Joe Enns Reviews:

Nicholas Bradley, Before Combustion, Gaspereau Press, 2023
Joshua Chris Bouchard, Burn Diary, Buckrider Books (Wolsak and Wynn Publishers), 2023
Yoyo Comay, States of Emergency, Véhicule Press, 2023

We’re constantly learning new phrases to describe destructive climate change events like ‘heat dome’ and ‘atmospheric river.’ High severity wildfires break new records in British Columbia each summer. This disruption of our ecosystems connects to a disorientation of language, and we look to poets to reflect this experience on their own terms. 

Before Combustion is a collection of poems by Nicholas Bradley about lost stability and change. Through these poems, Bradley describes a transfer of elements through time (‘Not the end of the world but the onset/of another’) like the entropic transfer of energy from order to disorder: ‘I reset the clocks/to preserve the day’s//design.’ If combustion brings instability (‘running shorts//that heat will/destroy, rain//jackets that/can’t withstand//chemical/overload’), then ‘metrical lines of rain’ are the antidote. But throughout, Bradley recognizes a ‘before’ and an ‘after’—marked by a changing climate, parenthood and aging. 

Within this bracket of time and pages, Bradley explores fatherhood (‘my rough parenthesis’) and domestic life, trying to pull meaning from the mundane, which is summed up well here: 

Mutatis mutandis
so it is with all of us caught between

here and there, all of us driving this
way and that, forgetful of the right

route home.

Bradley understands his life in relation to the written word (‘three hundred pages/later. Inside the cover//was my name, printed’), but also to those who came before, represented by old oak trees, and the next generation of people (‘between the last meal and the next walk./The youngest living thing I know sleeps’). 

Bradley’s collection varies in form between free verse, quatrains and tercets, but most of the poems are arranged in couplets. Why couplets? Couplets, especially with shorter lines, create the most frequent pausing, each line break a breath and each stanza break a longer breath, creating a choppy reading experience akin to hyperventilating. Bradley uses this breathy, fast pacing to create an anxious tone that matches the imagery. For example, in ‘Forest Fire Moon,’ Bradley writes: ‘our son//turns three/weeks old//and across/the gulf//in embered/mountains//dry trees turn.’ There’s a detached but twitchy feeling behind the impression of the father watching over his young son’s first forays into a burning world while separated from reality by a ‘gulf.’ The eeriness of this insidious danger is further emphasized by the ‘smoked cantaloupe’ dessert, a  metaphor for a moon shrouded in forest fire smoke.

The impacts of climate change are shown in Before Combustion, but they don’t take the form of bold headlines. Nor are they written about in scientific terms. Instead, Bradley writes of everyday domestic life lived alongside the effects of climate change: ‘Hydro/lines are poised to fall. As babies//start to bawl, basements/think dry thoughts.’ He captures the underlying anxiety that comes with a desire to act, to do one’s part, while recognizing the futility of personal discipline (here, in the form of recycling) in the fight against climate change: ‘to preserve/these articles//of faith, as if/the war against//disaster/could be won//by strictness/alone.’ Bradley’s collection speaks to the detachment caused by time (‘the whole bad trip//belonged to a different/life, not ours’) as well as the ways inheritance and observation can connect and guide us.  

Similarly, Joshua Chris Bouchard’s debut poetry collection Burn Diary is an onslaught of corporeal imagery and reflection that disorients the reader in its own way. Bouchard wrestles with the shame of being alive, recognizing the inherent violence in others dying in order for you to live: ‘When one life ends, another begins./Born in wildfires, floods and burning/seas.’ Even baby birds ‘break the hollow bones of their siblings,’ but Bouchard lays out a kinship and empathy through voice (‘They know each other by the sounds/they make when alone’).

