The Woodlot

by Rob Taylor

In May 2024, I was invited to judge the Fred Cogswell award for the best Canadian poetry book of 2023. I said yes immediately, having long been a fan of the prize’s structure (and, often, the resulting shortlists). What I love most about the Cogswell is its single-juror format. I see the limitations of that, too (when I served on the BC Book Prizes board of directors, the idea was proposed to us and swiftly rejected). It’s certainly not how every prize should be decided. The results are too idiosyncratic, too whimsical, too yoked to a juror’s stubborn biases, to truly represent “the best.” Yes, exactly!

+

Attention – Kate Cayley
 
And if repetition could itself be
a form of attention, folding along the crease
until the crease finds itself
hollowing out the groove, as in marriage,
studying the same face, the same
permeable body, as in children, their fury, their
fraught going forward thinning out your life
like a membrane that will not break, lives
that alter in the telling, theirs outstripping yours
and stripping you of anything they find useful yet
carrying you always with them, a husk pinned to their inside
pockets, as the poet when she wrote on the back of recipe cards
attended sternly to the rising bread, attended to each
blade of grass on her Amherst lawn, then I will
believe that language rose up in us
as praise.
 
-          	from Lent (Book*hug Press, 2023)

+

Ah, how beautiful I find this poem from Lent by Kate Cayley, one of the ten books I longlisted for this year’s award. I can point to its rhythm and precision; its repetition as a form of attention. But after a while I stop pointing and just let it wash over me.

+

In evaluating these books, I attempted to shake off the committee-juror’s inclination towards summary. It’s difficult to talk about what makes something beautiful (or haunting or funny or…). It can be analysed to an extent, but invariably analysis falls short. At some point a poem makes the leap from unbeautiful to beautiful, and that moment can never be explained (if it could, the beauty would vanish). Beauty is also subjective, created at the moment the poet’s intentions meet the reader’s interpretations. When a jury gathers, “beauty” proves a fraught criterion. You can’t convince someone that something is beautiful, you can only encourage them to look over there a bit closer and hope they see what you see. Jurors can more easily find consensus in the summarizable parts of a book (themes, ideas, arguments, story). A jury can agree that a book is valuable or interesting or important far more easily than that it is beautiful. As a result, beautiful books that are “about” this and that, nothing and everything, are often lost in the shuffle.

+

I should clarify that by “beautiful” I mean anything that can grab you by the heart, but that you can’t grab back.

+

Here, as a jury-of-one, I could let myself pursue beauty with no need to find an easily communicable common ground. Still, it took me a while to accept that the only criterion I required was my reading pleasure, my apprehension of beauty in its myriad forms. In other words, to read these books as a reader.

+

Destiny – Harry Thurston     
 
Destiny thrashes us.
              	- Attributed to a ‘Moorish’ Poet, Museu Municipal De Faro
 
An old man has fallen down.
Young men stand around
not knowing who to call,
what to do. The old man’s scalp
bleeds, an ugly gash, while I hold
him gently in my arms—
I too am old, just not quite so.
I try to tell him with my few words
to stay down, “Desculpe! Sorry!”
 
He wants to stand up,
that’s what we do,
knocked down, we get up
as we have always done.
But it gets harder to rise
until we no longer can.
I hold the old man down
and say, “Sorry! Desculpe!”
 
-          	from Ultramarine (Gaspereau Press, 2023)

+

This poem delights me, as do many in Harry Thurston’s Ultramarine. It would have done nothing for me had the two repeated words not switched their order at the end. Strange, eh, what language can do. And the funny little ways it goes about doing it.

+

Poetry prizes are inherently flawed because a poem or collection’s greatness is only truly found in its afterglow. Years after first reading, I run my finger along the spines on a shelf and pause on this one, a long-forgotten friend I’ve never truly forgotten. It’s been with me this whole time. In seeing it again, I’m reminded. From time to time I play my bookshelves like a piano, my fingers gravitating to the most resonant keys.

