Shane Neilson is a poet from New Brunswick who published Exterminate My Heart with Frog Hollow Press in 2008. My Manic Statement will be published with Biblioasis in 2009, White Coat, Black Bag (a book of medical poems) in 2010 with the Porcupine's Quill, and Alice in 2011 with Goose Lane.
Making Sense
I'm flummoxed: hock me up in a big hammock,
spin me. All top-heavy me, and let the lummox
go, watch the lunkhead stagger, watch the ox
stomp, watch him at angles to the world,
watch me. And I'll tramp and stamp,
swagger dizzy and abuzz, I'll be headlong,
I'll have no line, far-flung, and as the world
stems to lacklustre, as I am stemmed,
as sense rights, the hammock empty
and I've travelled far, flung far
into a lesson: the world is not vested,
it has no angle, it sets you, and atwitter
your head goes.
The Inventions of Love - "Love invents the sadness of tolerable departures." Dannie Abse
Love invented me; my patent is pending.
Love took my pain and invented the succour
of tolerability; love was a niche market,
a special-order product, sadness its brand name.
But this three-word naming,
this I-love-you of destitution,
I feel each time I say it like I
am waving bon voyage at a cruise ship;
you are on it, laden with the inventions
of love. The boat is named, ominously,
The Good Goodbye,
and I invent other words to call you back.
I invent a magical trombone to call to your
purely invented heart,
that you would ever come back
the invention I have come most to love.
Just Saying
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind. -from Philip Larkin's "Talking In Bed"
And I converse in double negatives,
that negation of negation that is pillow talk;
that not love could unsay, but there is not still,
not silence nor anything I don't mean,
and in this rush to unclaim declension
and any part of not you, not you,
or not unkind and not untrue,
at once, at once, it is not undifficult to find
the basest reasonings of will; and here, I am,
I am not willing to say these unsimple words,
but I am also not unwilling. The hinge of or,
the sulk of not. I stare. It is not morning,
nor night either. Your back does not balk;
It has no non. It is aware. Perhaps you will not hear.
I love you.
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