Local Calls

In their brevity, the poems in Sean Howard’s first collection of poetry Local Calls recall haiku. They also share with haiku an acute attentiveness to place and time. This is a poetry of sea and sand, tides and seasons. Like haiku, Howard’s best poems invoke the mysteriousness of the natural world, as in “ stills (tide triptych, port george),” in which rockweed is described as:

            tomb-
stone, the dead
rising,      shell

& fishes in
       their          

hair

(40)

This isn’t bucolic nature poetry. Unsettling evidence of the human figure in the landscape and our complicated, uneasy relationship with nature can be found in ATV tracks, decapitated seals washed up on shore, clear-cuts and food bank trucks. Howard uses line breaks to striking effect. In the sequence “tide line diary,” the traditional horizontal orientation of the haiku is re-imagined in a starkly vertical form:

12^th, 2008

pede-
stal,
ra-
ven
perch-
ing,
whale
vert-
ebr-
a

(25)

Howard’s radical line breaks are deconstructive. They create sudden shifts and pivots that defeat the reader’s expectations and invite the multiplicity of meanings contained in the simplest of words. As Peter Sanger remarks in the book’s foreword, “As we reconstitute and restore words across line-breaks, we recover original acts of physical, kinetic, metaphorical and poetic understanding hidden by the customary traffic of habitual usage (9).”

The poem “prose poem (transcanada, near stellarton),” which is not actually a prose poem at all, is alert to the disparity between prose and poetry, between language’s day job as a tool of commerce and the transcendence of nature. The poem’s title is not merely a signpost to situate the reader, but becomes a metaphor for the prosaic “long/    lines, lum-/ber trucks, hori/zon cut &/stack-/ed”.

The poems in Local Calls demand the reader’s full engagement as an active participant in the process of parsing and reparsing the text. These short poems reward rereading and reading aloud. Local Calls is an impressive debut. —Steve McOrmond