The Woodlot

by Conor Mc Donnell, May 2024

But first, some context. One cannot discuss Robert Colman’s latest (fourth) poetry collection without considering its predecessor, 2020’s Democratically Applied Machine, where Colman took us on a road-trip both literal and metaphysical through his father’s deteriorating health from Alzheimer’s dementia. In the last month I have re-read Democratically Applied Machine and 2023’s Ghost Work (both from Palimpsest Press) to re-familiarize myself with Colman’s quietly powerful work. Like many 2020 publications, Democratically Applied Machine was somewhat lost in the virtual-launches of serial lockdown which is a true pity because his previous book, Little Empires, was published as far back as 2012. Since then, Colman has spent much time tending to his craft and the results in 2020’s Democratically Applied Machine deserved more widespread attention. I think it therefore reasonable and useful to devote as much time to Democratically Applied Machine as to Ghost Work in the course of this review.

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Democratically Applied Machine opens on ekphrasis with the Vallum Award-winning poem “Middle Distance”. Inspired by Gerhard Richter’s Landschaft bei Koblenz, this poem introduces us early on to recurrent intersecting themes and locations: the urban-industrial, the rural-remote, the stately-crumbling …

the hay-field we can’t quite see
…
the pitch of rough cut steel on a lathe.

Each landscape maps the history of a state of mind and sketches those features that dominate both visual foreground and distant memory:

a memory-heat we can’t glean–
thok of clogs on cobbles, vowels
stretched open on a spinning mule

“Middle Distance”’s closing lines also contain the seeds of much of what we will encounter in Ghost Work two years on:

In his exiles

homeland
memory

father gives me pieces of willing
loss, our tolls, phantom limbs.

We can forget so much
the pain has no name.

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I believe Colman’s latest books do us a great service. They amplify a signal I first heard while hearing Carmine Starnino read “St. Pellegrino” in Toronto in 2018. Starnino’s reading was revelatory, mostly because the poem (from 2016’s Leviathan, Gaspereau Press) is an exquisite piece of writing, but also because he struck a deep note in me that night, one which Colman expands symphonically – the complex relationship between ailing father and adult son. Whether coming to the realization after years of pulling away that our time has grown limited just as we reconnect, or registering deep in our gut that the super-anti-hero in front of us has forgotten for a moment which brother we are, or even surprise at how quickly muscle softens and disappears, these poems stand as amplifiers to silent acknowledgments, and Colman as unheralded speaker for the dead: from “Winter Rites”, (Ghost Work):

What day is it? I worry
for memory but memory’s
no one’s familiar.

In “Bone”, Colman (maybe inadvertently) poses a quick-pick test, of which I asked myself, ‘which of the following three passages is the most damaging?’

Before calling, I’d gauge fragility.
Would he be garrulous with chips and whiskey
or grunt out? What of me would cleave?
…
When everything he said was dismissive
I saw the disappearance of us
…
At close quarters, he simplifies with a word:
clarity with a boot through pressboard.

… each to their own answer.

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As per Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, death occurred before finishing Democratically Applied Machine but the aftermath only really unfolds in the follow-up work. As per Cave’s Ghosteen, Colman processes death, deterioration, diagnosis and grief in greater depth throughout Ghost Work, where we are immersed in the author’s year(s) of magical thinking; those moments of haze & mist, twilight and sunrise, where understanding is skewed by exhaustion, futility and quiet revelation: from, “From the Front”:

The fierce hiss of the doped optical amplified on metal met us that morning,
the lasers having made their own hour for this.

Whether buried in memory of childhood slights, or barely contained during careless remarks at a family occasion, anger too is an energy in Colman’s work. It is important we observe such moments from the safety of this side of the page, because anger itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Without anger there is no anxiety, without anxiety there is no fight or flight, and without these, there is no survival. Yet there always remains a choice: whether to dispense such energies in a manner both careful and non-threatening, or cut loose and damnation to any bystanders. As with “Son to Father”:

This isn’t pin-the-blame on-the-senior

Colman’s wounds run deep and long, yet seldom does one encounter craft like:

There’s a line to happy,
I’m sure. Problem is, it includes books you read me
and the rest we both groped for blindly.

Often, when a lifetime of pent-up silence and struggle settles, it sags and seeps, leaks and encroaches. In Colman’s hands, however, this energy is transformed through feat of alchemy into pastures and meadows of patience, forgiveness, understanding, acceptance of flaws that mistook themselves for love. From, “Possessions”, Ghost Work:

There’s something in a gaze
when it isn’t returned,
can’t be given back,
when the walls
become phantom limbs
with no I on which to latch

In both books, there is acceptance and application of the inevitability and equity tied up in death. There is also an elegiac haze to descriptions of dying that precedes the final moments. It is why I truly believe Colman is producing important work, not only because of what he has to say but how he is choosing to say it. Variety is a word that has been bandied about in reference to Colman’s most recent two books. It’s not wrong but it’s nowhere near praise enough. What is clearly on show here is tradecraft (not surprising considering Colman’s father’s status as a skilled precision-tradesman) and a handling of multiple poetic formats that is masterful and often also playful, e.g., the internal rhymes skittled through “Ghosting the Assembly Line” – blurred … births; paycheques … sets, hoarder … workforce. This is little preparation, however, for the panoply to come: centos, list poems, sonnets, erasures, sestinas and forms beyond my own knowledge yet signalling some trickery at play despite the most serious nature of what they describe. There are examples also of industrial and technical jargon leaning into the language of the unknown:

Driver pins poised to move through the lock’s body
as our bodies key love

Herein lies preservation, both through the early attempts to shore up a man’s failing memory and the final surrender of preserving the very essence of the memories themselves.

