A Diaspora Re-imagined
Aqueous, Nathanael Jones. The Porcupine’s Quill, 2024.
First books of poetry are hard: not necessarily difficult to write but challenging to craft in a manner that will make them stand out from the crowd. It’s almost inevitable that such books will tackle family, ancestry, maybe young love — all themes that preoccupy poets when they’re building their skills as writers. So when a new poet handles these themes in a distinctive manner, one can’t help but sit up and take notice. Nathanael Jones is just such a writer. His debut, Aqueous, takes risks that demonstrate a mature vision of how poetry can serve a topic and renew it for the reader.
Aqueous consists of three sections, each of which reads like an extended prose poem broken into individual poems that build on an extended metaphor. The first section, “A Botched Science,” handles this particularly successfully. The first page of the first poem, “Installation,” sets the tone for the section:
A landlocked country, as in, wolverine country, as in,
mirroring the motherland’s dusky interior; as in, mon
pays ce n’est pas un pays, ethnic and cultural hybridity,
remembrance, forgetting — not a nation state with a
coastline but a cataract, an inability to see beyond the
horizon of trauma’s incision. A conceptual dilemma.
Note to self: construct a device to simulate the socio-
cultural equivalent of an ear stone.
Jones starts by giving a slippery definition of a country, riffing on the Gilles Vigneault song about Quebec as a nation being less solid ground than what is felt — its heart of winter. Each sub-clause, each “as in,” gets us both closer to and further from solid ground. The em-dash then breaks from land, into this cataract that is “trauma’s incision.” After that, the last two lines suggest that we are entering into a scientific exploration of a phenomenon, and the intriguing concept of the ear stone as the key metaphor. Ear stones play a role in balance and aid in spatial awareness. Jones writes: “the stones resonate / at a frequency capable of tricking the human brain / into believing its body is in perpetual motion.” And a few lines later:
What if the Middle Passage, rather than concluding on
the shores of the New World, simply went on forever?
A foghorn in place of a buoy, a buoy in place of a land.
And thus, Jones introduces us to the broader theme of being part of the black diaspora today. His “what if” stands as a question, but it is impossible to know whether he is positing a fictitious lack of arrival or a sense that there has never been a true arrival. Across “A Botched Science” the latter sense seems to predominate — this diaspora lives in the interstices between departure and arrival endlessly.
“Silica 2” provides a sense of that place/no-place:
Limbs of ashes and oaks line the bottom of an arroyo.
How the dead persist amongst the patterns of the
living. A country in miniature caught between rocks,
trauma minting interstitial ecologies. Boundary fog:
where centre and periphery modulate. Here the body
politic is indistinguishable from silt, is anomaly,
antigen, a strip of beachfront shrinking and swelling.
What cannot be both measured and demarcated has no
right to land. We are that push and pull of years
collapsed in lumens, tide’s aggregate. A rolling across
the uneven flooring of a shoreface.
Jones accomplishes much poetically here. The limbs of trees stand in for the limbs of bodies, the ghosts of forebears informing every “pattern of living” of their ancestors. The shoreline scene serves as a “country in miniature.” And while Jones’s tone can sometimes sound clinical at first reading, the depth of his musical engagement in language comes to the fore here, with the internal rhymes of “oaks” and “arroyo”; the thinness of a body imagined by the use of “i” in “the body / politic is indistinguishable from silt, is anomaly, / antigen”; and the rhyme of “boundary,” “body,” and “anomaly,” building on the idea of a not-quite-rooted existence. Lastly, the statement that hammers home that landlessness is emphasized by its iambic conclusion in “has no right to land.” We are left with a beautiful image of these years “collapsed in lumens,” the idea of the tide’s aggregate being nothing less than light, a kind of beacon the ear stone might resonate with.
If I were asked to compare Jones to a novelist, André Alexis comes to mind, whose fantastical literature builds on what feels like very purposeful internal logic. Because of this, when there were moments where I felt lost on a page, trust had already been established such that I knew Jones would deliver me, eventually, to a shore of his choosing. With such a distinctive voice already, I look forward to where Jones takes his work in future.
— Robert Colman is a poet, essayist and critic based in Newmarket, ON. His most recent book of poems is Ghost Work (Palimpsest Press, 2024).
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