THE ABCs

Arrive! Assimilate!

Bountiful: billowing

fields and batches of

aromatic blues beneath

the can-do of a crow’s

careening caw.

Dead, done – well-delved, a debt

counted on the knuckles

of one drastic hand.

Endless, and then some.

Florid, all huff and

fluster,

greed machine squeezing

God until he gives.

Homing in

on the inkling

of an ideal.

Joy

to the point of justice,

keenness without

the knowledge pronounced.

Love with its loads

of lark-like lustre.

Mega! More!

Nothing less will do,

O room of open doors.

Pillory, pineapple,

pinwheel –

the quantity

queue, the quality

raving, almost religious.

Sex like the spoon

standing in a sugar bowl.

Total truth

uncanny,

the viscera

of when, what, who.

X marks the lot.

Yearn and yearn and yearn.

Zero multiplied.

  

BARRY DEMPSTER, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award, is the author of fourteen poetry collections. His collection The Burning Alphabet won the Canadian Authors’ Association Chalmers Award for Poetry in 2005. In 2010 and again in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ontario Premiers Award for Excellence in the Arts, and in 2014 he was nominated for the Trillium Award for his novel The Outside World. He lives in Holland Landing, Ontario.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster’s fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck—the “three-leaf clovers” so much more plentiful than the four. Dempster’s wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to life’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece’s order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book’s final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-too-human condition.

Shifting effortlessly from light-hearted ode to solemn elegy, Dempster offers no touch-up jobs; instead we find a love of the flaw, a generosity toward it even as he exposes it. This is a poetry of inclusiveness, engaging both our better and worse angels, baring its Achilles’ heel and trusting us to do likewise.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Poems from this collection have been published in the following journals: Canadian Poetries (“The ABCs,” “Toy Box,” “The Word of God,” and “The Explained World”); Eighteen Bridges (“White Peony, 1927 – Georgia O’Keeffe” and “Our Lives and Nothing Less”); The Fiddlehead (“Portrait of Aphrodite” and “Rundle Lounge”); The Malahat Review (“As Close as Distance”); Prairie Fire, as 3rd place winner in the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award Contest (“Ten Thousand Repetitions”); The Winnipeg Review (“Spider” and “Be Drunk”).

The “Disturbing the Buddha” section was published as a chapbook by The Alfred Gustav Press, Series Six, 2011. The first line of each of these poems comes from the book The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, edited by Stephen Mitchell (HarperPerennial, 1989). The inspiration first arrived from Julie Oakes’ installation Buddha Composed at the Varley Gallery in Markham, Ontario in 2008.

Even if I repeated my gratitude ten thousand times, it still wouldn’t be enough to show my appreciation for the support of Brick Books and all its wonders. Sue Sinclair was a dream editor, contributing to both the intricacies and the vision behind these poems with tenderness and precision. Once again, Alayna Munce turned copy-editing into an art. And Kitty Lewis tended to everything else with great warmth and joy.

Much appreciation to Karen Dempster, my partner in poems and all things real. And to my writing groups who are invaluable in how well they always listen to what it is I mean to say.

AMY WINEHOUSE

She winks her way

through the rehab song,

pleasure blips like red poppies

crushed in the creases of her brain.

The cognitive is every bit

as much a mystery as the soulful

way she stands here whacked and wary,

fidgety fingers ravelling knots,

her voice the crack within a crack.

Like Billie when her cheeks

were going grey, a wilted

gardenia of an eyelid.

She sings about being stoned,

groped and dropped, overhanded

by love in all its surliness.

As if a soft-shelled egg is tucked

beneath her chin. Is this what’s meant

by broken?

What does she think she is: the spray

at the tip of a needle?

AS THEY POUR THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR

As they pour the thirteenth floor,

the crane swings back and forth

with its cauldron of cement.

Shelter has become big business.

We keep our eyes on the ground

to keep from tripping over

foundations that weren’t there

a glance ago. What it must have

been like to witness the first

construction: a hairy mammoth

skin stretched across two hammered poles.

For the creationists:

the moment Adam

raised his arms against the rain.

Most passersby

don’t realize a crane

is flying above their heads

like a mythical bird

building its equally

mythical nest. If only

we’d been wide awake when

we made our sons and daughters,

when it was our flesh reeling

across the horizon.

What a glorious sight

that must have been:

poured honey,

hip bone nestled into pelvis.