Nicholas Bradley, Before Combustion

 

Parable of theConflagration

After the fire thunderedover the fields
like bison, like horses,like cattle, like
trains andeighteen-wheelers, and the woods
were cindered, and afterthe thunderstorm fired
itself into a drippingcalm of carrot
and melon, after historywas left
to smoulder, thecreatures who inched out
of the embers were coatedin mud. They looked
at each other withcolliers’ eyes until
their ashen masksmouldered, and they set to work
like oxen, clearingground for graves and grass.

Ifound myself charmed by the heartfelt intimacies of Victoria, British Columbia poet Nicholas Bradley’s [see his 2018 '12 or 20 questions' here] second full-length collection, after Rain Shadow (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018), his Before Combustion (KentvilleNS: Gaspereau Press, 2023). Before Combustion opens with a suite ofpoems that focus on the new moments of parenting, of fatherhood, offering such clearand quiet moments I haven’t seen prior around the subject, one I’ve also hadthe experience of enjoying three different times, three different ways: “I amthe oldest / living thing // you know,” he writes, as part of “In theBeginning,” “an unshaven // bristlecone / bent over // your bed.” Whilethere is an enormous amount of territory worth covering and recovering onparenting generally, the subject matter of fatherhood is still one that emergeswith hesitation; a poem or two at most by any new fathers, perhaps, although thereare exceptions [something I covered across 2012-3 in my four-part “WritingFatherhood” essay over at Open Book, which Benjamin Robinson reminded meof recently].

Bradley’sBefore Combustion is a collection sectioned into quarters, with theopening cluster of poems focusing on that newness of life, that newness ofexpansion, becoming and being. As the two-page poem “Waiting Room” begins:“Your third night alive / I drove home // from the hospital / to find sleep //and left you sleeping / those few hours. // In darkness, having / forgotten //everything but food, / water, and how // to keep you fed, clean, / and quiet,// I entered the house / a stranger // and failed to notice / the oak leaves //letting go.” In certain ways, the entire collection is centred around thatopening moment of new life, new fatherhood, echoing the way one’s entire worldcompresses into a single, singular moment at the birth of one’s first child, slowlyrippling out a return to the world but with an entirely new perspective, anentirely new lens. The poems of Bradley’s Before Combustion begin with newlife, but slowly do edge out into that return, offering graceftul turns ofphrase and line-breaks and short phrases, each of which do provide a slowness,requiring deep attention, even through poems such as “There Must Be 50 Waysof Looking / at Mountain Goats on the Internet,” that begins: “Stoned,blindfolded, one /goat dangles above / a second, horns / sheathed, four /ankles bound / and then four more, / rhyming quatrains.” In certain ways, eachsection provides its own impulse, less leading up to combustion than reactingto a change or changes so life-altering they seem akin to an explosion. Or, ashe writes to open the poem “Parable of the Drought”: “Not the end of theworld but the onset / of another.”