Matt Rader, FINE: Poems

 

Last summer in Sunnybrae
we watched from acrossthe lake
a kilometre of railcars
the colour of oldmemoires
slowly describe theshoreline westbound
below Mount Tappen
What are they hauling? I asked,knowing
we didn’t have an answer
The insides of mountains,trees, prairie
I imagined
It was difficult to watch
something being taken
but what
exactly (“Sweet Air”)

Thelatest from Kelowna, British Columbia writer Matt Rader is FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024), a book of fire, climate and crisis, includingdeforestation, mining and other increasingly-devastating resource-extractions. Ashis author biography inside the collection reads, Rader is the “award-winning authorof six volumes of poetry, a collection of stories and a book of nonfiction,”the last title on that list being Visual Inspection (Gibsons BC: NightwoodEditions, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Composed across twenty momentsorganized in four cluster-sections (as well as a further poem, hidden aspost-script, just after the acknowledgments and author biography), the poems inFINE articulate “a vision of the present from a deep future, chartingthe porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm.”There might be those who don’t recall that particular year, existing within theCovid-era, of the British Columbia fires, and this collection exists as an intriguingcounterpoint to Delta, British Columbia poet Kim Trainor’s new long poem aroundthe same geography and subject matter, A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a book I’ve yet to fully delve into.

Acrossthe poems of FINE, Rader offers long, meditative stretches, almost as asingle, meditative length, through this year of catastrophe, offering a thoughtful,quiet and slow-moving sketchwork of point-form, writing of visiting his brother’sfarm, watching the landscape hollowed out and the aftermath of a season oforange skies. As the poem “Working on My Brother’s Farm in Errington, BC”writes: “When we read / a silence / we change it. I can’t tell you / what it’slike / to be outside / language / inside language. The tall grass / at the edge/ of the field makes shapes / in the breeze [.]” These are poems that existfrom within a changing landscape, and one that sits nervously on a precipice ofcomplete environmental, entirely man-made, collapse. Throughout, Rader offerslovely sequences of sharp moments, turns and observations across a poem-suiteof sharp attention, deep concern and an abiding engagement with his landscape. Really,it is just as much the pacing of his short lines and line-breaks that makethese poems as any other element, moving at exactly the correct speed as itmakes its way down the page. As well, the ‘hidden track’ poem-as-postscript, “LiteReading,” offers its own kind of conclusion to the collection, opening: “Whatdoes a good future look like? / I asked the plum tree / as I steadied myself /on the aluminum stepladder. In its bare branches / the tree held open a fewchoice pages / of daylight to read. That’s what it asks here, I said / but theplum knew that passage / from memory / being a natural, as it were, in the literature/ of water and heat.”