Adam Beardsworth, No Place Like

 

Loons

At night with the windowsopened
you hear them on theriver,

their backs mirror thestars,
their deranged cries arethe crack in a

cellar door you want to peekdown,
maybe test the creakysteps,

compelled by the awfulneed to
prove something is downthere,

a shape hidden in themilky black. But
you won’t. It is betternot to know there

is nothing, an emptyriver. Better still
not to be called home bythe lunatic cry.

Iwas fortunate over the weekend to hear Corner Brook, Newfoundland poet Adam Beardsworth read from his full-length poetry debut, No Place Like (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023), as part of the Horseshoe LiteraryFestival. Set in three sections of first-person lyrics—“Home,” “Earth” and Sky”—NoPlace Like offer a meditative series of descriptive landscapes, populated bysuch as Robinson Jeffers, border towns, sanctuaries, how to survive a bearattack, youthful folly and suburban sprawl. “Traffic flows downstream,” hewrites, as part of “Biography of a Morning,” “past salmon // fighting thecurrent, past anglers lashing the rip / with flies, jonesing for the hit thatassures // man’s dominion over things.” There is a storytelling shade to hispoems, one that is deeply intimate, focusing a foundation of ecopoetic aroundmemory, moments and domestic matters. “The day I returned from school to find /you crying at the kitchen table / next to the canary’s empty cage,” he writes,to open the short sequence “Sanctuary,” “I learned that happiness is a glass /made of shards.”

Beardsworthcomposes poems in a combination of short phrases and long, languid sentencesthat lope across line breaks, stanzas and a deep earnestness, one that providesa comforting voice, even across multiple threads of elegy, and poemsacknowledging a multitude of losses, from the personal to the ecological. “Beheaded,birds / flew from my neck,” he writes, to open the poem “Elegy,” “warblers,thrushes, hosts of / sparrows, startlings murmured // the shape of an empty heart.”He writes of fathers and sons, and of a beer at the pub, offering fresh meaningand insight across familiar realms. One of the highlights to the collection isthe elegy “Buttercups,” that ends: “a reminder / of the day our lives divergedas you walked into the family / life that fitted like a knitted sweater, as ifto say you still // remembered life before that day, carefree and careless, / butwhat mattered came after, and as this dawns I feel / your hand on my shoulder,pulling me out of the dark // one last time, pointing me towards my son stillsitting / in the sandbox, holding a fresh-picked buttercup to my / bearded chinand smiling, wondering where I have been.”