Ken Babstock, until recently poetry editor at House of Anansi, was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize for his last collection, 2007’s Airstream Land Yacht. Early press indicates that Methodist Hatchet is likely to receive similar attention. One reviewer has already declared Babstock “the best Canadian poet of his generation.” It will take decades to assess whether such declarations hold water, but in the meantime they suggest that Methodist Hatchet will be a bellwether for contemporary Canadian poetry.

According to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, a bad dancer is said to have “Methodist feet” and a “two-edged (two-faced) axe” is called a Methodist hatchet. Apparently Methodists aren’t altogether popular on The Rock. But when Babstock (who was born in Newfoundland, but moved away while still an infant) chose the phrase as the title for his fourth and latest collection of poems, it was not to declare any religious or even regional allegiance, but rather to embrace duplicity as a poetic ideal. Babstock’s poems cut both ways by design. They vacillate between meanings, two-faced perhaps, but each face equally sharp and controlled.

At first blush the book’s title also evokes the directness of the axe, the most straightforward of tools. In Babstock’s case, though, Methodist Hatchet indicates something quite different: he’d rather go far afield in search of a strange word than pick up a simpler and more obvious choice nearer by. He prefers the difficult word to the easy, the colloquial to the common.

Sometimes this can create the feeling that he’s reaching, as in “Ledger,” where the indulgent self-involvement of youth is described as “The sour cotton-batting-and-vinyl / / trauma of irreducible young man’s narcissism. / Such drama.” Such drama indeed. Instances such as this make one wonder whether more clarity might get better mileage. Usually, though, Babstock is able to deliver his baroque flourishes with enough fluidity to seduce the reader into finding them, while not exactly conversational, natural in their own cerebral way.

If the book is united thematically, it is by Babstock’s conception of what a poem should be. The poet seems more interested in how a poem moves than where it’s going, favouring journey over destination. A few poems explore Canadian places, vaguely political themes, or philosophy, and one is dedicated to the late writer David Foster Wallace, but Babstock mostly uses these topics as pommel horses on which to perform his verbal gymnastics. The poem exists for itself, not to deliver a message, and the aural alchemy that occurs when words are combined takes precedence over meaning. The collection is almost a barrage of language, poems sometimes so thick with sound it’s difficult for the reader to find a way in.

In the title poem, the speaker, listing other Methodist epithets, describes the act of hewing with a two-faced axe. The dense description creates a surface so smooth, it’s easy to slip out of comprehension:

These poems don’t invite entrance so much as negotiate their own slow surrender. The less one tries to extract from them, the more they tend to give.

As with much contemporary poetry, the pleasure of these poems is intertwined with their difficulty. Challenging poems draw attention to the linguistic climate that surrounds us, where brand names are verbs and LOL has been added to the dictionary. They invite us to listen more closely, to bring the discernment of reading poems into our habits of reading the world. The rewards, however, are often more intellectual than sensual. One might say it’s a double-edged sword. If this is the direction that “the best” Canadian poetry is headed, one wonders how much of a readership will follow, potential pleasures notwithstanding.

Abby Paige is a poet and playwright.