Methodist Hatchet: Poemsby Ken Babstock
House of Anansi Press (2011)
Like the athlete who improves with better competition, poets in our time have consequently become very, very skilled. The quality of poetry in Canada has never been better than it is today; tomorrow, it will be better still. Since his debut in 1999, Ken Babstock (small-town Newfoundland by way of small-town Ontario) has ranked among the very best poets of this exceptional time. Time called his first book “one of the best things to happen to poetry in Canada”; the Globe and Mail said his last book was “perhaps the most important poetry book yet from any Canadian born in the 1970s or beyond.” With his new book, it’s time to forgo the qualifiers and just call him what he is: the best Canadian poet of his generation.
Methodist Hatchet reads like a dropped glove to poets here and everywhere: catch me if you can. Babstock doesn’t so much write words as spar with them, challenging the language to forty-three rounds between sound and sense. He’s a master of the clanging consonant, the jagged rhythm, the line break that knocks you off the path, and the quiet rhyme that brings you back. Content-wise, some of the book’s affections are familiar Babstock turf: wild animals and indie music, loneliness and death, remembering Avalon, dealing with Toronto. It’s a less philosophical book than Airstream Land Yacht, meaner than Mean, more satirical. You don’t have to watch Property Virgins to catch the sting of “Corian slab in the calibrated / cubism of the kitchen.” Props, too, for surely the briefest critique of the reborn Royal Ontario Museum to date: “Shiny, shiny Libeskind.”
Naturally, inevitably, Methodist Hatchet is full of conversations with other poets. Some are named, like John Clare and Dan Bejar, Dante and Morrissey, John Ashbery, Ovid, Peter Gizzi. Others are private, professional conversations, some of which I can hear, like those with British poet Simon Armitage and Canadian label mate Karen Solie, others, I’m sure I can’t. But the conversation I miss is the conversation with me, the reader who doesn’t write, poetry’s public, such as we are. Several poems in this book speak with a clarity that matches their skill, notably the tremendously powerful “Caledonia.” But most are built from enigmatic fragments that achieve at best what one poem calls a “brief coherence,” what another simply admits to mentioning “in the spirit / of ‘shit that occurs to me.’” The result, for me, is the unshakeable sense that instead of listening, I’m listening in, eavesdropping on a conversation of which the reader is no longer a part.
The Globe titled its review of Babstock’s last book “A Canadian Auden for the Under-40s?” I’m not sure the comparison works, but this much I know: what we remember of Auden isn’t the shit that occurred to him; it’s the shit he turned into diamonds for the rest of us, poetry’s public, such as we are.
