The Astonishing Room by Brian Bartlett
A Michael Greenstein Review
Brian Bartlett’s latest collection of poetry, The Astonishing Room, is noteworthy not only for its astonishment in sound and sight, but also for its roominess or breathing space between meanings. His capaciousness includes the reader and his subjects in the experience of reading and dreaming about family, friends, neighbours, other poets, and the moods of antique shops. Like James Joyce’s Chamber Music, Bartlett’s The Astonishing Room adds admirably to the house of poetry.
“What astonishes his sounds and signs are nouns surrounded and snagged by reverberating, hyphenated adjectives. His echo chamber is a portrait of the aging artist at thirteen, twenty, forty, sixty-eight, and a minute before midnight.”
On one level, his astonishing room belongs to the Harriet Irving Library in Fredericton where he reads in 1973 (“A Reader at Twenty”). On another level, this room branches out through simile “Like a heart’s chamber” — a connection between inner and outer worlds, body and surroundings. By the end of Bartlett’s pentameter quatrains, the room expands further to “those billions and trillions of surrounding symbols.” What astonishes his sounds and signs are nouns surrounded and snagged by reverberating, hyphenated adjectives. His echo chamber is a portrait of the aging artist at thirteen, twenty, forty, sixty-eight, and a minute before midnight. His scatter of dark marks are not only age spots on his body, but also sounds inked on the page — vowels and consonants that cling to the ear and spread their internal significance.
The book’s first section, “Readers and Dreamers,” begins with “A Family, Reading,” a poem about a mother reading to her children aboard the Titanic, as the ship is about to sink in 1912. A domestic scene plays out against the dramatic catastrophe, measured in tetrameters and long e’s of silent shrieks. “An iceberg pierced the opulent ship / yet a mother in third class, trying to keep / fears at bay, reads to her children / in their cot.” The contrast between opulence and third class, and sibilance of piercing iceberg dramatize the dire situation. Indefinite articles turn to definite articles by the end to seal their fate. “A barricade bars / the gates to a higher deck / so joining the push of panic in the halls / would lead nowhere safer / or more hopeful.” Alliteration in that sentence also seals her fate, so instead of opening doors, she “opens / her wide woolen sweater.” The tension between widening and narrowing adds another dimension to this astonishing room.
All of her nurturing, however, is futile in the face of the ocean’s onslaught: “A distance-muddled alarm / screams like a deep-sea banshee” — those long e’s heralding dread and death. The mother’s comfort is heroic in the face of the encroaching sea, “as her eyes stay fixed on the book / designed with roughly cut / edges.” Her book is designed to match the ocean’s encroachment and the ship’s predicament: “each page both entrance / and exit, shack in icy woods, / oasis in desert.” The tragic mirage undulates between water and mother: “the children listen to the climb and / dip of their mother’s voice.” In another telling detail the mother reads about the Frog telling Princess that it “will dive / in to fetch your golden ball.” It instructs the Princess to open the door. Bartlett’s fable within a fable imagines the mother’s “spell turning / the creamy-paged book into a raft.” The allegory links breastfeeding and sheep’s wool with “ropes of water” that become nooses around the necks of innocent passengers. At the end the water tears the book from the mother’s hands in this allegorical reading, situated in a room astonished by flood and family.
Bartlett works his room at and from the edges. From the book’s roughly cut edges the focus shifts to the sweater’s smell that recalls the morning the children hugged “a living sheep, breathing / its ticklish flank.” But the pastoral flank fails in the light that “slaughters all lambs” and the water that edges closer. Little wonder, therefore, that “A Dream of a Border” appears in this section with its “unending entrapment on the edge / of no man’s water,” as Bartlett edges and upends the elements.
In “A Dream of Speech” the poet frames his dream and speech with similes: “I spoke like an ancient Roman orator.” The poet’s measured sentences capture the orator’s “exact timing.” The astonishment of a “rundown rec room” contrasts with the Senate Chamber. The second stanza awakens from the dream of speech, as the speaker offers a goal for the task of iambic poetry: “the precision of each syllable I’d shaped / with assurance and resonance hardly human.” The goal of oratory and poetry reappears at the end: “communed in perfect unity, clear as / sunlight in springwater.” Bartlett’s endings exhibit that quenching lyrical clarity.
“A Reader at Thirteen” hyphenates adjectives to grasp the lyrical experience: “Pale, so pale even in summer, I spent more hours / tree-shaded in forest than sun-smitten on beaches.” Summer’s sibilance opens to hyphenated sylvan shade, balanced by beaches in comforting quatrains. Yet the poet disturbs his idyll through some menacing details, all in satisfying rhythms and internal rhymes: “bobcat tracks in brookside mud,” a “Red-Shouldered // hawk’s nest,” and “brambled entanglements.” By the end, we find emotions recollected in uneasy tranquility, as another bird surveys the scene: “Decades later I imagine ravens / eyeing a white-sneakered creature, a solitary reader / motionless like a dead deer in a bed of ferns.” The young teenager reads The Last of the Mohicans, while the older post-Wordsworthian poet reflects soberly on youthful enthusiasm. If Hawkeye is a character in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, then the hawk’s eye appears in this poem where the poet squints at a hawk’s nest, and a raven eyes the reader.
