Ben’s Place: Between the Lakes or “Why Not Give In and Call It Lovely?”
As Is. Ben Robinson. ARP Books, 2024.
“Would you like to spend the day with me? I can show you around.” Ooooooooo, an adventure! My favourite kind of day. Let me grab my sunglasses!
All this time I thought Ben Robinson’s first full-length The Book of Benjamin (Palimpsest Press, 2023) was/is a poetry collection. I suppose it falls under that new highfalutin’ all the rage genre “the hybrid” — text poems with intermittent photos, prose, striking in effect as well as on the page — another demonstration of what poetry can do. Bend.
I mention this, because his newest, As Is, is being touted here as his debut poetry collection. Like its earlier companion piece, there’s a story/stories to be told of persons, and place, commonly referred to as histories. And while there are facts galore, I wouldn’t call this as in any way resembling a history “lesson” — Robinson wisely doesn’t go over that cliff. It’s in his tellings, the discoveries of which propel our curiosities to hop in the passenger seat as reader.
And like Benjamin there’s sections uniquely formatted — four line “grids” that at times resemble point by point directives on Google Maps:
I turn south to the bluffs — back up to the bridges —
east over the tributaries — ploughed field on one side
— marsh of the national wildlife area on the other —
gauntlet of starlings line the shoulders — I fill the tank
God, I love the pedantic ordinariness of this poem. How Robinson brings us into the frame, taking notice of what it is exactly one sees in the present moment, absent of what the fuck kind of day they’re having — or maybe this is exactly the day they’re having. Out filling the tank.
I remember when days used to be about getting simple tasks done. You?
Can life really be ordinary?
But nothing about these four lines are ordinary — the bluffs, the bridges, the tributaries, a ploughed field, the marsh — all Robinson’s familiar: where he lives, works, has a home, wife and family.
Is there anything more significant than place? Surroundings? Home.
That, and good signage:
The potholes are circled in fluorescent paint.
It’s one person’s job to circle
and another’s to fill. What could be
more like this city than highlighting its flaws
in bright orange.
“Tiger Town.” The City of Hamilton, we come to find, was inaugurated in 1846, thirty years after the arrival of its “Founder” George Hamilton (once a “Police Village” of “The Hammer” was established, 1833).
Words of the day: inaugurated, founder, arrival, established. Who decides? And how exactly do these designations, these settler terms, come about?
These are the queries that Robinson’s poems prompt, excavate or, perhaps a better word might be to elucidate — make clear, bring light to — including room for the wonderments and questions that arise in the reader. He does so with an uncanny sense of discovery aplomb with humour poking fun at the incredulous incongruities that simply makes one scratch, as in the poem “Founder’s Day”:
It’s not a metaphor
that the city’s original square
sketched by Mr. George Hamilton
was centred around a prison
that though the jail’s walls were sound
its foundation was so compromised
an inmate need only lift the loose board
in the corner to make his exit
that once free, if he followed the main road south
it would have led straight to the founder’s door.
How utterly convenient! A direct path to the culprit himself! (George Hamilton?! I can’t help but conjure that smarmy American actor, perpetually suntanned regular on The Love Boat, easily mistaken for John Stamos’ dad in another life.)
And, so astute in that final couplet, “that once free,” as those who were once. As though we ever were.
I’m always deeply moved by ancestors whose oral histories recall what it was to be free (thinking specifically of Taiaiake Alfred’s Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors and Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Oxford University Press). A place before . . . now gone.
It’s in Robinson’s keen observances that make this illustrated road map a reader’s delight. Like Didion’s Where I Was From and Terrence Davies’ Of Time & the City, I’m drawn to such curiosities about place — how things are named (“Beaverdams Rd — Beaver Valley Way — Beaverton Blvd. — Beaverglen Dr.”), the markers, paths, trails, rivers, parks, the appearance and disappearances, businesses dying off, the “curation” of things.
Here, in 1814, a sidewalk plaque announces,
eight men were sentenced to hang
for treason against a country
that did not yet exist.
A plaque suggests a marker, marking an occasion, date — the writer so and so lived here — something someone deemed “notable.” How peculiar what is chosen throughout histories as historical. Most often having to do with tragedies or battles. Winners, the lost. The monied.
I always appreciate when a poet delicately forges a path they’ve set out for themselves: for Robinson, to consider what it is to be a “settler,” in the town they’ve lived in from birth. Their hometown of Hamilton. Now, also the hometown of his child in “James”:
All that fixes you to the world today
is a government-issued sheet of paper
where I print your name with a blue ballpoint pen
A name that only becomes real as I hear it
in the voices of others — as though by consensus
we might bring you into being.
In a word: brilliant.
— Kirby’s works includes She, Poetry Is Queer, and This Is Where I Get Off. Fairy comes out Spring 2027 from Palimpsest Press. kirbyfairy.ca.
Read this review and many others in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025). Order the issue now:
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