ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one : Cameron Anstee + John Levy,

[see last fall’s similar notes here]

Ottawa ON/Kentville NS: It is good to see a newpublication by Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, who is famously working at his ownpace, in his own time [see my review of his second collection here], and goodto see a chapbook of his produced through Gaspereau Press: Sky Every Day(2024), produced as Devil’s Whim Chapbook No. 53. It is almost a surprise to thinkthat Anstee hadn’t published with Gaspereau prior to this, as there does seem asimilar aesthetic of tone, of production, between the two (remember Anstee’swork through his own Apt. 9 Press, for example). Across seventeen poems in thisvery lovely chapbook, Anstee extends his exploration of poems that take up thesmallest space possible, yet each one packed with enormous resonance and scale.One can point to the work of the late Nelson Ball, titles by Mark Truscott orcertain works by the late Toronto poet bpNichol, but Anstee is workingsomething entirely evolving into his own direction with these pieces. There areechoes of Ball’s attentions to nature, but one that blends Nichol’s ownattentions to pure language, somehow meeting in the middle, establishing thestretch of his own, ongoing space. Anstee’s poems are aware of physical space,of physical place and of a space of attention that wraps itself around all theabove. There are enormous amounts that go into these poems, and one could spenthours, not lost, but comfortably settled into a suite of curiosities, withinthem.

AUBADE

sun
spilt

 Jay MillAr of Bookhug Press, hiding underneath his table,

Cobourg ON/Tucson AZ: It is very nice to see anew chapbook by Arizona poet John Levy [see my review of his recent selected here] through Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press, Guest Book for People in myDreams (2024). It is interesting in how Levy returns to composition-as-response,directly riffing off or responding to particular poets or particular lines,sentences or phrases, allowing for a wider opening of where it is his own linesmight extend. “That’s something to look forward to,” the sprawling openingsentence of the prose poem “Sisyphus at Noon” begins, “no shadows, though itwas marvellous before noon and afterwards, finding all sorts of colours in eventhe smallest shadows he rolled the boulder past—a pebble’s oblong shadow withblues and greys (a little yellow at one edge), or a dead bird’s longer widershadow with a greenish-grey stroke close to the feathered rise of folded wings.”Each meditative poem begins with a line or a thought or a moment and thenfurthers, the poet working one step and then a further step, curious to see, itseems, where it all might end up, as eager to discover as the reader. Produced inan edition of 150 copies, you should certainly try to pick one up from StuartRoss when next you see him.

Poem Beginning with a Sentence
by Elizabeth Robinson

The essence of nature isto be always borrowing.

I borrow my thoughts andrarely repay anyone or
anything, it’s part of mynature, is second nature

and third, and so on. Always,so on. There’s no Polonius

telling me what to do—or instructingnature
to stop lending naturemore nature. Dust

lends dust to the dust

that is always borrowingand returning the dust.
Bats chase bugs at dusk,what isn’t

dust at the moment

is taking its time.