“The Fly in Autumn” by David Zieroth / “Expressway” by Sina Queyras / “Pigeon” by Karen Solie

Somewhere near the midpoint of a poem situated precisely midway through his latest book, The Fly in Autumn, David Zieroth asks the reader to consider the elegiac conundrum: “Just think: to be beautiful / and dying at the same, last time.” It is a luminous moment that casts its light forward and backwards throughout this collection that recently won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and, in its mourning yet consolatory tone, whispers a confiding secret in the reader’s ear. More frequently, though, the poetic stance is solitary and isolated, centring as it does on a walker or sojourner as he wanders through mist, steam, rain and water-light; falling water of various kinds being the more or less constant medium through which these poems gently float or fall or falter. This is not to say that the poetic persona is unimpassioned about the incurable condition of his existential loneliness:

I kick sidewalk trash while within
whirls my own lean cyclone
sucking from me what once I was: one whose joy
at living and arriving was not so easy to destroy.

As in these resonant lines from “Hollow,” the landscape of Zieroth’s poems is most frequently composed of the natural world in its silently held or falling stillness, within which the poet’s cerebral panic is contained by rhythm, rhyme and the sweet felicities of inevitability. The earth is our only and our last home, these seem to testify—“All I’ve been I’ve been by being here” goes a line in “Earthward”— and so our best homage, as poets and wanderers, is a carefully precise, unflinching eye. At the same time, this observational gaze casts a pervasive sense of the already- lost on all the mortal world, wet and rain-slick, foggy and icebound though it is.

This does not preclude a more joyful mood, of course, and in poems such as “Am I Dreaming?” and “Man in the Ice Fog” a certain easygoing jauntiness and the rhythms of scuffy, scalpy quotidian life give the poems a Larkinlike workaday appeal that, true to Larkin’s finest “verse,” is lifted into sudden beauty at the end by the existential ache of a moment of fleeting but lovely apprehension, like these final lines from “Just Two Streets Down”:

… and yet
as he glides further into foreign debt
he’s not thinking of pocket loss
but of his boyhood hope: to be brave,
to ship out, to learn to sleep on waves.

Sina Queyras’s poetry collection Expressway, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award this year, is similarly concerned with walking, moving through landscape and considering the connections between humanity and nature. Yet, unlike Zieroth, she strenuously questions—and ultimately rejects—the listener/receiver model of poetics.

Instead, her poetic persona, a woman striding along the edge of the expressway talking (or is she listening?) into her cell phone, kicks over the traces of the undivided subject, the solitary walker wandering lonely as a cloud in a “natural” and naturally beautiful environment. Indeed, in the opening poem, “Solitary,” she explicitly invokes the Wordsworthian moment, that cloudy daffodil-flocked day that still hovers on the periphery of some allusive, elusive romanticism of the mind. But Queyras’s walker strides forth out of the “Post-Romantic years,” her cell phone cocked to her ear, her perspective cast backward to history’s finish line and forwards to that mock-epiphanic moment when “Nature, / One concludes, is nostalgia.”

Who is she but the expressive traveller hastening ever further along the expressways of her past and future selves? Not to mention history, memory, Genesis, the apple tree, a father’s death, speed, optimism, the urban sprawl, post-Industrial ennui, the history of hurtle forward and hold fast and throttle back. And what is memory but one of the cars that flash by, fleet and shining, on either side of the expressway? Yet in Queyras’s collection, memory of the individual self is not privileged over the collective memory of a larger self, a bigger world, a higher and more conscientious consciousness or, alternatively, a subjectivity that is split and wildly proliferating as in the poem “Progress”:

One is not simply.
One is not.
One is ever after.
One is as much as this.

Queyras’s aesthetics are not those of lyricism or beauty. “This poem stinks of dynamite,” she writes in the poem sequence “This is not My Beautiful Poem.” And later in another resonant phrase, “Writing is a disordered hum.” Dynamite, disorder, the apprehension of and willingness to elucidate “stink”—this is her manifesto, and the collection, which includes poems “crafted” from texts as diverse as Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals as well as various fragments, police reports, and newspaper clippings from Google text, comes to achieve the constructedness of the medians and highways, the thoroughfares and crash sites, and neural pathways of that expressive straight line with all its crooked moments of interruption and connectedness.

Karen Solie’s latest collection, Pigeon, is similarly concerned with the aesthetics of road and restlessness and the landscape of itinerancy, but her interpretation of that vanishing point where nature and meaning, urban anomie and misunderstanding, briefly intersect is utterly original:

Rats come out to sniff garbage blooms in rat weather. Heavy cloud, colour of slag and tailings, green light gathering

like an angry jelly. Pardon my French. The city on rails, grinding toward a wreck the lake cooks up.

In these poems, Solie offers a vision of nature gently bubbling and turning rancid in the run-off from factory waste and industrial slush, and in her deft vision of the way man-made structures frame and then constrict every view, she allies herself with photographer David McMillan, another proponent of nature’s rusty unease. “The forest, / with its long hallways and concealing furniture, / is not for me,” she confides in “In New Brunswick,” a not unexpected conclusion since few statements about nature in this collection are intentionally “natural.” Like Queyras, Solie is no champion of unaffiliated nature; these are poems of tractors, factories, industry, unions, the sly clash of machinery and irony, the fumy buzz of diesel, dust, smoke from exhausts and the inexhaustible surprise of metaphor. Her poetic persona boards Greyhound buses and takes off on impromptu road trips, beds down in hotels and rented rooms, traversing the country as various landscapes behind glass flash past. This transient and itinerant self, this doyen of the desultory outer suburbs whose preferred milieu seems to be the threadbare lounges of old motels on busy through-roads, knows that she must be ready to leave any place without warning.

Solie has explored the romance of motel and highway before in her previous collection Modern and Normal, 2005. But this present volume certainly does not suffer from a return to those 40-watt corridors where “night / lays a hand on each numbered door / in turn.” Much of the reason for this lies in her refusal to accept the usual grand narratives with anything but a kind of gentle comic skepticism. Through sly wit and the ironic feint, Solie once and for all disables the dull earnestness at the heart of belief:

The honourable life is like timing. One might not have the talent for it. Take this guy up ahead who’s driven 45 minutes with his turn signal on through this jurisdiction of few exits, as if the hope of a left is all he’s got now in his one chance on this earth.

The Fly in Autumn by David Zieroth, Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2009. Paperback, 96 pp, $18.95.
Expressway by Sina Queyras, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009. Paperback, 104 pp, $16.95.
Pigeon by Karen Solie, Toronto: Anansi Press, 2009. Paperback, 112 pp, $18.95.

Méira Cook is a Winnipeg writer.