Category: Stop! Look! Listen!

Ask me about my favourite record and I’ll tell you it’s The Nightfly

I have to be careful as a reader of poetry to allow enough room for the diversity of voices and approaches. For instance, very early on I was struck, convinced, intoxicated with Jack Gilbert's work.

During the second summer of the pandemic, I made my way from my apartment in Vancouver to my parents’ home in Saint John for an extended visit. I was thirty-six and burnt out: a high-intensity job, months of social isolation, the loss of a grandmother, and a year and a half on the other side of the country from family had taken their toll. 

Ripples in air, soft and immense. Bells curl round a hillside to be cradled in an ear. Small animals worry their paws. A dazzle of piano, a glittery sheet of salt water. A cart lopes along a country road. Ghosts play ping-pong. Cascades from outer space. Some strange vessel encircles us in a scalded wood.

I took Cormac McCarthy camping with me: five nights together on Lake Superior’s rugged north shore. That is, I took McCarthy’s The Road with me.

Sure enough, contemporary philosophies of posthumanism and ecophenomenology, challenging human-centered frameworks and exploring the embodied reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world, circulate—if at all— in the back eddies of popular consciousness.