+

Some of the books submitted for this award I had in my possession for six months before my decision was due, but most I had for less than three. The not-so-secret secret about book prizes: in deference to commerce and its requisite trends, prize timelines make it impossible to read books the way they should be read. To live with books the way they should be lived with. Most books must be skimmed, with jurors convincing themselves they get the gist from the first few pages. Running my finger across my shelves and seeing the oddities that give off an afterglow, I’m not convinced.

+

Here are my numbers: I read 118 poetry books between July and December 2024. That’s almost every book written by a Canadian poet and published by a Canadian publisher in 2023 (a few presses didn’t send in their books, and I will forever hold this against them).

Of the 118 books, I read 27 cover-to-cover (23%). I read less than 10% of 42 of the books (36%). The rest fell somewhere in the middle. The books contained around 11,000-12,000 pages total, of which I estimate I read 40-45% (a bit over 5000 pages). It felt simultaneously like far too much and far from enough.

+

Still, still – Ali Blythe
 
Being in love
is a lake.
 
The world
turns upside down.
 
We shatter it
when we dive in.
 
How dark
it had to become.
 
To see the unnumbered
sparks on each shook swell.
 
To feel their gold
hooks fixed in us.
 
-          	from Stedfast (icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2023)

+

Stedfast by Ali Blythe is a welcomely unusual book. I’m not convinced that it’s meant to be fully understood, at least not all by one person. It’s more the breath before and after than the words themselves. It will stay with me for a long time, and I suspect will be a different book with each reading.

+

The perfect prize would take eighty years to judge. You’d gather a jury of babies, their parents reading them all the books slowly over the course of a year, making them the babies’ nursery rhymes and lullabies, fused to their mothers’ and fathers’ voices, all sound and light and warm embrace. The jurors would then return to the books once a decade for the rest of their lives, never taking notes or submitting a list for evaluation. At age eighty they aren’t given the books but are simply asked which one they remember most fondly. That’s it. So in 2104 this year’s prize would be complete.

+

If that sounds farfetched, it’s the only truly meaningful type of evaluation we have. As some point we look around and notice what we’ve carried with us. What’s carried us this far.

+

law and order: check-out counter – Hana Shafi
 
the clock is ticking
it’s your turn to pay but
mum isn’t back with onions
the groceries inch forward
every moment pure agony
how will you pay, you’ve got
nothing, if you hold up the line
the people will riot
the line between order and anarchy
is where the conveyer ends
and the scanner begins
the first beep rings
a piercing hollow sound
she’s scanning the milk
she’s scanning the apples
a whirlpool churns in your gut
the end is near
civilization heading for a collapse
your eyes scan the store
frantic you just want your mommy
she emerges, your beacon
your messiah, like christ
resurrected she appears from aisle two
onions in hand, the line parts for her
a miracle truly, your faith is restored
god is good. onions are good
and they are absolutely essential
to the recipe.
 
-          	from People You Know, Places You’ve Been by Hana Shafi (Book*Hug Press, 2023)

+

The poems in Hana Shafi’s People You Know, Places You’ve Been are a lot of fun. They show that a poem doesn’t have to be capital-P profound to be perfect. I’m still anxious every time I read “law and order: check-out counter.” I still laugh every time I reach the end.

+

As best I could within the given timeline, I first read these books quickly, hungrily, then let them rest on two bookshelves I’d cleared for this purpose. I would walk by the shelves every day, rereading and moving books as they called to me, beckoned by the afterglow of that first reading. The brightest among them drifted to the right side of the shelf, until it glowed so brightly that I knew I had my longlist.

+

But ah, the books just to the left of my ten selections, how brightly they glowed, too. How fractured the light in the room when I severed the ten from the rest.