“The Party” (a sestina after Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, La Notte) plays with sestina’s enjambment rules – road, rode, erode, corrode; door, adore, dor-mouse, dor-mant. Sonnets pull at the threads of the safety-valves we fashion to prevent our own dissolution, twirling perspectives back and forth – father and son, son and father, adult and child, child and child-like, e.g., the set & reset of Perimeter’s recurring reversal of engagement with perimeters and boundaries depending on where one chooses to stand.

streetlights stand where no street is laid
…
sanctuary the adjacent church allowed
…
this borderland’s suburban dry rot
…
I believe I yearn for countryside

And if all this variety and poetic form is not enough, “Let Us Butt Heads, Love” appears to be BOTH cento AND sonnet.

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If I was to quibble and point out those poems/sections that don’t quite work for me, it would be those parts of Democratically Applied Machine that take place in the United Kingdom on what appears to be one last father-son trip. It may simply be that with many relatives dotted throughout industrial and Northern England these locations are already too familiar, and gloomy, to me. It may also be I am forced to confront my own fear that I myself am not the good son; therefore, it is shameful to be reminded of what I will and won’t do. In poems like “Slipping Time”, I sense Colman’s dislike (?discomfort?) during certain parts of this trip, but he sticks with it anyway as he skirts churches and cathedrals, rubs up against God but comes away, unchanged? Maybe better to say, unscathed and unimpressed? At times like this I feel close to the writer but distanced too by his greater charity and patience, his admirable ability to be … selfless.

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And so, a word before dying. I mentioned earlier that Colman is producing important work and I would like to close with a few outstanding examples. I could quote wondrous lines all day, indeed I considered fashioning a cento for this piece from the best of them but instead I merely admire and note lines such as:

Isn’t the whole that? The error happened so you could learn more. (The Machine’s Advice)

What gain to argue facts with him, or repeat endlessly what’s missed? (January Storm)

He loved me, loved me enough for this profanity to be stifled (Watching the Exits)

What do all these pieces confirm? I run on as if words could shape an anchor, shape a father
unoccluded, riven of doubt. (Name)

These lines, these poems, these books do not simply grieve an absence, they are grimaces too in the face of a slow disappearance. Each visit, each encounter, each moment is pinned to the page like memento mori of the still-living but soon to be gone. Colman uses repetition throughout sestinas and distressed sonnets that suggest rumination, again switching our perspective from perimeter to boundary, placing us on the wrong side of the window or inside the mirror so we might witness the struggle while simultaneously railing against the frame of our situational cage. But, as he writes in “Barter and Make”:

the mistakes don’t matter if we keep each other safe.

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It would be remiss to leave you with even the slightest inkling that the line is the important unit of measure in Ghost Work. This work is all about poetry. Democratically Applied Machine’s “Interview with the Machinist” reads like a cognitive test for the yet to be diagnosed, a Voight Kampff for the forgetful if you will. Added to the three Memory Clinic poems from Ghost Work, these four poems chart a case history of disease’s progression from testing through bargaining and guess work past uncertainty and out the other side to an unusual and uncertain discovery; from

The question is not what shall burn next, but how, in the fire, we must be.

to

Do I wish to be?

I could also end by quoting “On Hearing Dad Sing the Skye Boat Song from Memory”: in its entirety:

We cling to the fact
that the colony of bees in our garden
has yet to collapse

I could mention that How You Left is a tender exercise in devastation
I saw your body balter on a stair
…
I imagine gods at your marrow, aged hunger taken,
…
Your robe loose as feathers

I could end on the quibble that I myself would have ended Ghost Work with “The Crowd Disperses”, if only to end on the lines:

and you held a microphone up
so I could sing my nonsense song

I could even heap praise on Katie Fewster-Yan’s fabulous back-cover blurb for Ghost Work …

Rob Colman’s Ghost Work is a slow dance with memory. A slow dance with memory as it crumbles, flees. A slow dance with pieces, and the heart begging one more chorus, one more verse, one more line, and the dance floor is a rising pool, and the pool is time

but, let’s spend a moment instead with “We’ll Meet Again”, a stirring tour-de-force that winds from Dame Vera Lynn’s WWII elegy through strangelove lyric:

I don’t know precisely what you think,
but imagine helmets waltzing ashore,
tossing rocks at a piano that peters out too soon

taking in mid-20 th century gaze of the traumatised male,

My father, just smiling to the soundtrack of men dying the traditional way
– patriotically in their soiled clothes and fear

through images of shadow and silhouette to create a fading but indelible mark: the map of all of a
man. There is guilt in grief again,

…what will charm you into words or ease where the soundtrack skips too quickly
and I am dancing around shame

for this is all the poems and all the lines from both Colman’s books, Pollocked onto the page as elegy, war-poem, everything I have written so far, and more besides. “We’ll Meet Again” is a brilliant and important poem, maybe the finest Canadian poem I have read in recent memory (yes). We approach territory of Do not go gentle but the roles here are reversed:

My son, my son,
how we want to protect
and feel undone.

The gaze of the elder, clouded with cataract and fog of age is passed to the son who must rage and recall, reflect overall, then cast life in new light, dark shadows and all.

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