Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here.

So we’re at week three and already I’ve deviated from the plan. Instead of fulfilling my obligation to my “To Be Read” pile, I spent the week with a new book. Sorry TBR, I’ll get to you this next week, I promise.

When you read this book though you’ll understand why. My good friend Andy Weaver came to town to read from his latest book “The Loom” which was published this fall by the University of Calgary Press.

Andy and I have been friends for nearing 30 years now (yikes!) Back in the year 2000, we co-founded, along with three other writers and scholars, the Olive Reading Series. The series has continued to run, with the occasional year or two break in the middle of a pandemic, since then despite me taking some time off, Andy getting a teaching gig at York and the rest of the gang moving on to other opportunities in other cities. We restarted the Series a couple of years ago and Andy flew out to be one of our featured readers for January.

Guys, you have to read this book. I’m serious. To quote the back cover blurb, “The Loom is about love. It is a book about frustration, confusion, crying, and being sticky. It is a book about doubt, unreadiness, fear, sleeplessness, and pressure. It is a book about parenthood. But mostly it’s a book about love.”

This is an impossible book. This is a book about becoming and father, about discovering how to be a father, about having a love so profound thrust upon you that you spend the rest of your days, dazed. This is a book about the heavens opening up on you, about being washed over, anointed, annealed, annihilated, shipwrecked, wracked, adrift, as the waves weave you into some other existence.

It’s time to stop all this dithering, the cycles
and recycles, the lather and blather of hithering
and thithering around this unspeakable point:
love is, and so the ancient laws of salvage apply,
we keep what we find.

VIII.vI

When you do pick it up, leave yourself some time. This is very much a book that needs to be read slowly, and probably out loud – especially the ligament/ligature sections with their two or three word clusters stepping across the page. Stylistically it is pure lyric though it feels like perhaps three or four long poems broken down into series. The poems don’t come at you as a wall of single-spaced text, the lines are relatively short and the breaks can be quite masterful, there’s just a lot going on. And while there is quite a bit of intertextuality, it is more additive than invasive and as you work your way through, you can really feel the weight, the immensity of the machinery behind the scenes.

I can only read this as a father, and a father of a similar age, background and experience. This book quite strongly resonates with me and could be one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a while. I would love to hear from those of you who aren’t fathers how this book hits.

Do you guys want to start a poetry book club?