Poetry Is Blood by Keith Garebian

Guernica Editions, Spring 2018

102 pages

Trade Paperback

ISBN13: 9781771832793

ISBN10: 1771832797

English

$20.00 Canada, $20.00 US

Review by David Bateman

To discover a people that no one told you about

is to be troubled by their differences

Poetry Is Blood

Keith Garebian’s latest collection of poetry speaks of “differences” with a passion for words that simultaneously touch the heart and excavate history in a troubling and cathartic manner. Gorgeous images mingle with at times subtle, at times gut-wrenching moments of remembered terror. In A Pilgrimage a sense of contemporary tourist culture becomes an image of sunrise and adjacent colour -

I feel these hearts

in a hard country blooming with royal skulls,

sad cavities where old songs fester

close to the barb wire border.

Ararat in the background

stands in chains.

History towers above mineral springs

bubbling in turquoise sunrise

over pink flamingoes and pelicans.

As the moon hatches pale light…

Flesh has become grass, hearts

fused to mountain.

A poem only pages away speaks with closer attention to the horror of detail, yet retaining the beautiful images that collude to make the terror both poetic and shocking within a breathtaking landscape.

Somewhere my body goes taut when

All history is burned out, down to

A slow, tortuous migration to the vanishing point on the

horizon line appears to be

Where a dense and baleful wind blows

There are blank sockets in place of eyes which once

Skeletons from another

Place and century, split and carved…

Within us all,disasters are numb as

The baring of the stones…

the wolf’s belly, the sheep’s meekness

They climbing over the dead…

Finishing Sentences

Finishing Sentences acts, perhaps, as a silent metaphor for the opening presence of a paternal conflict that is elegantly woven throughout the collection. It seems. upon a full reading, that the writer’s father, Adam (named in a closing note) held a steadfast grip upon a kind of “wolf/sheep” divided fortitude that simultaneously held a family together with love that was often inarticulate or without full emotional scope.

If I could touch his lips with words,

my fingertips would turn to gold from Horus.

He was a father and he was not,

in a time that was

and a time that wasn’t

Old Griefs

There is the soulful connecting tissue that asserts the presence and lack thereof of an iconic family figure who could never quite live up to the essential physical and emotional requirements of familial iconicity in conflicted yet formative times:

A child’s toy car. At the beach,my father’s strong arms not

quite grasping me in the surf.

My Father and I Rarely Touched

This repetition of theme and mournful beauty finds further expression in a sheep/wolf play of word and image arising in Sheep In Sun and Wolves - and gracefully reprising in Finishing Sentences -

Bleats and blares

Far fields

glimmer to sheep eyes…

A sadness like sunset

falls on me

after the clanging bells.

Wanderer, a stranger

in any land.

Sheep In Sun

- and then the gruesome task of surviving within a vicious milieu -

They live as always

dragging meat -

long leashes of hunger

dripping blood…

The great emptiness

baying, gleaming in darkness.

Their brains never learn

why they live like this.

Wolves

At the heart of Garebian’s narrative is a devotion to remembering - through metaphor and image mixed with detailed family reminiscence - the grave crimes and lifelong emotional aftermath of the Armenian genocide - and yet the opening lines pave the way for an interrogation of all massacres. April welcomes us into a collection that is at once citational and original as a passionate voice mixes the cruelty of T.S. Eliot’s infamous month and moves it into a specific time and place, creating metaphors that simultaneously remind, urge and re-mix the memory of past and present murderous inhumanity into a single vein of intense blood poetry:

A month bequeathing poppies,

compact red explosions.

Insomniacs found bones

in meadows of ordinary light.

April

A kind of spring-like, imagistic opening moment of poetry moves rapidly into the lifelines that memory, homage ,and graphic representation can construct once skilfully brought together by a remarkable poet. From winters of ravaged discontent and bloody destruction come iconic seasonal affirmations and catharsis that must occur over and over again in order to draw our attention to the repetitions of the past we may try to overcome - as they do so skilfully in Keith Garebian’s work Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems; Frida: Paint Me as A Volcano; Children of Ararat; Poetry Is Blood)

Poetry Is Blood carries on Garebian’s tradition of humanity seeking disquieting refuge in memory loss and recuperation. From the opening and re-birth of April to the commanding open-ended closure of Fetish of Last Lines, this beautiful and moving collection restores one’s faith in words and poetry that both warns and comforts in its great poetic narrative and import.

Between unsaying and forgetting

how each of us becomes void

in any land.

There is only the earth.

Fetish of Last Lines

David Bateman is an arts journalist and performance poet currently based in Toronto. He holds a PhD in English Literature (specialization in Creative Writing, University of Calgary). He has taught at a number of post-secondary institutions including Trent University (Peterborough), Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops), University of Calgary, and Emily Carr Institute for Art and Design (Vancouver). His performance work has been presented in Canada, the United States, and Europe He has four collections of poetry published by Frontenac House Press (Calgary), as well as collaborative poetry manuscripts with Hiromi Goto (Wait Until Late Afternoon) and Naomi Beth Wakan (pause) - also from Frontenac. His collection of short stories and creative non-fiction (A Mad Bent Diva) wasp published by Hidden Brook Press in 2017. His arts reviews can be seen online at Bateman Reviews.