NEWS AND WEATHER

Seven Canadian Poets

Robert Bringhurst
Margaret Avison
Brent MacKay
A.F. Moritz
Terry Humby
Guy Birchard
Alexander Hutchison

Edited by August Kleinzahler

Brick Books
Coldstream

© The Authors, 1982
 ISBN 0-919626-17-3
 Brick Books, Box 219, IIderton, Ont. NOM 2A0

Brick Books
www.brickbooks.ca
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada

CONTENTS

FORWARD

Here are 7 poets I read and listen to with delight. And envy.

Louis Zukofsky said that the test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound and intellection. I'm not at all sure who could append a nickel's worth to that, though I am certain volunteers are legion.

None of these poets is easy. Don't take this book to lunch with you unless it's a very long lunch in a quiet place. Trust that the poet is not bamboozling you, confounding you for no reason, mixing his syntax or strutting his erudition to make you feel the chump. I can tell you that each of these poets writes in dead earnest, and would rather have no reader at all than a smug, lazy one.

A small anthology wants a very small introduction. May these seven each win the Irish Sweepstakes, prosper and sing. And you, faithful reader, have a ball.

August Kleinzahler

Now winter nights enlarge
    The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
    Upon the airy towers

Let now the chimneys blaze
    And cups o'erflow with wine;
Let well-tuned words amaze
    With harmony divine

Thomas Campion,
Third Booke of Ayres

Death By Water

It was not his face nor any
other face Narcissus saw
in the water. It was the absence there
of faces. It was the deep clear
of the blue pool he kept on
coming back to and that kept on coming
back to him as he went to it, shipping
out over it October after October
and every afternoon,
walking out of the land-locked summer,
out of the arms of his voice,
walking out of his words.

It was his eye, you may say,
that he saw there, or
the resonance of its colour.
Better to say it was what he listened for—
the light along the water, not
the racket along the stones.

Li Po too. As we do. And for the love of hearing
our voices and for the fear of hearing
our voices and those of the others come back
from the earth, we refuse to listen but look
down the long blue pools of air that come toward us and say
they make no sound, they
have no faces, see they have each other's eyes.

Ararat

The deepening scour of the keel across this
granular water.      Nothing more.       The fissure
through the estuary five thousand feet over the headwater.
These
          are the real mouths of rivers. The teeth,
not the slough and the rattles.

                                                 We have been here
before, eating raw air, but have always
forgotten,

all day eating the air the light
impales,
               stalking the singular animal.

      I no longer remember whether a fish
or a bird.    Nor whether its song or its silence is
what we were listening for.
                                              I remember
a bow in a black tree, and a snowbound
ploughshare.
                       Here is no spoor and no flotsam
timber.    Simply the blue sliding into
the furrow on the tilting light, and the violet
sky always casting the same white shadow.

Song Of The Summit

The difference is nothing you can see—only
the dressed edge of the air
over those stones, and the air goes

deeper into the lung, like a long fang,
clean as magnesium.    Breathing
always hollows out a basin,

leaving nothing in the blood
except an empty
cup, usable for drinking

anything the mind finds—bitter
light or bright darkness or the cold
corner of immeasurable distance.