sewn paper
Poetry
April 2000
94 pages
ISBN 0-88984-211-6
$12.95
Kurgan
Don Coles` ``A line will take us hours maybe;/Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,/
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught,'' wrote W.B. Yeats. It's the paradox of poetry:
Spontaneous and yet made to last, it's news that stays news, both living flesh and imperishable
marble in one. Don Coles has obviously taken the advice to heart. No poet I know of captures
the quicksilver twists and turns of our tongues and thoughts more exactly and more memorably
than Coles does; very few (perhaps only Geoffrey Hill) can be as exacting or demanding
in what they commit to print.
`Little surprise, then, that it's taken Coles seven years to follow up his last
collection, Forests of the Medieval World, winner of the 1993 Governor General's Award.
His new book, Kurgan, contains forty-six pages of new poetry plus thirty-two pages
of newly revised out-of-print poems, and offers an opportunity to consider a poet whose work is
profound and accessible, enduring and alive.
`As if in answer to those who have found his kind of craftsmanship un-Canadian, Coles opens
with a celebration of a particularly homespun kind of artist. Here is the poet as a regular guy
walking home and checking on the rink, discovering a boy out there alone driving the Zamboni:
... I like it best when the Zamboni's
`Like that of his Zamboni driver, Coles' art is all deftness
and understatement, never trying too hard, no flourishes till the end
(``the perfect thing's/just about ready again'') and our final glance
up to see what the title was, the title that says it all: Kingdom.
`The poems that follow include meditations on childhood and art, dramatic monologues
(the title poem is a tour-de-force in the voice of an archeologist haunted
by the contents of a burial mound or ``kurgan'' he has uncovered in Central Asia), lyrics,
an elegy and a number of sequences. Here Coles displays his great gift for phrasing
(skaters abandon rinks for ``their ampler lives'', schoolchildren returning heads down
are ``diminutive penitants'', Keats's Fanny Brawn is imagined ``all damp and pleased'') and,
more radically, invents new compound English words (``deathwork,'' ``star-distant,'' ``dirigible-wife,''
``life-shy,'' ``image-debt,'' ``wisdom-caches''). If Coles's model for such coinages
is German, his wife's mother tongue, perhaps the reason they sound immediately convincing in
English is that they revive a power from the language's very roots, as readers of
Seamus Heaney's new version of Beowulf, with its ``word-hoard'' of ``spear-Danes,''
``wound-slurry'' and ``swamp-things'' will realize.
`Most of all, it is Coles's mastery of syntax, sinuous and unpredictable, that brings his poems alive.
The trademark hesitations, asides and parentheses that mark his lines derive from speech (a Hemingway
wife is ``one of the specialty, I am/going to risk saying, dishes in the big man's/moveable feast'')
and are all measured out and weighed in beautifully constructed sentences. They reflect, I will risk saying,
a radical skepticism: ``Nothing/here doubts itself, from which it follows/there is not a hint of me here,''
he tells us. This doubt, perhaps Coles's most modern trait, runs through and enriches all of Kurgan
(as it did his great book-length poem Little Bird) and places
his poetry among the very best being written in English.'
out there doing its ignored choreography,
blue lights glittering and the kid's dark head
turning to neither one side or the other, just
intent on getting it right. Around one end and
up the middle and peel off, down the side
and up the pure broadening middle again,
lights glittering, kid's silhouette watching ahead.
- Richard Sanger, The Globe & Mail
`Kurgan is the work of a poet who has mastered the full range of his voice,' commented
[Trillium] English-language jurors Kim Echlin, Andrew Pyper and Michael Redhill. `It is a collection
that seems at times easily elegant in its language, but that at the same time plumbs
the depths of human experience.'
Photo by Roger Hallett
Kurgan has been awarded the 14th annual Trillium Prize / Prix Trillium given to the best book published (in any genre) in the province of Ontario in the year 2000. For more information on the Trillium Prize please click here.