Alberta bound

Ottawa poet rob mclennan’s Wild Horses is a work of skill, polish

Wild Horses, by rob mclennan

Wild Horses is rob mclennan’s 21st book of poetry, written while the incredibly prolific Ottawa author spent 2007 as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. Mclennan is a poet of place, always finding his voice out of the material of his surroundings, the continuity of its existence through history. “It’s an Edmonton book,” he says. “During that year, I worked on two different projects… both of which were exploring the space I was in, the physical space, the literary space, trying to engage with the history of the province, the writing I was surrounded with. One happened to be poetry.”

But it’s more than a simple engagement – this collection of works uses the study of a place to give shape to the wanderings of mclennan’s thoughts. In rebuke to the legions of confessional poets out there, mclennan doesn’t find his own life that interesting. “I don’t even keep a journal. I can’t keep my own interest, so how could I expect to sustain another’s?”

By filtering the personal through the richness of history, mclennan elevates both, extending “a sprinkling” of himself into the solid, unchanging strata of history and the literary heritage of a place while making the “really interesting parts personal.” Nowhere is this more plainly spoken than the section “map of Edmonton.” Each separate piece is both sketched along geographic lines and “for” a specific person related to the voice mclennan writes in. In “map of edmonton (garneau) / for andrea bloom,” mclennan writes “1. / , loss of soft flesh / a stretch of river side / the night before / you turn & roses / turn.” All at the same time it is a place, an event, a person and a highly personal recollection.

There is difficulty to his work – his poems seem at first to hide themselves from anybody who isn’t him. But this ambiguity creates an air of expectation and mystery, as each line can suddenly take on new meanings with each reading.

It works because of mclennan’s technical skill as a writer. The previously cited poem actually does begin with that comma, a punctuation that turns a blank opening space into a pregnant, human pause. With no words, he makes a very full statement. He writes in terse “clipped lines” as he calls them, usually trying to bind each thought to a single line rather than “cut it in half and stagger it onto the next line.” The effect is one of solemnity; each line seems to exist as a small image, a small whole with its own completeness that adds to the mystery of the rest.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept 16, 2010
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=20465