Originally written for hobby blog on 27 April 2018
If you have been a part of the London Ontario poetry scene for a long enough time, you’re sure to come in contact with one of the many lovely people who are a part of the local publishers. Brick Books is one such publisher. Why would I bring them up here other than the fact that Torch River was published by them in 2007? Well, it just so happens that they have a surplus of their inventory, so you can often see Brick Books’ books on the counter at poetry events next to the feature poet’s, free with a purchase or sometimes just straight up free. That means, because I have been attending local events month after month, I’ve acquired quite a few of their books (and as a result you may have noticed I’ve reviewed many of their books in the past). I try to read the back blurbs of all the Brick Books’ books left on the table, but have only a few moments to pick out ones I might potentially like. In reading the blurb on the back of Torch River, I found mention of two of my favourite topics to read and write about in my own poetry: sexual love and the wilderness (not necessarily at the same time, come on folks). The point of this is to make clear how much I wanted to love this book. Having tried to find the secret to writing engaging nature poetry in my own work, I seek out all the nature poetry I can find, but reading further down the back blurb at a later date, I started to get the impression this book was going to be on the more pretentious end. I took this book, along with a few others, on vacation with me to Algonquin Park, thinking it’d be the perfect way to unwind. Who wouldn’t want to read about nature while surrounded by its beauty? Instead of unwinding me, I got coiled up tighter as I read along, getting more and more frustrated. Torch River became the catalyst for me wanting to do more reviews, so I knew I’d have to come back to it. So here I am now and I’ve now read through the collection twice. I told myself that perhaps I just wasn’t giving Torch River the focus it deserved while I was on vacation. So, did my feelings change?
In looking at the table of contents for the second time, I noticed that one page poems were the exception rather than the rule in this book, already a bad impression. I frequently talk about length in poetry and how in the end, if you’re able to keep the reader engaged throughout, it shouldn’t matter if the poem is haiku-length or the length of Homer’s Odyssey, but having read my fair share of poetry books, I find my mind starts to wander after the two page mark unless the poem is doing something unique and fresh.
Reading the opening line of the first poem, I found myself groaning internally: “who’s to say this life isn’t the eternal life?” it said. It gave me flashbacks to my first university poetry class where the professor discouraged abstraction and rhetorical questions. Like with the length of a poem, these shouldn’t matter if done in a new way, but asking “the big questions” in poetry is nearly a trope in itself. I had to read this opening poem several times to get the gist of it, even reading it aloud to my parents to get their opinion. It helped to read it aloud, and my mom suggested that it was because the poem’s train of thought jumped around that made it a little difficult to understand in one read through. I accept that some poems are thicker than others and need more times to digest, but I don’t think there’s a single person out there who enjoys feeling stupid because they didn’t “get it.” Perhaps this sounds lazy on my part, but I left university over a year ago and if I’m reading a poem, I’m doing it for the pleasure of it, not to study it.
The second poem, “Breath” was an improvement on the first. It puts the readers’ perspective in line with that of the speaker‘s lover, though I feel the collection finally comes into its own with “Lake Aubade” in Phillips’ description of the canoe’s movement through the water and the beautiful nature the speaker sees from their canoe, though it’s in this poem where a distracting trend throughout the collection starts. Words like “glissando” and “meniscus” really stick out from the overall diction of the poem. As a piano player, I knew what glissando was, but meniscus is a physics term. As a writer myself, I can understand the temptation to want to use the fanciest tools in the kit, but sometimes a hammer will suffice, might even be superior to a more obscure tool. Words like “palimpsest,” dactylic,” and “plumb” may pull people out of the flow of the poem even if they do know these more obscure words.
I finally warmed up to the collection with “Jackknife/1” which details the story of a young boy skipping stones, and later taking a dead frog home to dissect, later feeling guilty. This is something different and fresh and Phillips really used the words to create nostalgia for something more specific. “Reprise” and “The Hanging Tree” are also interesting in how they juxtapose images of sex against less expected images, like stormy weather and the euthanasia of a horse respectively. There are many small moments of brilliance laced throughout the collection as in here: “Aggravation,/ war, crazy eights, concentration,/ trouble, sorry” (44). While these are all board game names, one can look into the words’ other meanings.
The other critiques I have some may consider nit-picky, but nonetheless need to be said. I often found that many poems ended abruptly with ambiguous purposes and I felt the word “and” was slightly overused. The poem “Prelude” suffers the same jumpy train of thought as “Breath” does, but happens to stretch it out over 10 pages. Also, while I enjoyed the poem “Sunday,” it seems to imply that the speaker’s female lover smells of seafood. I can tell you from personal experience that getting told you smell fishy can certainly put a damper on the mood.
Torch River covers a very large range of topics from childhood memories, sex, nature, fatherhood, death of a loved one, and many others and that is definitely commendable. When Phillips focuses on a single image or story in a poem, I do find myself enjoying her work, as in “Passage.” While I found myself struggling with from time to time through reading Torch River, I don’t regret that I did.
Some Quick Stats:
Author: Elizabeth Phillips
Published: 2007, Brick Books
Pages: 119