Ongoing notes: late June, 2023: Scott Cecchin + Patrick Grace,

Oddto think that my mother would have been eighty-three today; my father wouldhave been eighty-two this past Monday. Oh, and don’t forget I have a substack, yes ? I think I’m gearing up for another book-length non-fiction project(possibly).

Montreal QC: A resident of Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, poet Scott Cecchin’s second chapbook is HOUSE (Montreal QC: Vallum Magazine/VallumChapbook Series No. 35, 2022), following Dusk at Table (O. Underworld!Press, 2020). I’m intrigued by the breaks, breaths and halts, the rhythms ofthis particular chapbook-length suite, and his poems expand upon their rhythmsas the poems progress. What I find most interesting is how and where he holdsthe small moments and fragments of speech, appearing far more compelling thanlater on in the collection, as his narratives stretch into more traditional andeven conventional plain-speech. But there is something here, and I amintrigued. As the opening title poem, “HOUSE,” reads:

The house flowers
in light. Be-
low that,
dirt. Deeper,

a glacier. And deepest:
fire.
        Inside you, a moon. And
            in the moon, somewhere, is

            you. The sun gets inside every-
            thing; and when the sun’s out
            we are too.

*

            The house, pressed
            into the deep,

            like a seed,
            sinks. Look up:

            air, so
            many ships sinking up

            there. Above that,
            ice—and higher:
            fire.
                      The earth

is shaped by fire andwater, while
water enters earth andair. The air,

sometimes, holds fire andwater,
and fire gives earth tothe air.

Montreal QC: One of the latest titles from James Hawes’ Turret Press is a blurred wind swirls back for you (2023), a secondchapbook by Vancouver poet and editor Patrick Grace, following Dastardly (AnstrutherPress, 2021). Set in three sections of sequence-fragments—“a brazen thing,” “thesky cottoned” and “a blurred wind swirls back for you”—this is a curious chapbook-lengthsequence, offering one step and then another, towards a kind of expansion, say,over a particular ending or closure. The first section offers what might be aflirtation, writing as the third page/fragment:

lightning came             lightning          lit the night
it gave us an easy in

                        an ice
                                                to break

Whatstrikes most are the rhythms, the pacing; a very fine patter across a length oftethered fragments, although there are some moments in the language that strikefar less. Either way, there is something interesting here, and worth payingattention to, to see where Grace moves next. I say keep an eye on this one.