Carleton Wilson's debut book of poetry, The Material Sublime, is a book of life's stages, combining work from his early years as part of the U of T based Algonquin Square Table of Writers and also covering Wilson's movements from those heady student days to his life as a young man and business owner living in Toronto's The Junction neighborhood. The Book combines work from over a decade of writing and includes noted and award-winning poems from various Toronto writing publications. The voice of the poems is consistent, the quiet subdued voice of a man beavering away, catching the minutae of life in his eyes' lens while fulfilling his duties at a typographer and book jacket designer. There is a tension to the writing though, and the voice is also of a person in a slightly uncomfortable position, realizing in his tomb of self immersion that there is a world out there; from this point of realization the voice is like hearing a man in a neck brace telling things he has seen in an accident.
Early work references the old guard
Some of the poems in the first section such as "Intelligent Crockery" about finding the bones of a badger in a pile of earth, are, like the poet to whom the poem is dedicated, Seamus Heaney, well-observed. The animal skull is a "bone bowl that once contained weasel genius." The writing is detailed and almost forensic in its flow, though the friendships forged amongst a group of scouts in "Wofic" is more rich and detailed. "This time of sharpening instinct, the tense knowledge of adolescent friendship nurtured and shared" starts to connect more as Wilson has spent some his time in Hospital with a lung condition (hence perhaps the gap in output, and perhaps the stages of this book) his appreciation for the simple joys in life is his strength and power and conveyance of this is his gift.
Killing House Flies?
Perhaps as a nod to his peers, Adam Getty and AF Moritz, the poems start with a walk along an old school route in autumn, "an underscore of strewn chestnuts as I walked along." There is mention of an industrial area, the slate stone is grey and cold, but where the book really starts too take off is in the middle section; one of the best opening lines I have ever read comes at the beginning of "Glowood Lodge, Possawan Ontario, Summer 1984"
"My first job ever was killing house flies
And I took to it with a warped frenzy
That is quite disturbing in retrospect."
..."I kept count, for heaven's sake!"
"Not even one of the men who tended
garden across the gravel drive, noticed the
piles of flies."
Relationship poems
Naturally after this poem there are a series of relationships or near relationships in:
"Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once."
A simple exchange over a cup of coffee is is quietly and finely observed but the little tensions are underneath there too. I recommend this book; there is not really one poem out of place - a continium of a person - just as nice to spend an afternoon with as read.
Blink and you might miss it, but in the words of the poet, you'd be missing "a whisper of me."
Reading in Cobourg
Carleton Wilson gives a launch reading in Cobourg
Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Location: Palisade Gardens, 240 Chapel Street, Cobourg, ON
At this event David Groulx will also do a Launch Reading for his 5th poetry collection A Difficult Beauty (Wolsak and Wynn).
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