The epigraph is an excerpt from ‘Satan Says,’ a poem by Sharon Olds, which makes a reference to fire and hands. Bouchard leans into the theme of idle hands as the devil’s workshop: ‘Lethargy, he says, is a terrible sin.’ This is best described in the following lines: ‘The moment I felt my hands in the fire of my life/was when I put them in you and taught myself to be/a hell king.’ Weaving threads of violence through hands and fire, Bouchard explores what it means to think of oneself as both a creator and destroyer: ‘If it’s not broken, break it until it is.’ Hands are linked to heritage (‘Say to me that my hands are bloodlines’) as though constantly and viciously reshaping the world (‘You think of the world/and create it in your image’).

Bouchard challenges expectations, writing poems with clashing imagery and weak line breaks. This is poetry, mostly in free verse, that resists rhythm and rhyme. Bouchard achieves a vagueness through unclear pronouns and shifting perspectives. The underlying realizations or ‘so what?’ moments of the poems are often elusive. Seemingly random word choices and vague aphorisms create a lopsided signal-to-noise ratio, making it hard to discern a particular narrative or message. With their aggressive, vivid imagery and non-sequiturs, Bouchard’s poems make a strong impression on the reader. 

For example, in ‘I Hate that Journey for You,’ Bouchard writes: 

On the lake I raised my hand to wave
and they returned, my knife felt smooth

between my legs where it was neatly placed.
I gutted the fish as the men drove away.

Travelling safe back to the dark –
the men were effortless.

There’s a palpable tension throughout the poem brought on first by the mention of a scared animal (‘A bear or wolf in broad light,/too scared to walk to the generator’), and then the speaker greets two strangers with a knife phallically tucked between his legs. The knife is a tool for violence and survival, as in the gutting of a fish, but here it is ‘neatly placed’ and ‘smooth.’ Bouchard’s writing could also be described this way: violence made smooth and neatly arranged through poetic form. The line breaks occur at the completion of thoughts, which gives a simpler resolution to the imagery as opposed to diverging meaning. This appearance of simplicity, however, is complicated by ambiguous phrases and questionable motives bounded by the frequent reflective pauses of the couplet form. Like Bouchard’s compelling use of language, the speaker’s wave is a disarming invite, yet he still holds a hidden danger. The animals in the poem (fish, bear or wolf) are in the act of being preyed upon, yet the speaker is calm and the men are ‘effortless’ and safe in the dark. Throughout the book, Bouchard explores what it means to inherit destructive and violent legacies. 

Another debut book of poetry, Yoyo Comay’s States of Emergency offers a relentless flow of generalities that is strong in voice and sound (‘the world is rerendered/rear-ended’) but also provides less of a coherent train of thought: ‘I speak languish.’ One long poem split into six parts, States of Emergency reads like an extended counterculture rant revolving around wordplay and self-reflection: ‘I interact with packaging,/and this all can feel like an endless/unboxing.’ Instead of absorbing the imagery of the words, I pictured the poet reading these poems expressively to a room full of finger snaps.

Comay confidently takes inner contemplation to a new level, writing, ‘I wash ashore/into awareness.’ This is evident in the decisions made throughout the book, from the page-size brooding rock star photo of Comay in the front matter to the centre-justified lines; the form of expression matches the voice and content of the poems. While Bouchard’s and Bradley’s poems respond to an outer landscape, Comay’s map out an inner landscape. This resistance to realist imagery and narrative creates a disorientation appropriate for Comay’s ‘pelagic density/of the everyday,/this tide of things/rocking against the skull’s/astonished coves.’

As I read this book, my partner looked at my screen and asked why I was reading a menu. I glanced at the page and noticed words like ribs, fishes, flesh and shimmering silver; with the centre-justified text and short stanzas, it did resemble a menu. Comay repeatedly refers to the speaker as a ‘detritivore,’ like a filter-feeder rearranging phrases for a new meaning: ‘I, detritivore.//washed ashore, a common wreck/to find in nature/but a vessel for our moods.’ If a menu is an apt analogy, States of Emergency lays out orders of life’s debris (‘starved, those shining lures/draw us in’) along interstitial spaces to ‘expand the blank between frames,//the blinks,’ an accumulation of emotions arranged artfully through word association.

—Joe Enns