Chris Turnbull, cipher

 

the lake,
remnant, scar, is shallow

swings
toward edge-not.

kinetics of form
– ebb-terrain –

includes
the sodden

the parched
the reminiscent(“candid”)

Thelatest by Kemptville, Ontario poet and curator Chris Turnbull is cipher (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), a book of listening and attention;of being present, and outdoors. Set as a triptych of suites—“candid,”“contrite” and “ciper”—Turnbull extends her note-taking across a slowness,writing moments and local through a book of ecological space. “in now, when,then –,” she writes, as part of the first section, “compression – generated – /for this / instant-on-instant, [.]” Compression is a perfect word to describeTurnbull’s poem-structures, a kind of book-length accumulation of note-takingthat exists amid the tensions of compression and expansion. Across the length andbreadth of the book as compositional space, Turnbull composes short bursts oflyric that stretch out across a wide canvas, compelling and attending anecopoetic of minutae and magnitude. “littoral zone – hundreds / list,” shewrites, as part of the first section, “founder – dark reshaping clusters – /// easy/ does it /// these domains / are fluid [.]” She writes of unsafe roads, ice onthe river and bees messaging, a poem composed from and within a landscape, elementsof which echo her ongoing rout/e, her project of placing poems along rural walking trails, and watching across time as the words fade and pages decompose’;a project, by itself, which echoes Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s collaborativeDecomp (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013) [see my review via Arc Poetry Magazine here]. Across cipher,Turnbull’s words hold, erode, corrode, and slip into soil. There is an element,also, that echoes Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” although, unlike Niedecker’sinfamous poem that emerged as an extension of work-related research, Turnbull’slyric exists as both research and reportage: these poems are simultaneous studyand result, and of something ongoing, deeply intuitive and regularly attended. AsTurnbull speaks to the project in a recent interview conducted by Conyer Claytonfor periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics:

I’ve been working slowly on this manuscript forseveral years — and over this period considering seeming societal withdrawals‘from’ the outdoors. I wonder how other generations might mediate theirexperiences of, or limit fears of, various elements of our physical worlds. Ithink this conundrum is important — there is no conclusion, but cipher presentspossibilities. How do these generations relate to or make world(s)? Land doesnot take precedence, screens, networks, are central and unbound: the marsh is rippedat corner.