The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Rights Movement of the Kennedy years
have overshadowed the supreme achievements
of the Apollo missions, the Russian
space program, and man's exploration of
the final frontier in general, and that he, "...
found the space business offensive in its
worship of power and jingoism ..." Thus his
discovery that all the famous astronomers
and astronauts were overwhelmed with a
sense of grace and experienced a deflation
of ego —a poetic as opposed to a rationalist
stance to their powers of penetration — has
released him to explore the language of
these primary texts and examine his own
response to the new physics of cosmology.
In poem after poem, Cooley cracks open
his syntax and evades closure in open form,
composition-by-field experiments with
vernacular rhythms and shifting figure and
ground. Typically, his titles run right into
his first lines and the periodic structure of
his initial sentences undergo a kind of
meiosis when confronted with the ineffable,
evasive objects of his gaze:
spun out in spring
season to season
sun so strong so unsparing
the clouds behind us
coming undone
one by one, only fast
very fast
spin backwards off the skein
we skim the translucent skin ...
( "intravenous space ")
For sheer verve and breathlessness, for his
masterful control of rhythm and mouth
music, Cooley remains one of our most
adventurous and accomplished poets.
Although occasionally, the sparks fly off the
carborundum wheel into the starry
dynamo of night without a kind of corresponding
force to keep the fragments in
orbit about some still centre.
Michael Harris's volume strikes me as the
strongest of the three — as avolume of
Selected poems it represents the quintessence
of fifteen years' of published work.
However, at 205 pages selected from only
three previous volumes and perhaps the
equivalent of a fourth collection of new
material (no chronology is used; the poems
are merely divided up thematically), a volume
of half or two-thirds the length of this
one might have been preferable. Still, Harris
is equally adept at writing modernist free
verse sonnets, persona poems, linked imagistic
and narrative sequences, family and
character sketches, metaphysical lyrics, object
and nature poems, travel meditations,
satiric squibs, and deeply personal lyric
meditations on love and death, and he generally
brings a keening lyricism to the page.
It is as a craftsman perhaps that Mr.
Harris impresses me most. Listen to the
sheer energy in the compression of syllables
and taut phrasing here:
0 I do love her, that woman in love with
death,
numb with denial, drugged and dumb
with fear.
Why beat around the bush. And if one
more
adage still manages to retain
a little of its original power, I confess
1 have flown from time to time
in the face of convention, like Icarus,
who fucked up badly, rebelling against
his clever daddy, or maybe just flying
wild
for the hell of it. Or living like Dionysus
the Dark
popping grapes until his tummy bulged,
rubbing his knees and elbows raw with
women.
For now I am the father she can fondle,
the man she needn't marry, the boy she
teases
with full impunity. I am the scribble in her
diary,
the walk-on in her dreams. I am the weekend
guest...
Harris is a poet's poet, delightfully irreverent,
not at all stodgy or academic, despite a certain
amount or erudition and an allusive hand.