reviewed by Chris Banks
“I took a word
from a word
and the word
was still full of words
so I took another
and another
and just when I thought
I might have too many
I realized that every word I’d taken
was full of other words”
When I think of the poetry of Robert Priest, I am always struck by his playfulness, the mischievous tone, but also his individualism as his peculiar preoccupations and imitable phrasing, the way he can take an idea like “a word is full of other words” and make it dance. His latest collection of poems Accidents After Happening out with ECW Press is full of love poems, poems about lust and kisses traveling at the speed of light, poems about aging and difficult abusive fathers, and micro poems with aphoristic pithy statements like, “Love for one’s enemy is most often unrequited” and “No one expects the American Inquisition” with its play on Monty Python but also its underlying deadly contemporary gravitas.
I often talk about the art of poetic attention, that special lens for viewing the world that makes one’s poetry unique and different from say another poet’s take on Gaza and war-mongering, or talk of babies in daycare or the black bile of Hate, or even a well-worn idiom like ‘the sweet hereafter’, which Priest flips to “the sweet herenow” which is just lovely, lovely beyond comprehension (and rebooted my brain as I wrote this), and I think this is Priest’s dominant poetic tool. His peculiar way of looking at the world is like no other. It’s his own entirely. The way the poet can say, “There aren’t enough / alphabets” and the reader can sense the poet trying to encapsulate how he sees and experiences the world–its wonders and atrocities and personal stories–and folds them into short-lined, tightly focused poems. There is real economy of language but also economy of imagery. The right words in the right order with the right images. That’s Robert Priest.
Check out this poem called “If All Words Were Rose” which I think showcases Priest’s attention to detail, his short economical lines and clever phrase-making:
If All Words Were Rose
If all words were rose
what would we say?
Language helps us
differentiate
It is in our interest
to go by the rules
Though whose rules
is hard to say
A rose by every other name
is a dictionary
a monotonous red lexicon
that only smells like language”
For me, I like Priest’s shorter poems rather than the longer pieces in the book. They feel ‘punchy’, succinct and savoury, every line a tiny door to other words or other things that our sense gates filter out. I like how this short poem interrogates language itself, putting the word ‘rose’ on trial in the opening rhetorical question, then the allusion to Romeo and Juliet morphing into riddling wordplay and wonderment in the ending lines: ”A rose by every other name is a dictionary / a monotonous red lexicon that only smells like language”. This poem is precise in its suggestion that language has to be so. Words are full of other words, and it is the job of the poet to be aware of that, but to use the right ones, if that is even possible, even if as Priest says in a different poem, “All words are followed by invisible question marks?”.
I really enjoyed reading Accidents After Happening by Robert Priest which is out now with ECW Press. I like the cinched line-lengths, imitable imagery, and the poet’s belief that “There is forever in everything” because I believe that, too. I think language, and poetic attention, a little love, a little word magic and wonderment, is what makes this life worth living, and I certainly think this is the simmering essence of this smile-inducing poetry collection.
Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of eight collections of poems, with Bureau of Useless Splendour forthcoming (Fall 2026, ECW press). 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.
The Woodlot 