel is a book composed in wartime, an act of reckoning, a record of unkept anniversaries and possible histories (in texts devoted to the likes of Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Linton Garner). In exhuming the mesopelagic shades of the 20th century, The Shovel collapses, at last, the reigning fiction of time.

Every age demands a poetry to contain it, and here Colin Browne takes a measure of both the privileges and the appalling costs of service and citizenship, from colonial British Columbia to World War I Mesopotamia.

The Singer’s Broken Throat is a collection of poems that trace a path through both physical and emotional landscapes; each step of the narrative way is marked by an event of the heart; each image is a map of person and place. Des Walsh’s fourth book of poetry echoes his extensive film and theatre work: the voices here are always dramatic and present, not passive and absent, even when the poems are elegiac in form and substance, even when their subject is historic. These poems disclose the fragility and wonderment of relationships, as well as remind us that we are all alive to each other, inextricable from our frames in both time and space.

Walsh’s ancestors, who crossed the cold grey Atlantic from the rock of Ireland to the rock of Newfoundland, clamour to be seen and heard by the living in these poems, to remain visible in the fabric created by the often frozen, often trembling, often grasping, sometimes gentle hands of the living.

There is no attempt to create an artificially poetic voice here; there is no attempt to impose an exclusivity of language, purged of things unpoetic. These poems tell the truth, unabashedly, mystically and sometimes in a way that is violently Catholic. That in itself is reason to celebrate.