by Chris Banks
The poems in Brian Bartlett’s latest collection The Astonishing Room are finely crafted, for the line breaks and stanzas feel meticulously measured, but I would expect no less from Bartlett who has been writing poems since the 1970s, and this being now his eighth full length collection. The long, near uniform poetic structures Bartlett uses in this book put me in the mind of a poet like Philip Levine, especially in the cataloguing and curating of the past, but Barlett does it with more imaginative verve and word-play.
The title of the collection “The Astonishing Room” comes from Bartlett’s poem “A Reader at Twenty” in the first section which talks about the Harriet Irving Library in Fredericton which the young poet stumbled upon in 1973. Here is the poem in its entirety:
A Reader at Twenty
Harriet Irving Library, Fredericton, 1973
The astonishing room was like a heart’s chamber.
Its red carpets and glowing leather chairs
made my friend Bill joke, “The lobby of Hades,”
fire rising all around, touching every surface
with the red you find when you need dark
and squeeze your eyes against the sun,
capillaries tinting your lids. From floor to ceiling
shelves were rivered with woodgrain.
A pair of long tables stretched like festive spreads
for Beowulf’s family, but the only food and drink
were books and papers; the only sounds,
stray coughs, turning pages, pen scratches
imitating mice crisscrossing the shadows.
Behind higher chair-backs, lips took joy in lips,
hands explored nooks, illegal pills slid down throats.
In autumn, when classrooms blossomed
that room was a cave scooped from a hill
of scarlet leaves. In winter, tall empty boots relaxed—
Medieval dogs, Egyptian cats. Blizzard-reddened,
I doffed my coat, the millions of pages
warming my heart—an apple on a spit.
A place and time that could become any
place and time. The room was the red of Mars
but spruce needles clinging to my pantcuffs
belonged to a green and blue planet.
At the opening to my third decade I embraced
the impossibility of drinking it all,
those billions and trillions of surrounding symbols.
I love this poem right from the get-go, as the opening line ”The astonishing room was like a heart’s chamber” and then the “red of Mars” morphs into the lobby of Hades with its “red carpets and glowing leather chairs” but this library is more of a place of comfort, of curiosity, than a repository for the dead. The poet expresses this sentiment in the line “the only food and drink were books and papers” and later admits, “the millions of pages warming my heart–an apple on a spit.”
Furthermore, the Astonishing Room is “a place and time that could become any place and time” which suggests the library is a motif for life itself, the curating and compiling of personal experiences, from the “cheering chaos” of antique shopping, to a Blue Whale washed up on a nearby beach, to a father “sundowning” from Alzheimer’s, to reading Borges in backyard shade, to the cataloguing of facts like there are 1.5 million species of beetles.
In Bartlett’s collection, memories are “closings and openings” which when you sit with them later in life make you not only tally their significance, but make you ponder mortality itself which along with family, and reading, and remembering, is one of the over-arching themes of this book.
I mentioned earlier that Brian Bartlett is very attentive to how his poems sit on the page and he seems to have a fondness for the 10-12 syllable line which is by no means uniform but it is present in enough of the poems for me to notice. As much as some poems remind me structurally of Phillip Levine, this first section of Bartlett’s poem “Hints and Memories at Hartlen Point” from section three is so perfectly chiselled, the line breaks so measured, that I think of the American Southern poet Dave Smith who is another master of line breaks and indentation. Look how Bartlett expertly makes the first section of this poem structurally meaningful on the page:
Alliteration is everywhere in the image-rich lines of this poem, but so is assonance like “looms large, like the radiating solar O atop / an ancient map” with all those a’s and o’s. The sound qualities of this poem are really extraordinary, but the imagery too is quite wonderful with its “shorebird cries, slick kelp, three-generational picnics” and “salt-and-pepper-barnacled rocks”. Top it off with a masterful manipulation of indented lines, and intentional line-breaks, and this is one really terrific poem!
Towards the end of the poetry collection, the reader encounters poems about a neighbour shouting curses, the poet antique hunting, even a haunting meditation on a wood engraving of two skeleton marionettes, but there is also the voice of the poet as the voice of the reader (this time no longer twenty but sixty-eight), and instead of the Harriet Irving Library, this time its a Little Free Library, which shows this whole collection is about an entire life lived reading and writing and thinking:
A Reader at Sixty-Eight
In the brightly painted, rusty-nailed box
of a Little Free Library down the block,
among picture books sporting covers
with giraffes and crocodiles, and cookbooks
squeezed against gardening guides:
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide—
price-sticker cracked, paragraphs bracketed and
lines underscored by pencil and pen. That paperback—
a bramble bush in a multi-coloured field of flowers.
Who had faithfully marked up the study
after braving the cover—illuminated skull,
ice-cube teeth, planet eye-sockets?
I’ve never fixated on its subject
except in fleeting moments
yet in the pandemic’s third spring, the week
weighs leaden: more of Ukraine incinerated,
a cousin’s chemo pills not working, another
bracing for a quadruple by-pass, a friend frightened
to leave her house. For years I’ve wanted
to enter Alvarez’s inquiry—
but in my hand
it felt like a hot coal, so I urged it back
into the jumbled shelves and walked away
as if great danger were at my heels.
New day, new sky, new mood. I regret
not welcoming the neighbourly gift,
retrace my steps to the Little Free Library—
but The Savage God is gone. Questions hound me
through the cold: who gave into the temptation
to claim the book? Should I have spared them
the act of carrying it home,
one hand burning?
This is a great poem about mortality and reading and thinking amidst a Little Library’s miscellaneous gardening guides and giraffe picture books. For me, this piece harkens back to the earlier poem “A Reader at Twenty” for to read and to think, which albeit can be pleasurable acts, is not always pleasurable. Sometimes thinking leads to hounding questions and difficult emotions. But how else to be human or to grow older?
In the poetry collection The Astonishing Room, Brian Bartlett shows us how an individual life lived reading and thinking and pondering life’s imponderables may not provide safe answers, but life by its very nature is not safe. He writes, “the mind too… …holds grapes, birds, and fire / and the heart can be a crate of lumber or / a bowl of keys” which is to say human consciousness is “an astonishing room”, full of wonders and sorrows and personal experiences, and these poems to me are part of the poet Bartlett’s wide-ranging ‘walkabout’ curiosity, for the poems seem to be searching for something just beyond the frame–beyond the images and the line breaks and the structures they contain. I might just call it ‘poetic meaning’, which feels like an overwrought phrase for the real significance we dreamers want to assign, to ascribe to our lives, but nevertheless “like a palate-delighting wine” these poems linger.
Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.
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