+

Here are another ten books that I still think of often:

The All + Flesh by Brandi Bird (House of Anansi)
Alternator by Chris Banks (Nightwood Editions)    
Pascal’s Fire by Kristina Bresnan (Biblioasis)
Casting Out by Rocco de Giacomo (Guernica Editions)
The Natural Hustle by Eva H.D. (McClelland & Stewart)
Crushed Wild Mint by Jess Housty (Nightwood Editions)
While Supplies Last by Anita Lahey (Signal Editions)
Absence of Wings by Arleen Paré (Caitlin Press)
Scorch by Natalie Rice (Gaspereau Press)
the trick of staying and leaving by David Zieroth (Harbour Publishing)     

I have another ten all lined up, but I will restrain myself. We could be here all night.

+

Drawing of the Rain – Amy Ching-Yan Lam
 
I drew the rain as little grey lines.
 
It rained all day and night and everything was grey.
Water fell through the sky continuously.
Its motion made everything seem especially still.
 
My drawing looks like a square with lines on top of it.
It doesn’t look continuous.
I wonder if the rain will escape from the drawing.
 
I say this because apparently the devil can escape from
a painting.
Someone painted a mural for a church and they had to paint the
devil three times.
The first two times it disappeared from the painting
overnight…
Somehow the background remained uninterrupted.
The third and final time, the painter painted it
chained by the neck.
Then the devil stayed.
 
I don’t know how to tie up the rain.
 
I think that when the devil escaped
and the background filled itself in
the painter should have honoured
and preserved the background.
 
-          	from Baby Book (Brick Books, 2023)

+

The magical background of Baby Book is stories. The book teems with little stories that are simply told, approachable and giving. Each races to fill in our wounds. “We will be dissolved in our own stories,” Amy Ching-Yan Lam writes near the end of the book, as we find ourselves dissolving into hers.

+

A few tests I ran on the books:

–  The “Look at that book sitting there” test. I would read a book for a bit then set it down somewhere around the house. Whenever I’d spot it, I’d note if I had an urge to pick it up again.

– The “Does this book know how good it is?” test. I preferred books that felt as bewildered as I was by what we were creating together.

–  The “Was it more than 80 pages?” test. I mean, really, what are we doing, people? Too many books felt like the physical manifestation of a poet at a reading going twenty minutes over their allotted time.

– The “Did I stumble?” test. Did I have to adjust how I read, learning to speak the particular language of these poems? And was I rewarded for the effort?

–  The “Did it wake me up?” test. When you read so many books on a tight timeline, a numbness sets in. Whole books pass in a haze. Reading becomes a groping for handholds, a search for anything that might rescue you from the stupor. In this way, it is the same as reading poetry at any other time.

–  The “Did the bathwater go cold?” test. Also known as the pruny-feet test. This was the most reliable test of all.

+

In Lieu of Flowers – Lorna Crozier

When someone knocks on the door
pray he is not bearing
another bouquet of flowers
 
but an animal on a leash—
a goat would be best—
you can lead him
 
to the vases—the hall, the kitchen,
the living room,
the bed strewn with dying blooms—
 
such a beautiful feast—freesias
and chrysanthemums, rosebuds
and roses, the labia of orchids.
 
You love the stink of him,
the violence of his teeth,
the sound of his hoofs
 
throughout the house,
soft on the carpet,
hard on the hardwood floor.
 
-          	from After That (McClelland and Stewart, 2023)

+

A confession: I didn’t want to include Lorna Crozier on my list. I love Lorna, and like celebrating books by well-established writers (70% of the finalists for the 2023 and 2024 the Governor General’s Awards were first books; prizes too often treat writers like new cars, their value plummeting the moment they step off the lot). But have you read this woman’s bio? She has to stack up the prize winnings to make them all fit! Four-time GG finalist, three-time Pat Lowther Award winner. C’mon, people! Let’s share that love around! But dangit, this book made my feet pruny. Written after the death of her partner, Patrick Lane, its concentrated grief reminded me of Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, perhaps my favourite book of poems. I’ve come to think of After That and The Great Fires as companions in a long, shared conversation, one we all speak into and into which, one day, we will be spoken.

