by Colin Morton
As a child, some of my favourite books were atlases, those repositories of plans and dreams. Once, with a pencil, I drew on the map of North America the radioactive clouds I imagined spreading death downwind from each city obliterated in the future nuclear war. Predictions of global nuclear winter came later (followed by acid rain, climate change, mass extinctions, etc.), but from early on I understood the world as a scarred place, subject to wounds inflicted by history. In the 21st century, global events influence the lives of everyone, including poets. We are all connected, and the consequences of our actions spread like radioactivity, everywhere.
Now, with the return of fascism, European war and further crises, many have said that we are living at a crucial moment in history. End times must be near. The truth is, I can’t think of a time in my life that wasn’t similarly momentous. The opening poem in my new book Scar Atlas says it in plain and simple terms:
I grew up with rumours of 1984,
daydreams of 2001,
cruised through Y2K with ease
as if with 20/20 vision.
Then came years I never planned,
ghost years, years adrift, when once
close friends went quiet, missing,
ghosts of myself came back to haunt.
Ghosts never drew so near before.
Though shadowed for years
I always kept a step ahead.
Now we walk side by side.
A literal sub-text runs along the bottom of the page, in this first section of the book, like the crawl that runs at the bottom of the screen on 24-hour news channels. “Walls fell. Then towers. So empire ends” reads the crawl, continuing over the page under the next poem, “the wealth of nations smashed and scattered on the tarmac.”
“Walls fell. Then towers.” Such world-historic events may not have touched us directly, but they changed the world we live in and the way we think and act and move about in it. They have infiltrated our dreams and our attitudes. How can our poems be unaffected?
When sidelined by pandemic and lock-down in 2020, I had leisure to meditate on such changes, to give voice to some of my anxieties and disillusionment, fear for my friends in dangerous places, for my neighours who are refugees from war zones, for my grandchildren.
Most of my life I have watched from the sidelines, yet history hasn’t spared me or my family. The title poem of Scar Atlas sets the theme: an intimate look at someone deeply scarred by a history that is still unravelling.
My father leaned over the sink
to study his face in the mirror.
With a sterilized needle he probed,
prodded, nudged out a sliver
of bomb casing risen to the surface
years after he came home from war.
Field doctors had removed the larger bits,
phosphorus that glowed in the dark,
then smoothed on a sheet of skin
borrowed from his body lower down,
and when the patient regained his sight,
sent him back to the battle.
As he lay on the sofa watching TV,
his legs across my lap, I traced
a route with my fingers on the map
of shrapnel scars that pitted his shins.
He watched in silence scenes of war
staged as heroics on the screen,
never spoke of his wounds, said only
that the scars no longer hurt.
Here the pain is understated of course – it’s a survival strategy – but scenes like this have stalked my poetry from the start, showing up in my first book, In Transit (1981), through to a sequence based on my father’s World War II memoir in Winds and Strings (2014). In other books I have taken a wider view of history and explored the impact of momentous events on others: the Lakota refugee crisis of the 1870s in The Hundred Cuts: Sitting Bull and the Major (2009), exiled German artist Kurt Schwitters in The Merzbook (1987), my late loyalist ancestors in The Undead (2018).
In Dance, Misery (2003), time itself becomes a character, change the only constant. That sequence focuses on the “public passions” of the Twentieth Century, from the war euphoria of 1914, to the London blitz, to jubilation on the Berlin Wall in 1989, to the silent skies on the day after 9/11. In a way, Scar Atlas picks up where Dance, Misery left off. Here, especially in the section called “The Crawl,” my attention turns to the world-historical events of the 21st century, the ones I have had to witness from my compromised position on the sidelines.
Concerned with friendship, citizenship, aging, the poems in Scar Atlas look outward, I hope with compassion, but they have little room or patience for what we normally call “politics.” I care about fairness and justice, of course. A meek person, I want to inherit the earth, and to leave it as an inheritance. I do have opinions, but there is little home for them in my poems. (Don’t take what looks like advice in “Economic: Three Lessons”; it’s satire.) I have respect for those who fight the good fight for the political cause of their choice, those who “eat the rich, drink the bitter, spit out oaths gone rank.” Generally, though, my poems abstract from the particular event. For example in the “Confession of an Unindicted Co-conspirator,” I have no particular conspiracy in mind, only a common attitude of complacency that may allow us collectively to saunter into disaster.
When the time came we didn’t think.
That had never been a problem before.
Scars are emblems of healing. From a father’s war wounds to a lover’s open-heart surgery incisions, Scar Atlas is a record of survival. It speaks up against despair.
Born in Toronto and raised in Calgary, Colin Morton received an M.A. from the University of Alberta and worked as a teacher and editor in Canada and the U.S. He has published twelve collections of poetry, many reviews, and one novel. His collaborative works include a book and recordings with the word-music group First Draft and an animated sound-poetry film with Ed Ackerman. A former co-director of the Tree reading series and vice-president of the League of Canadian Poets, he lives in Ottawa with his wife, poet Mary Lee Bragg. Www.colinmorton.net
The Woodlot 