Stuart Ross, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

 

JENNY HOLZER

for Kenn Enns

Kennedy, you have
words in your brain
and words surround
you and you buy words
and say words and soon
you will have words on you.
Actual words right onyou.
Jenny Holzer was born in
Gallipolis, Ohio, on July
29, 1950. Kennedy, inked
You will move through
public spaces. When you
reach Gallipolis, youwill
light up and blink.

The latest fromaward-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, critic, editor, publisher and mentor Stuart Ross is The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (Toronto ON: CoachHouse Books, 2024), a collection assembled, as the back cover offers, as “alaboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal andimaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment,while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes.” With so manycontemporary collections seeking to cohere through shared tone or structure, thisseems a highly deliberate miscellany, allowing for what each poem or situationmight require, whether poems that reflect on quieter moments, homages andresponses to friends, including Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell or the lateOttawa poet Michael Dennis, his late brother Barry, or offering his annual NewYear’s poem, a tradition he’s kept up for a number of years. “In Michael’soffice,” the poem “MICHAEL’S OFFICE” begins, “we are surrounded / by poetry.each passing month, / the space for books expands while / the space for peoplecontracts. You feel / the poems on your clothes, your skin, / and your tongue. Itis paradise.”

He writes ofshadows, mortality and depression; not as an edge but a kind of underlay,ever-present, and impossible to avoid. “That / tingling sensation in my pocket/ is not chewed gum but a cluster / of stupid nouns that,” he writes, as partof the title poem, “joined at the hips, / creates a quivering language /uttered only by clouds.” He includes poems that riff on and respond to particularworks by Nelson Ball, Charles North, Ron Padgett and Chika Sagawa, amongothers, as well as a further poem in his “Razovsky” poems, turning his family’sformer name (before it was shorted to “Ross”) into an ongoing character, one thatemerged in his writing during the 1990s, and first fleshed out as part of hiscollection Razovsky at Peace (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001). There’salways been something intriguing about the way Ross has played this particularcharacter, occasionally riffing as a variation on himself (who he might havebeen, perhaps, had his grandfather not anglicized their name), or even as akind of red herring akin to the late New York novelist Paul Auster, introducing“Paul Auster” as a side-character in certain of his books, whether to distract ordistinguish from who the main narrator might truly represent. As Ross’ poem “RAZOVSKYHAS SOMETHING TO SAY” begins:

Razovsky has nevertriumphed
on the esteemed grid
that serves as abattlefield
for tic-tac-toe, nor hashe ever
won a game of chess,thoroughly
cooked an egg, paintedall four walls
of a room (by the time hegets
to the fourth, yearslater,
the first has begun tofade and peel),
or finished reading a TomClancy novel.
He tosses his cigarettesto the sidewalk
half-smoked, and mouldgrows
on the surface ofyesterday’s coffee
that perches on thecorner of his desk.

The collectionmoves in a myriad of directions, providing a poetry title assembled almost as asequence of outreaches, responses and interactions through the form of thelyric. I’ve long appreciated that Ross wears his influences openly, wishing bothto give homage and work in conversation with other writers, other pieces,almost as a way of better understanding a particular work by engaging and respondingto it through writing, and this collection seems entirely built around thatcentral thought. “As James Tate once said,” he writes, as part of the poem “LIFEBEGINS WHEN YOU BEGIN THE BEGUINE,” a poem “for Charles North and RonPadgett,” “‘My cuticles are a mess.’ Inspired, I wrote / a broadway musicalabout cuticles, choreographed / by Busby Berkeley. It closed after just one day/ but changed the lives of those who saw it.”