+

I love taking the piss out of prizes, especially their sense of self-importance (2024 was a particularly easy year for this, with prizes like the Griffin and the Giller making controversial decisions based on prestige and prize purses, not the wellbeing of the community of readers and writers). I do this for younger (or older, but equally deluded) authors, one in particular: me. I remember how badly I’d wanted recognition for my first book, and how disappointed I was when I’d felt little came. Imagine! 100+ books published that year, and me crestfallen to not land in some committee’s top five! In a country of 34 million people! How the mind contorts itself, trying to squeeze through the keyhole of a house of its own design. I want every young writer to know this stuff doesn’t matter. Relish your words, the victory of their having been written out of and alongside the night, the elegance of their being heard a while and then forgotten. The same as the man raving on the street corner, handing out pamphlets. The same as Shakespeare.

+

the berry takes the shape of the bloom (excerpt) – andrea bennett

Maybe in my inbox. Maybe through the
mail. Maybe hiding in my spam folder.
A thing, something big. Something big
that will solve it forever and for good.
 
-          	from the berry takes the shape of the bloom (Talonbooks, 2023)

+

This excerpt from andrea bennett’s long poem the berry takes the shape of the bloom shot me into attention, my delusions made plain. The book—about pregnancy, parenthood, and inheritance—did this many times, in many ways, and for that I am extremely grateful.

+

Two competing forces whisper in my ear, urging me to pursue prizes. Call them belonging and fame, art and commerce, high and low. I think of them as hope and fear. I want my words to reach readers and transform them, ever so slightly, in the way others’ books have transformed me. I also want “success”: book sales, reading opportunities, residencies, huge stacks of non-sequential, unmarked bills. And beneath that, the more fundamental, and fundamentally frivolous, “fame” and “immortality.”

The problem with prizes is that they contain, at their core, that good stuff (readers connecting deeply with your book) and coat it in the bad stuff, which is promoted and discussed until the good is rendered near invisible. Words like essential, best-selling and acclaimed replace loved. Poets start their writing lives already sensing scarcity—one cash prize, one certificate, one sticker on an author’s book—when the real prize, what we all long for deep down, is available in abundance.

+

Hybrid/e – Dominique Bernier Cormier
 
Comme je disais, the important thing
is savoir se fendre
 
le cerveau in half
 
et de continuer à parler
devant a foule of light
 
even ébloui, even aveuglé
 
même quand the vase of the moon
se fracasse dans le ciel
 
et que la mer again
comme un orfèvre must fix it
 
and all its little pieces
 
-          	from Entre Rive and Shore (icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2023)
 

+

What a brain splitting book! I was bewildered! I stumbled! I Google Translated! The bathwater didn’t stand a chance! Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s life is divided between two languages. In Entre Rive and Shore he finds a way to bring the two halves together, creating poems that sound and say better than either language could hope on its own. It’s no small feat.

+

Of the books I loved, some—like Bernier-Cormier’s—were themed books (or long poems), while others were general collections. On my first reading, I gravitated towards the themed books. I did this because I found the general collections to be uneven. Some of the poems were better than others, some did nothing for me. Each weaker poem felt like a failure, unlike in the themed books where everything contributed. But this is just a trick the mind plays. All books are uneven, with some poems, some parts, stronger than others. It’s rare to achieve the sublime, or even the very good; it’s impossible to sustain it. And even when poems are of similar quality, I will latch on to some over others. Loving one, I’ll rest on the next and invariably find it not quite as good. After a few disappointments I’ll expect a quality poem and all-but will it into existence. This is the flow we are born into: waking and sleeping, breathing in and exhaling, laughing and letting the room fall silent again. We demand these undulations, peaks followed by valleys which make possible the next peaks.

+

Even successful themed books, or long poems, are riven through with imperfections that enhance their sublime moments. General collections, I came to appreciate, function in the same way, and should be treated as equally successful even if only a few poems really stand out. Remembering 3-4 poems from a book is not necessarily a shortcoming, if those poems are good enough. That was simply that book’s flow: the particular intensity of its peaks and valleys, and what each of those heights allowed me to see.

