Andy Weaver, The Loom

 

where
            we’re headed,
                                    only realizing that
the arc
              of the pitcher’sarm
                                                mirrors
the galaxy’s
                    swirl,
                              thatthrough
its parts
              the universe
                                    posits
a sum
            and the silliness of games
                                                     ends. (“ligament/ ligature”)

Thefourth full-length poetry title by Toronto poet Andy Weaver, following Were the Bees (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), Gangson (NeWest Press,2011) and This (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2015), is The Loom (CalgaryAB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), one hundred and forty pages of an extendedsequence-thread on the surrealities surrounding marriage, children, parentingand homestead through first-person lyric. As the back cover offers: “Andy Weaverled a life of quiet contemplation before becoming a father at the age of 42. Withinthree years he had two sons; two small, relentless disruptions to an existencewhich had, for a very long time, been self-sustaining and tranquil.” For sometime, Weaver has been engaged in pushing his own variations upon a blend of thelong poem/serial poem, and The Loom exists as an extended, book-length line.Composing sequences within sequences, he writes an excess that stretches itselfthrough sequences and layerings, suites upon suites, clusters and accumulations,one held together and by this new foundation of domestic patter, and discoveringhow big a human heart might become. “Perhaps if a new content is / a newdevotion,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CLEAVE,” “theresult / of novel imagination, then / there is love even in reason—if / emotionis the first evolution / making ways for new forms of life, / then love is whatgives us reason / for reason and saves us from the crushing / reality ofreality.” Through the evolution of his lyric, passion and reason are no longer separate,distant poles, but a blended opportunity for enlightenment, calm and perspective,offering fresh layers of personal and lyric insight.

ThroughoutThe Loom, Weaver offers structural echoes of Robert Duncan’s lyricblocks and staggers, writing not an abstract articulating the spaces around andthrough the occult, but one of an open-hearted familial love, a groundingprovided through his two young sons. “When I had journeyed half my life’s way,”he writes, near the opening of the collection, “I found I’d lost sight of love—justthe sort / of line that mediocre, middle-aged men / have been using since theevolution / of male pattern baldness.” Through his explorations around familyand children through a particular lens of the long poem, his work exists nearlyas counterpoint to that of Ottawa poet Jason Christie, two modest and quiet poets(both with two young sons of similar age) simultaneously working their long lyricstretch of an abstract, accumulating domestic line. As a fragment of the fifthsection of “THE BRIDGE” reads:

Looking at the lake atnight, a child knows
the flat field ofreflected lights is a series of depths
of incalculabledistances, sets of eyes gleaming
from an underneath wherethere is no holding
them away, and the strainis etched into the walls
of his brain cells likeshapes scratched uncountable
years ago into the stonesof a sea cave forgotten
so long ago the crews ofthe fishing boats sail over it
every day without evenshivering, no clue that every
minute love is watchingand waiting for the moment
to capsize us.

There’sa density to Weaver’s lyrics, stretching out across packed sequences even asthe language breaks down, fractals, breaks apart, leaning harder into pure soundand collision. At times his language deliberately scatters, akin to lightthrough a prism—“the knot / will not / knot but / that does not /mean that / anuntie,” he writes, as part of the extended “ligament/ligature,” “a terriblenaught / that unbinds, / should be taught / as an answer / to shield you / fromfeeling distraught.”—and the structure of sequence-within-sequence offers afurther layering of the book-length poem stretching further and endlessly out,his mix of sound and cadence offering a propulsion well beyond the accumulationof one line upon another. Through the book-length poem The Loom, Weaver weavesa deep sincerity across the newness of children, devotion, uncertainty, minutedetail, deep appreciation and abiding love, detailing a swirling abstract ofemotional upheaval and ongoing, continuous wonder; one might almost consider TheLoom to be a meditation on love through chaos. “My actual family,”he writes, “those bodies / whose parts / in my speech / make a texture / beyondcognition,” offering a detail upon detail. As the final extended sequence, “THEBRIDGE,” ends the collection:

                        But there is a point in every event
that we cannot seethrough, and another we
cannot see at all. Love’sopacity, then, is its essence.
Which is to say that thepeculiar fate of the lover
may be that the mostserious question can only
be posed in thevocabulary of love.
                                                            And I’vewritten
myself into a corner, afull stop, an unproductive
bafflement that freezesmy hands over the keyboard,
trying to parse out thedifference between hiding
and lying in wait—until thereyou are, stamping
into my room trailinggiggles of glory, grabbing
my hand and pulling mefrom my seat at this
cerebral dead end, mylovely gosling, my godling,
my Hugh ex machina.