The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

No ideas but in things 
No answers but in questions

Robyn Sarah is a poet’s poet whose work I have enjoyed for decades so it was a real treat to sit with her new book We’re Somewhere Else Now - poems 2018-2024 out with Biblioasis Press this Fall. Sarah has written eleven books of poetry previously, and a book of poetry criticism Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry among other works. Her last poetry collection Wherever We Mean To Be: Selected poems 1975-2015 came out almost ten years so I was expecting this new collection to really be special and I was not disappointed. We’re Somewhere Else Now really has something for all readers of poetry: end rhymed poems ("Once More"), prose poems; poems with incantory repetition ("Le Rappel Des Oiseaux");  small, image-dense poems in miniature, and a breath-taking long poem sequence called " In The Wilderness: A Soliloquy in Broken Time" which I could write a whole another review simply about, and I just might.

Robyn Sarah is a striking poet because she seems to employ so many poetic forms and sensory images effortlessly, and I loved so many individual lines in this collection like “If God was dead, we were his obit” and “To what avail a sundial on a cloudy day?” or “Doubt was a thread in the gathering dusk” which feels like a mantra for our troubled times. Even these lines “And how many times can we say / and how many ways can we say / this life’s ephemeral” from “Late Journal Entry On A Leap Year’s Phantom Day”  feel like the rich simmering essence, the demi-glace if you will, of a poet’s imaginative life. 

Not so much a hotchpotch, but a very carefully compiled selection of poems, in We’re Somewhere Else Now the subject matter varies, veering from the remembered music of a pet bird from childhood clambering around its cage, to street graffiti witnessed during a lockdown in Montreal, to pick up hockey games where the players change over decades, to friends passing, to children growing up, the whole world in flux; and there are poignant allusions to Hopkins and Rilke and the Book of Genesis, to the Tao’s Ten Thousand Things, all culminating in this collection to reveal Robyn’s steady hand and unwavering eye poking and probing at Hope and Despair and Time and Doubt to see what secrets they will reveal.

There are terrific pared-down lines in “Finders Keepers Losers Weepers” like these ones I have excerpted  here:

The more we lose, 
the closer we come 
to who we are.

There is also a terrific section in the poem “Perpetual” which showcases not only Robyn Sarah’s wisdom, but her ability to make what is essentially ineffable visible: how our familiar world changes, can feel alien, at times, and lately not for the better.

I like the wisdom in these lines, and there are many instances of not only the right words in the right order, but the right questions asked for the right times in this book, questions that go to the heart of our difficult present, even if the answers to these questions are not immediately apparent.

Take for example, this section from a different long poem sequence “Once More” which I excerpt here because it is both a terrific instance of end-rhymed, 10 syllable line work, but more so because of the philosophical heart-work the poet instills in both the images and the  rhymes:

Beyond the delicious rhyme structure, the poet is grappling with age, the many-headed hydra of War,  a scourge that never really left, a world order in a state of flux, and the poet’s doubts arriving to ask, have we made a difference? Could we have done things differently? Especially for those “young ones headed into change / Beyond Imagining. How will they deal?” As the father of children growing into young adults, I find the paradox of doubt and hope, the wilful but perhaps necessary blindness in the last line of this poem, both comforting and haunting.  

The poet Sarah expands on this idea of knuckling down and putting on blinders to see the good, the Hope in front of us, and the need to block out the fears and atrocities and challenges lurking in our peripheral visions, in her poem Straws:

Straws

Everyone looking through their straw. 
And maybe it’s best that way,

a collective shield, silent pact 
to protect self and others by continuing 
to pursue one’s own business as usual, 
as if it were all just business as usual, 
colluding to ignore that giant shadow 
in the peripheral vision, as it creeps 
ever closer to where we stand

you could call it high flying denial 
or you could call it kindness, 
kindness or willful blindness 
hearts in the right place 
or heads in the sand

Headline: Great Disorder 
in the Next Eighteen Months.
Well, wait a minute. Who says? 
Who has the authority to proclaim? 
And besides – who doesn’t know that?

We know it and we don’t.

Hearts in the right place 
won’t be enough to save us. 
We need accidents. 

I really am struck by the truth in the last stanza. Our hearts in the right place won’t save us from the challenges we face, but maybe a few happy accidents and a little luck will.

We’re Somewhere Else Now – poems 2018-2024 by Robyn Sarah is out now with Biblioasis Press this Fall. Written after Donald Trump’s first term began and through a worldwide pandemic a chorus of newscasters called “An Epidemic of Loneliness”, these poems have much of the doubt and despair and the need for hope engendered by these events sewn into their inner linings. Robyn Sarah’s work is powerful, visceral, but also elegant and pared down when it needs to be, employing both high formalist rhymes and minimalist beauty. Her poetry collections are consistently lauded, and this one I believe will be no different. 

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.