+

A Corpse – Russell Thornton
 
Here is his corpse in a hospital bed—
the soft, silver-white hair falling to the shoulders,
the flesh thin on the high cheekbones, the skull a throne,
the nose high-bridged and long, the old beard long,
the half-exposed, shrunken body stiffening,
the organs within it still a stone, the skeleton a throne.
The curtain drawn in the acute care room
where he died three hours ago. The mouth open,
the round abyss of a gasp, the eyes open,
no longer blue, dark grey, stopped up as stone,
and unyielding, contained in a new aloneness.
What I am that he was, I owe to the desire
that was like an edict in a solitary,
wild young man and a smiling young woman
summoning me from an elsewhere into the flesh.
I take the sheet edge, cover, tuck him in,
and wait for the aides to come to wheel him away.
I wait as when I was a child waiting months, years
to see him, my father, my absent king.
I see him step down from his elevated sitting place,
put on armour, wield weaponry like any man.
I tend to him as I would tend to a soldier,
light waning over a now-quiet field where he lies dead.
I advanced alongside him like a brother, I saw him fall.
I sit with him so that he will not be alone,
and I guard him, guarding my truest self,
until the air around me is dark, and I go.
 
-          	from The White Light of Tomorrow (Harbour Publishing, 2023)

+

If this was the only good poem in Russell Thornton’s The White Light of Tomorrow, it would have been worth the read. (Lucky for us, it isn’t the only one.) The line “I advanced alongside him like a brother, I saw him fall” has lodged somewhere deep in my brain. When I read it again its as if I first read it years, not weeks, ago, and it’s been inside me shaping how I think about the world this whole time.

+

I used to think great books (Moby-Dick, etc.) were overlooked in their time because their readers and critics were fools. I see now that I was believing in an orderly universe. That if we’re smart and hard-working and passionate enough we can always detect greatness. That it is somehow measurable both out in the world and inside our bodies. But that’s just another story we tell.

+

In other words, forgive me if your book isn’t on my list.

+

The Bus Stop – Erin Noteboom
 
Outside the Benrath Senior Care Centre in Dusseldorf,
the caretakes have placed a bus stop.
A bench and a shelter. A graceful tree.
The bus does not come there. But those who wander
stop and wait. The private with marching orders,
the baker who must awaken the dough. The woman who knows
she is fourteen years old. She must get home,
she is not frightened. Or at least, she is patient and brave.
She sits with her hands folded inside the mittens
and waits like Mary for the birth of the Word.
The bus is not coming, and soon enough
she will forget why she is waiting
and be coaxed inside for soup. But for now
the sun gleams through the roof of the shelter,
and lays its hand against the side of her face. A lie, yes,
but the sweetest lie God ever told us: Of course
I am coming. Of course you can go home.
 
-          	from A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen (Brick Books, 2023)

+

My father was a minister and my mother has dementia, so this poem from A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen by Erin Noteboom reached me at that fortunate time when I was ready for it, seeing a world not unlike the world the poem sees. Illness, loss and poetry, all three have the capacity to open us to the world as it is, whether we want to see it or not.

+

We are stabbing out for significance in an indifferent cosmos. We will always fail. I believe our journey is to find a way to peaceably enter the grave, accepting our time on earth and its swift, bewildering passage. Do awards help us or distract us on our journey? Oh, I think you know my answer. The more interesting question is if poetry helps. It doesn’t always, at least not directly. Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem advocated the opposite, though maybe even that poem can serve as a step on the journey. Perhaps awards and accolades, spasms of fame and memorialization, can be steps towards quiescence and willing erasure. I hope when I award a prize to a book that I am doing—for its author, its publisher, its reader—a useful thing. But it’s not entirely clear to me that I am.  

What is clear to me is the love I have for these books, and for Canadian poetry, and for poetry writ large, wherever it may be leading me. I hope that love shines through the rest, like sun through the roof of the shelter.

Rob Taylor’s most recent book is Weather. He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.