AS EARLY AS 1807, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH LAMENTED, “The world is too much with us.” Now it is always with us, in its richness and calamity; we can’t get away from it; frequently overwhelmed by sheer superabundance, we can feel paradoxically diminished, cut loose, cut off.  

Katia Grubisic, in her debut collection, What if red ran out, delights in the paradox, flotsam and jetsam of the world.

It began with an elegy for a goldfish and the list went on
to include the practice
of entomological Buddhism; also
do a bit of laundry.

Her writing is a dense, eloquent, musical mishmash; sensual, lively, steel-trap intelligent and cold. The risk, at times, is incomprehensibility, but brilliant metaphors leap out of the ruck.

… there, and there

are the thunderstorms you seek,
one after another, all close calls with lightning bolts
and crashing, tequila-drunk skies.

While her writing is well grounded in fresh imagery and evocations of place, the effect can be oddly cerebral. The emotional disconnect is indirectly confessed in poems employing an indeterminate “we”:

We say the words instead of love, keep ourselves revocable,
when we are standing stone-still, blithely confessing our dreams
to the sleeping beasts around us in the night zoo.

The most successful poems have crystal-clear narrative focus:  On the Eve of Return To Hamelin, a gorgeous evocation of the Pied Piper legend; Basin No. 3, a profound penetration into our grisly industrial heartland; two fun poems, Song for my Old Lead Pipes and Ladder to the Middle, and the ferocious Love Song for the End of the World.  Needless to say, a very strong debut.

In Noble Gas, Penny Black, his third collection, David O’Meara cuts through the clutter in a series of concise, gravely singular poems. Many of these pack undeniable emotional punch. The opening poem is a brief meditation on the anxieties and inadequacies of mid-life. In full:

The Next Day

You turned forty all afternoon,
and with every hour’s drink you poured,
you aged. The thought was fuel; your mind roared
like a fire, like a starved sun

eating its core, making a feast of
the fears that remained. But the next day arrived,
and you were safe, and sane; not in the least
surprised you’d lived.

This poem contains hallmarks of O’Meara’s verse: irregular lengths and anticipatory line breaks associated with free verse, coupled with an easy mastery of form — the slant rhymed abba cdcd, with the justly placed internal rhymes, “remained” and “sane”.

Containing not a word of filler, most of this slender collection concerns an ill-fated relationship. The fractured narrative of this unhappy romance takes us on a tour through the faraway climes of a wasted world – the Caribbean, Europe, Central and East Asia – yet always within the limits of poverty, poor jobs, inadequate means:

How fast a month goes when you can’t make rent,
how mean the restaurants look, how hard
everything seems, remembering fun
but too stretched to share it.
I’ll wait, and wait, and walk with you endlessly.
Let’s ditch this city, these jobs, all the bother
of having things, and keep only each other.

Brian Campbell’s second collection, Field of Gems (prose poems) will be coming out with Signature Editions in the spring.