by Chris Banks

The sonnet form has had a bit of a renaissance since Diane Seuss published Frank: Sonnets three years ago. Her richly descriptive–at times anecdotal, at times revelatory– poems have cast a wide spell across North America, including on poets like myself, breathing new life into an incredibly elastic poetic form, so it is remarkable to see Canadian poet Matthew Tierney take up the sonnet too, but instead of running toward’s Seuss’s lyric richness (and thus, the rest of the crowd trying to catch up to the zeitgeist), Tierney moves completely in the opposite direction.

In his fifth book Lossless published by Coach House Books, Matthew Tierney takes the sonnet form down to its studs, to the very essence of human experience, interrogating not only memories, but our senses, how we edit and process sensory details, in order to manufacture what becomes a continuously changing “picture” of the world and, in contrast, ourselves. Even the language, the diction Tierney uses, appears to be an object of investigation.

Here, the sonnet is less of a form; more of an aperture. Less of a restless search for beauty; and more of a data compression tool.

Indeed, the book jacket of Lossless reveals Tierney’s new collection “takes its title from lossless data compression algorithms” and “positions the sonnet as lines of code that transmit through time and space.” This is all to say it is a very demanding book. Themes include fatherhood, nostalgia, philosophy, and a host of other subject matter. The whole collection is comprised of two “book-ended” sections of stripped-down sonnets with a middle composed of prose poems called “Mission Architecture” sitting in-between.

In the first section, the sonnets really made me work to try to read them as sonnets, and not just snatches of thought made possible by the holy algorithm of human consciousness, but then I decided they were both. Here is a prime example of one sonnet from the first section called “Grandma Bo’s Farm For A Spell in September”:

I love the compression of images, diction, sensory details in this poem. The idea of pain as “an engine”, its “what-what-what” a measure of radiant energy (or as I understand it), and the idea of the poet using tongs to “jar the collective”, or his experience of a September day on a farm.

As A.R. Ammons once said, “Even if you walk exactly the same route each time – as with a sonnet – the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet’s health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same” which reveals the dual purpose of Tierney’s book: to see how much the sonnet form can be “compressed”, but also to reveal how one’s thoughts, feelings, experiences of the world change too.

It is almost as if Tierney is using his Uber-spare, 14 line sonnets to go beyond the form, to go beyond the white paper itself, to get to the genesis of ideas, and hopefully reveal “the continuity issues” that plague “the long take” of human conciousness (to borrow and bend a line from his poem “1 A. M. Walk Gets Her In Trouble For Staying Out”.

The middle section of prose poems/essays stand in stark contrast to the opening sonnets, but they dive deeply and keep interrogating the poet’s inner voice. In “The Subject Sighs / A Structure of Nowhere / Explain Fear”, Tierney writes, “I’ve seen all the shows you have, read the books you have, your reference points are my reference points and I’m not among them. It’s imposture to claim other-wise” which poses the question are we just the sum of our thoughts and experiences? Tierney goes on to write, ”The subject sighs, thought to ego, ego to act” suggesting maybe a person, like a poem, is just a flowing forth of ideas and thoughts taking action.

One of my favourite sonnets from the last section of the book is entitled “Pop Music Comes To Lineate The School Years” where isotopes and pop music and skateboard kids all commingle at dusk:

I read that line “I am / too far in to get out” as the poet remembering being a young person, and how memory draws it cognitive cage around him. Maybe all of us, while we are here, are just part of some large “meanwhile before the mighty sun”, and as much as we try to make sense of the world, our memories decay, our thoughts change, and what we know is more a personal paradigm, a system of subjective beliefs, than scientific verifiable truth.

Maybe this is what Matthew Tierney’s Lossless is really asking us to see as he restlessly interrogates his world using his 14 line sonnets—that ideas and images and poems are just so many “lines” of human algorithmic code. And blood.

At times, I admit I felt shut out of some of the poems as I do not have the background to fully comprehend the many allusions to philosophers and physics he makes reference to, so my enjoyment of the book was somewhat tempered by this, but then again, these are not poems meant to stroke your synapes in a familiar, reassuring way. Tierney is doing something truly new here.

In Lossless, Matthew Tierney’s  fifth book, there is a wealth of strong poetic lines like “hours seep into strata” or “I close my eyes to the gold hilt” or “we are made of effort, not will” that stayed with me long after reading the collection. This is a terrific book made to “poke” and prod your thinking, and to broaden your poetic imagination, and just when you think you understand the compression of Tierney’s thoughts (i.e. how he conceives of the world), flip flip flip goes the unsayable which is another wonderful line from his book, and an apt way to end this review.

(Lossless by Matthew Tierney is available from Coach House Books in May)