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

So, back at the height of the pandemic in 2020, Brick Books offered a 50 for 50 deal. Give them 50 bucks and they would send you 50 books picked at random from their warehouse. Such a good idea! I jumped on it immediately. Brick has long been one of Canada’s best poetry publishers and I was very excited to see what kind of stuff they would send me. Amazingly I had already only one of the 50 books they sent me. So many new voices! This week’s pick off the TBR is one of those new voices. Well, new to me at at least.

Degan Davis and I were born in the same year and belong to the same cis-gender white male Gen X demographic. Like me, he published his first book , this book, at closer to 50 than to 30. This later than usual first publication is perhaps why it is not surprising that I had never heard of him. I suspect he has never heard of me either. We do live and work on opposite sides of this very large country and while the Canadian poetry community is relatively small, so one might be tempted to think that everyone writing and reading poetry has a passing familiarity with everyone, our circles tend to be small and local just like our audiences.

I will also admit to sometimes judging a book by its cover, both the title and the blurbs. The blurbs on this back cover, which is kind of cool with all the Karsh mugshots I will admit, explains that this is a book is “…an expansive meditation on manhood…” Hmmmmm. I guess I am not surprised that it took me five years to get around to cracking the cover on this one.

One of the things I love about taking a slow approach to reading is that it gives one time to let things sink in, to think. This sinking in is also why I am documenting this year of slow poetry reading. Writing about what one is reading forces an ordering of thought. A reflection. A critical eye. Things that it is easy to not do when speeding through a book.

What Kind Of Man… gave me the chance to examine why I am not a huge fan of “meditations on manhood.” I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that I am having a hard enough time just trying to figure out how to live as a human that the thought of trying to narrow down and identify as belonging to any subset(s) of human seems impossible and baffling.

Now, one criticism of this thinking is that it is my responsibility as a man is to speak out against the abuses (sexual, physical, emotional, legion) perpetrated by other men. This is true. There is also, however, an entire colony’s worth of rabbit holes to go down on the identity politics aspect of this. That is another blog post. For now, for my reading of this book, it is enough for me to say that I don’t particularly identify as a capital “M” man the way the dominant social narratives usually run. You will never see a poem about hockey, or The Blues, cigarettes and bourbon, from me. Just not going to happen.

Thankfully, that is not what Degan is about completely either. This book is not just sounding a single note. In this complicated meditation on manhood, in the struggle to define identity amid personal chaos, there are poems I really connected with here: poems about Beethoven, anxiety, tenderness, death. My absolute favourite piece in the book is a short poem with a title is longer than its content called Postcard, 1926: The Fundamentals of Socialism Grow in the Mind of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy on a Visit to his Even Poorer Aunt which ends with the line:

Blood in the outhouse.

This, my friends, is poetry.