A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking
by Matt Robinson
Insomniac Press, 2000
Review by Shane Neilson
Matt Robinson is a poetry phenom. Schooled by the
University of New Brunswick's Creative Writing Department, he has won
several national and international poetry awards while still a student
there, and A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking, his graduate thesis,
caps an excellent period of study (one of his poems appeared in The
Danforth Review).
Robinson is a detached poetic observer. His words are
written as if at a distance, backgrounding emotion behind a wealth of
interesting and often beautiful description. When emotion is present, it
is hinted at only, appearing as a ghostly remnant, and thus a paradox.
When Robinson drops his intellectual screen and allows some controlled
feeling into his complex poems, what results is all the more
affecting.
Robinson's method is best exemplified by
"landscape architecture": "it was a forensic undertaking;
a structuring,/ an engineering of empty space. and the brick/ walkway we
built is now a fingerprint of our loss/ and recovery. there were, of
course, the obvious/ constructions: the framing and piecing together;/
the bricks and patterns with their metaphors...." These lines
display a rambling syntax that ebbs and flows, and a discursive
perspective that switches between topics. A detached Robinson reflects
later in the same poem, "it is a dynamic cartography, this clay
mapping/ of our loss. Ours is an engineered, interlocking
grief."
Yet his elliptic method is tempered by precision: the
most affecting section in Ruckus deals with the terminal illness of his
mother. Robinson seems loathe to present the immediate circumstance at
hand. Instead, he circumnavigates her coming death with detailed
descriptions of buying and drinking coffee at a Halifax hospital,
meditations on ward furniture. Weather becomes a metaphor for death:
"...people die weather/ or not; whether or/ not it's rain, sun, or/
snow. They go. They go." Simple condiments like dairy creamers with
expiration dates are enlisted as metaphysical reflections on the nature
of dying. A moment involving a son sitting in a living room, insulated
from street-cleaning after a snowstorm, becomes pivotal to his
acceptance of his mother's mortality.
Robinson's poems, so easygoing, are icebergs ramming
the hull of the reader's mind. Some poems are clearly the product of
graduate-English writing exercises, though none suffer for this.
Tradition has been absorbed and usurped by a mind that takes the best
from Stevens and Hughes. Other than a misplaced obsession devoted to the
alchemic distinction between coffee and tea, Robinson writes with an
interesting, distinctive voice.
Shane Neilson is one of The Danforth
Review's poetry editors. |
