Review - Near Cooper Marsh by Jesse Ferguson

Near Cooper Marsh
by Jesse Ferguson
Friday Circle, U of Ottawa, 2006

Reviewed by Aaron Tucker

Jesse Ferguson’s short chapbook, like the forests that backdrop his poems, is calm and relaxed, a mix of wilderness narrative and description that harkens back to the long Canadian tradition of intertwining words and landscape so close it appears the letters are written in pine needles. Yet, each poem is tinged with a fear of the natural world, a respect that turns all the beauty the poems set themselves upon slightly dangerous. It is this balance that drives the work, creating an engaging, though sometimes didactic, read.

For Ferguson, there is always a tension between the natural as dangerous and environment as a romanticized and pastoral setting. The final poem, “Remembered Moose” is a good example of this:

A carload of close friends
Colliding with a sudden black mass,
Steel crumpled, crazed safety glass,
Antler through the windshield…

The majestic beast, which the narrator wonders at in the other two sections of the poem is reduced to a propelled object, instantly endangering. As Ferguson turns over each of his descriptive poems the reader weaves between fear and awe, never settling into comfort.

But the poems here work the best when they are the at their smallest. The works are rich in tiny details, such as the first snowfall in “First Unmelting Flake,” to speak to larger concerns; there is a nod towards “the doom of [his] father’s/ garden” perhaps foreshadowing the inevitable loss of his dad. The poems are treated as snapshots then, brief and intense capturings of scene, meant to bloom outward only after the last line is read.

However, the temptation to explain to the reader the meanings of each text often overtakes the work and the reader is left with a line spelling out how to react to the poem. “The Game” undoes all the lovely imagery it has built by stepping in heavily at the end to pronounce on the scene, with the voyeur hunter “never again/[having] the stomach/ for game”. Where the poems work much better, such as in “Remembered Moose,” is when Ferguson trusts his reader and uses his solid descriptions to subtly steer the emotional context of the work, instead of defining it at the end in a flash.

Additionally, Ferguson shows a real affinity for sound in his work, pairing words and lines together that ring wonderfully when read aloud. Yet this sense of the auditory is broken by his overuse of enjambment and his over-reliance on the narrative line. The breaking of lines is uneven and sporadic, underutilizing the potential of creating multiple meanings with a single break. This fragmenting distracts the reader and necessitates the extra words that litter the text. “The Creek Behind My House” often falls into this habit, chunking words into lines that add jerky hesitations into the reading of the work. Often the poems are bogged down with their insistence in creating a complete sentence out of each poem where the text might have been better served to utilize its line breaks and punctuation, along with some editing of the smaller particles, to create more of a flow throughout.

However, the polaroid effects of Near Cooper Marsh are still strangely resonate. This is poetry that, when it focuses on its tiny hinges of description, is strong and enjoyable down to the last uneasy image.

Aaron publishes regular reviews for inknoire, a literary blog and has also contributed to The Windsor ReView, The Antigonish Review, The Woman's Post and Misunderstandings magazine. He currently teaches and writes in Toronto.