Earlier this year I’d come across Craig Poile’s poem, “The Blanket,” in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and liked it enough to mention it in my Rover review: “a love poem, with humour — “[b]ought from (and possibly made of) Canadian Tire[.]” This same strong poem serves as a fit finale to Poile’s recent collection, True Concessions.

The book is divided into four unnamed parts that could be roughly labelled Introductory, Neighbourhood, Family, and Relationship. A poem to examine closely in the first section is “Coming Out.” The title serves as a counterpoint to a description of a crossroads in the persona’s life:

People headed for weddings, funerals,

maybe, like me, mulling over what they’ll say.

The ring I’ve never guarded, nor al-

together lost, slips off like workaday.

The quatrain is typical of Poile’s careful organization of phrasings, though the subtle consonance of his end-rhymes is usually less obvious than the line-broken “al-/together[.]” The poem’s final two lines would refer to the “shudder and hiss” of wheels coming out prior to landing, yet somehow, what we read into them is biographical — a personal “coming out” that affects others: “the pre-emptive hush as we cool our heels./ It had to end this way, to come to this.” This poem represents the strength of voice achieved by expressing inner tensions through apt details from the quotidian.

“Early Reports” from part 2 concerns a neighbourhood fire. The persona wonders if his “ambulance chasing” is “the failed journalist in me” or “the poet” “eager to report a nuance[.]” Poile’s collection is replete with the nuances of daily life, quietly articulated. “Place Royale” has “We” arriving at the park “too late./ Everyone had gone, turned tail in the dark/ And left us morning like a licked-clean plate.” The hammering full rhyme of “plate” with “late” is softened by the implicit pleasure in its multi-sensory qualifier “licked-clean.” There is nothing left, but what was here was delicious.

The poems in part 3 focus primarily on children, opening with “Evolution” which remembers the persona’s parents–”Father smoked like an autumnal fire,/ almost quenched with beer/ or work-exhausted.” “The Balloon” is a “Giant Floating Fish/ Of Great Happiness” that delights not only a daughter, but “the smiling, upward-pointing people/ Who cheered the puffed-out torso, tail, and fin[.]” This (as many others in the collection) is a poem that invites re-readings.

Poile’s remarkable use of counterpoint appears again in “Chaperone,” in which the poet intersperses “adoption’s pained mechanics” into a description of five children at play on Thanksgiving — a family occasion, the children kin, though “my daughters/ not related in the legal sense[.]” The poem addresses the reader directly: “Here’s a bench. / We can sit and watch while I explain.”

The poems in the final section tend primarily to the domesticity of a long-term relationship, easily represented by “Twice That Day”: “Sundays are for slow cooking and sex” which ends with its “Second time, perfume, sweet cilantro.”

Although quatrains with ABAB consonance are Poile’s predominant form in this collection, there are two notable exceptions in the sonnet “Apogee with Coffee” and the terza rima of “Hearing Pan” which explores the relationship between Fred Astaire and his frequent collaborator in choreography, Hermes Pan. Poile’s lines have the poem flowing as smoothly as dance–”Like wings that lighten the feet, it happens [.]” True Concessions is a collection of nuanced poems with light feet.

Maxianne Berger was recently featured at Poetry Quebec. She is the author of Dismantled Secrets (Wolsak and Wynn, 2008).