harvest: a book of signifiers [9780889224551]

Overview

For rob mclennan, poetry is a way of seeing, and what is seen in harvest: a book of signifiers is always a landscape as it inhabits the poet and his various personae. In the absence of capital letters, with only minimalist punctuation, and with a denial of the possessive case, (all formal signifiers of precedence and ownership), these poems do not appropriate the landscapes of their gaze, but rather liberate them.

What is harvested here are the signifiers for journeys: tickets, postcards, letters—recording unseemly haste, enforced idleness, losing one’s way, and sometimes finding it again. All coloured in the deceptive hues of a populist and egalitarian style, these poems are allowed to signify their own powerful and at times devastating ambiguities, from “a magic more elusive than any spell she whispered” to “the salt waste left by the flood, where no seed grows.”

the present is a small thing & moves very fast

in the same river, which as they say,

moves. it takes

& takes & takes. a polaroid

too long

to develop.