All Books

What Your Hands Have Done looks at how life spent in a close-knit fishing family in rural Prince Edward Island marks a person. The book is rooted in PEI but moves from there to Toronto where the malaise of life proves to be unbound to the sameness of small-town days spent hauling gear on the Atlantic or toiling in rust-red potato fields.Bailey examines the world around him from the inside, observing the minute to account for the vast. These poems are laid bare and free of ornament, revealing the hard-won wisdom just below the surface:She was there, cooked for you. Helped cleanthe mess you’d become from decadesspent on your father’s ocean hauling lobstersfrom its depths, gulping down the sea air.Even when the booze was too much,she knew you were more than the vomitcaked to your shirt. Less than confessionsmade beneath the red summer moon.

what’s left, a book in six related sections, presents us with cues and clues to the poet’s compositional strategies. The first section, “hazelnut,” measures time as the unfolding life of space. It alludes to mclennan’s long-term genealogy project, in which he discovers traces of the Sumerian flood, Etruscans, Icelanders, and Robert the Bruce hidden in “Indian Lands,” waiting to be discovered like “gilded coffins in Egypt, undisturbed, as yet,” along with other “‘ancient’ remains, now ‘decades-old,’” of our more recent, cash-crop culture. This hopeful search for a unified thread of narrative continuity in our shared physical landscape is undermined by the road-poems of the book’s second section, “interim report,” where the poet finds himself “somewhere between love and madness,” only to discover in the third section that the pursuit of a collective historical voice might well be merely a search for a little white li(n)e.

Section four, “cooley’s key,” shifts the identity/narrative search from the “other” to the “self,” with an ironic platonic toss of the active body in favour of its passive intentions: “‘he says in the old days, eh, all / they cared abt was sex & grades, eh, but now / all they care abt is grades … where / has the ambition gone.” Section five, “paisley,” dead-ends in an artfully constructed fractal barrage of global nostalgia: a series of endlessly over- and under-stated images of idealized neighbourhoods where lawns are cut with mullets and relationships are cut into periodic tables by intrusive punctuation. Finally in section six, we find “what’s left: coda,” a return to the particulars of the poet’s “territory”: not a “mighty oak from a tiny acorn grown,” but a hazelnut thicket in which a multiplicity of voices is heard.

The often outrageous and always wise follow-up to 2008’s Governor General’s AwardÐnominated Be Calm, Honey shows David W. McFadden at his most inquisitive and provocative. Here you’ll find ninety-nine poems full of surprises by a Canadian long-distance poet in his sixth decade of writing, a writer who never rests on his laurels or allows himself to become complacent. This is a book full of mystics and Golden Age movie stars, friends of McFadden and long-dead philosophers, and their tales are all told in the poet’s deceptively plainspoken voice.