Tom Cull, Kill Your Starlings

 

 

HOME KEPT COMING

how a cloud can be a fist
a visible hand

we only saw blue sky
and piled wreckage

the turtle carries
the word home onits back

what did that word looklike?
burnished, tectonic

the sound off crack
and scoop and slurp

Thesecond full-length collection from London, Ontario poet (and, from 2016-2018,that city’s poet laureate) Tom Cull, following Bad Animals (Toronto ON:Insomniac Press, 2018), is Kill Your Starlings (Kentville NS: GaspereauPress, 2023), a collection of poems that appear, carefully and delicately, asthough carved out of stone or ice. Across this book-length suite on family andplace, Cull offers an assemblage of descriptive, first-person lyrics, settingblocks down as if to build, writing on cars, family, Ikea, masculinity,toxicity and landscape. Listen to how he describes heading west by train out ofOttawa (specifically, Fallowfield Station): “Outside, land is drawn andquartered. / Wild turkeys step through / split-rail fences; a lone coyotepauses / in a pasture, head thrown / back across its body watching us pass.” Cull’swisdom, as well as his humour, emerges quietly, to rest amid rumination,offering one step and then another, further, considered step: not one word orline out of place. As the back cover offers, this is a book about family andplace, although there is a way he writes about masculinity is worth mentioning:his articulations are different, although equally powerful, than, say, DaleSmith’s Flying Red Horse (Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here],offering a sequence of poems, for example, on the male gestures offered throughcar commercials. “Set it free.” he writes, in the poem “Subaru Wilderness,”the fourth and final poem in the sequence “AUTO EROTICA,” “See the Subaru inits natural habitat; / a hundred thousand mutations, / bionic selectionstalking slag ridges— // terrarium interiors—synthetic protein / seats, hotmist, pitcher plants, / neon salamander toes suction cupped / to the windows.” Cull’sthreads are subtle, offering a book heartfelt and deep, writing of a father helearned from by example, benefitting from the man’s quiet dignity. “Years aftermy dad died,” he writes, as part of the wonderfully graceful “AUTOPSY REPORT,” “Imoved home temporarily to help get the farm ready for sale. I hired plumbers, roofers,contractors to do the work. Over the course of that year, I met several men,who’d had my dad as their teacher. They all praised his patience, his care, andhis demand for discipline and hard work.” The poem ends:

A few years ago, my momwrote a poem about my dad. The poem
ends with details fromhis autopsy report:

BUILD: moderately obese
BRAIN: unremarkable
HEART: massively enlarged