The heartbeat of “A Reader at Thirteen” appears as “a heart’s chamber” in “A Reader at Twenty,” where pages of books warm Bartlett’s heart. The natural world intrudes in the reading room: shelves are “rivered with woodgrain,” the room is a “cave scooped from a hill / of scarlet leaves,” and spruce needles cling to pant cuffs. Bartlett’s reading habits progress from Fenimore Cooper at thirteen to Borges at forty. Matching his sound sense is his visual acuity that features colour patterns, striations, and silhouettes. As he reads Borges’s stories in backyard shade, a grain of pollen lodges under his eyelid, which causes blearing. He fears going blind like Borges with a speck on his cornea. “Time has failed to bury the day / when the promise of blossoming life / threatened to extinguish sight.” Instead his vision cameras the colours of swallowtails, honeybees, and fritillaries— an abundance of flora and fauna, ornithology and ophthalmology.
The aging poet dreams and reads through “Bishop’s Hues” (based on Elizabeth Bishop’s collage “Ajinhos”). Bartlett paints Bishop in sounds of colour, hyphenating the two poets: “The blue of the Blue Morpho / butterfly fades, sky-tinge left / only in one wing’s half, / the namesake hue now earth-brown.” The blue hue fades over time, and sky-tinge lifts the wing of butterflight in this “life-to-death” homage. The first stanza ends with the poet’s troubled eye. Even as the butterfly’s sight troubles the eye, so its silent sound troubles the ear in staccato rhythms that collage the second stanza: “Torn ticket, bottlecap, / leaves, lone wooden sandal” — to honour a drowned angel of Rio. Both poets hinge in a form of oversight: “Looking ahead, did the maker see / the blue diminished?” Bishop’s colours survive “in ears,” echoed in resonance and grasped in “bottle-green swallows, / white-gold skies.”
The poem migrates and morphs across the Americas and centuries in flight patterns on the page, wings of butterflies and angels, lines and lives merging: “Rereading after rereading, / her lines rise, skim, veer, tilt.” Bartlett’s belated slant carries the burden of the past into the twenty-first century, fixing and freeing Bishop’s butterfly in the prism of “ Ajinhos.” His affinity for colours also appears in “In Praise of VIBGYOR” — the colours of the spectrum on display against the black of crows and ravens, and the white of walls. “The loss of the spectrum cuts me to the core,” while an optometrists’s blinding beam / forces my eyes shut.” Bartlett’s blink opens eyes.
Like Don McKay, he birds many of his poems in “The Wing’s Lift.” The couplets of “Vulture and Volcano” combine sound and thought, bird and earth: “A distant silhouette curves downward / into tall grass.” The poet silhouettes distance and proximity, colours and black-and-white, “abstractions turned into // feathers and flesh.” Couplets grasp all the alliterations and actions of nature in Costa Rica. The poet’s descriptive acumen matches nature’s forces: “Bald, black head and neck — / corrugations like external intestines // or laval folds.” Once again, Bartlett striates form and force in the wrinkles of land and creature, each feature connected in rhyme and rhythm. As a visitor, he dreams of eons ago, time’s distant silhouette when the bird saved its nestlings from an exploding volcano.
The poet’s thought distills myth from history, further corrugating the Canadian from north of the equator to Costa Rica: “If faithfulness / and courage scar you … // maybe / remembering the rescued nestlings // beautifies the face’s unbeautiful flesh.” He then focusses on the speed of epiphany: “Do most myths evolve as slowly // as a gathering well or a growing lake / while others flash all at once?” Bartlett’s pace hovers between the instantaneous insight and longer reflection, and that careful pace is measured in the poem’s concluding visual exchange — the meeting of vulture and story teller: “His eyes meet the vulture’s eyes, travel deeper into // an ancient event to be told and retold — / then the wings lift their living body // far from carrion and storymaker.” From downward curve to upward lift, the poem carries on in its retelling of cultural Vulcans, forged in the smithy of the soul.
Like “Vulture and Volcano,” “Falcon on a Dark Day” silhouettes the scene, beginning with an apostrophe: “falcon! chasing clouds / that the thousandth man / of a thousand men // on each other’s shoulders / could not reach.” The poet triads the falcon’s flight across stanzas with no upper case letters. The thousandth man belongs to Kipling, while the cloud chaser owes its lineage to Shelley or Keats.
The second apostrophe falcates the bird through hyphenated adjectives “where sharp-topped pines / cut sub-zero winds.” The sickle shape from which the bird derives its name appears in “no talons twisted / to the shape of a gloved hand.” The speaker’s eye sees without seeing the bird’s golden irises, “but all i see is / motion and silhouette // merged into one.” Vision and voice merge bird and flight. The thousandth man meets “thousands of hollow bones” inside the falcon. Shaping stanzas spread through repetition: “full enough to plume arrows // that haul other silhouettes / out of the sky.” Plume and pen meet in patterning until the final apostrophe — the refrain of falcon! and thousand men. Words are responsible for the falcon’s flight: “falcons do not fly / because they have wings — / falcons have wings // because they fly.” Bartlett’s verse silhouettes the wings’ spread, as he windhovers his subjects. In his counting years the thousandth man astonishes billions of surrounding symbols.
Whether ruminating or astonishing roommates, Bartlett restores doorknobs that have been turned away from history. His bone duets outwit the day’s core of steadier rhythms and a cheering chaos.
About the Author
Brian Bartlett’s seven earlier collections of poetry include The Watchmaker’s Table, The Afterlife of Trees, and Granite Erratics. He has also published several books of nature writing and a gathering of his prose on poetry. His work has received The Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry, and two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes. The many books edited by him include Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems. After long periods living in New Brunswick and Montreal, Bartlett moved to Halifax/Kjipuktuk in 1990, and taught for three decades at Saint Mary’s University. He has kept a daily journal for many years.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher: Frontenac House, 2024
ISBN: 9781989466803
Pages: 68