ADAM CLAY. Canoe. horse less press. 2006. $5

reviewed by JOHN MULLIGAN

A book of poems for our time? Absolutely. Yet how obtuse a notion you might think for me to say “our times”. There is no encompassing time we are able to call our own. Even if there was, what would it matter? That is a different business we would have a hard time forming a relation of knowing to. How is this book of poems for our times? Integral to a condition one could label as modern, even postmodern, a subject is always in conflict with itself or an idea or another subject. These poems are messages from a lost country, letters from a severed hand. One hears the struggle in these poems like two wrestlers performing in the games. But there is calm when the struggle is over and the reader has experienced something new. I experienced the realization that I relate well to electrons and machines. But how do I see the natural world if only as a means of subjugating ways of being in the world, other subjects in time and space. Canoe by Adam Clay is two parts human and one part radio.

What can one say about poems that sever the binary of the simplistic and the industrial? This is the essential struggle of each poem. As if the first thinking animal could desire all that it could need. A mind. A river. Perhaps we are antennae. Perhaps animals, telephone poles, and ears are antennae. Perhaps a river is an antenna. Supposing a canoe to be its messenger. Or ghost.

a map made by

rivers. a map too

old to say something

new.

Clay forms a map out of water and prose. He bids us drink. Water is simple. Water is rhythmic. Water is necessary. There are spaces. These spaces are sacred. Aware of their limitations, these poems move forward, swiftly, into obscure waters then use fins to return. The only things we see are swirls in the shapes of fish beneath the surface. We need something else to decode the shapes. This awareness of limitation (think of a river’s banks) illuminates the confidence of these poems. But they are always moving.

Clay is right. The map is too old to say something new. We grow tired of the artificial, yet are seduced by the promise of electricity, neon, photos, trains…

One thing is certain in all this, this

bone’s terrible perspective.

Subjectivity and the world have to mean. There is no more mythology. No more story. These poems are a reckoning. Have your science. Your specialization. Leave me the river.

Canoe is anachronistic. But what are our times? And where in the world are these poems coming from? Where did

One man’s chemical

afternoon is another man’s

platinum attitude. or trash.

come from?