matt robinson currently works in Residential Life at UNB in Fredericton, NB. His most recent collection of poetry is 'no cage contains a stare that well' (ECW, 2005), a full-length volume of hockey poems. A poetry editor at The Fiddlehead, robinson's poetry has received numerous awards, including The Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, and has appeared in anthologies such as The New Canon (Vehicule, 2005), Breathing Fire 2 (Nightwood, 2004), and Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada (Goose Lane, 2002). Previous collections include a chapbook of hockey poems, 'tracery & interplay' (Frog Hollow Press, 2004), as well as the full-length collections 'how we play at it: a list' (ECW, 2002), and 'A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking' (Insomniac, 2000), which was short-listed for both the Gerald Lampert Memorial and ReLit Poetry Awards.
heart
whether to take an axe to this
loose shutter and its insistent clattering,
or not; to draw, perhaps, the hammer back
and drive the bolt into its
place. whether to cleave. there is,
no doubt, a force in this - the kind of thing
that bursts barrels and topples
stacks of whatever might not be
nailed tightly down.
whether to simply make our way
over to the door and be done
with it. to spread our arms; to brace
our shoulders against the hard angle
of the frame. to just make do
right there, standing at the threshold of:
delay; one of any number of perspectives on flight
it's become painfully apparent the airport
doesn't have the sweetest clue. it snores its way
through the snowed-in grey we can see shadowing off
the crack in the dawn of this
morning. each breath is a chore, a burden
to be carried awkwardly down the long hall
of your throat, an over-sized frame of
a picture you don't really care for. your arms
simply can't stretch far enough; you
are always on edges. and the frowns people wear
as they shuffle about the rote of their waking
are only spun tire tracks mirrored: the sullen
discomfort of their shifting stark roads now brow-etched
across them through the windows of earlier cabs.
this, we might say, is the difficult face of travel.
the taut, weathered skin of the tent
in which anger lies fitfully sleeping.
but the rules here, we all know, are still
different: you keep your baggage close by at all times.
no more than an arm's length away; no
exceptions. and as bad as this seems, we can guess
our alternative's both nothing and something like love,
only instant. so: having thought, you think
you should sit and be glad for the crowd
of mis-matched totes crashed here at your feet, how much
you still have to be carted about. be glad
for this time - this new time - you've been gifted
to consider just where you might've been
going; to rethink things blown out of proportion.
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading