Guy Birchard, Most By Books

 

Preface

Though he daily invocate,though he sacrifice Hecatombs, the Muses and the Graces still upon the Duncelook asquint. John Donne profanely paraphrased.

Why on earth in a guy’seighth decade would he contemplate issuing yet another unwanted masculiniststream of invitations and affection? or affectation and invective.

Why?

Jack B. Yeats answeredThomas MacGreevy: “I get headaches from reasons… I think Reasons arevery little use down here. But up aloft, just after St Peter shuts the gategently on us, with us within, we will be as happy as lambs throwing littleround reasons from hand to hand until they roll over the side and flop downinto Hell…”

The Ideal Reader would beshe who takes as much time to read a page as the author took to write it. 

It is too much to ask.

Iwas recently intrigued to catch a copy of Victoria, British Columbia poet Guy Birchard’s Most By Books (Victoria BC/Parry Sound ON: Symple PersonePress, 2023), a chapbook designed and produced by poet Jack Davis [see my review of his own full-length debut here] “in a private edition of forty copies.” I wasfortunate enough to discover Birchard’s work through a title produced by BethFollett, Only Seemly (St. John’s NL: Pedlar Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], a title I picked up a small number of extra copies of when thepress folded, the book is just that good. I give them away, here and there, to those that I think should be reading it, as well as to counter the fact that thereis something about Birchard’s approach to almost going out of his way to sitjust under the radar, releasing new work with small or even smaller, ephemeralpresses. Over the past forty-plus years, Birchard’s list of published books andchapbooks includes Baby Grand (Ilderton ON: Brick Books / Nairn, 1979), Neckeverse (Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press,1989), Birchard’s Garage(Durham UK: Pig Press, 1991), Twenty Grand (Boston MA: Pressed Wafer,2003), Further than the Blood (Pressed Wafer, 2010), Hecatomb(Brooklyn NY: Pressed Wafer, 2017), Aggregate: retrospective (BristolUK: Shearsman Books, 2018), VALEDICTIONS (Ottawa ON: above/ground press,2019) and Montcorbier (above/ground press, 2020), with a further titlethrough above/ground press to appear later this fall. Might a selected poems atsome point be worth doing? I would certainly think so.

Thetitle of Birchard’s latest collection, Most By Books, is excised from alonger quote, set on the title page to include the full—“They do MOST BY BOOKSwho could do much without them.”—lifted from the prose work Christian Morals(1716) by the English writer Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a posthumously-publishedwork originally composed as advice for his eldest children. Through nearlyforty pages of lyric heft, Birchard reshapes Browne’s advice, leading byexample through a selection of poems rife with reading. “From my fingers,”begins the poem “Mustapha Reached His Koran Back,” “off the shelf from which I hadcasually picked / up The Book in barely enough time to open it, Mustapha, with/ dignified tutting, his father projecting approval, retrieved the / Koran frommy hands, from before my eyes.” These are poems built from books, from not onlyreading but years of intense, dedicated and ongoing study; the kind ofattentions that lesser poets proclaim loudly across author biographies,entirely the opposite of what Birchard writes for his: “Scholar of nothing. Nodegrees. No prizes. Neither profession, trade nor career. A lay poet.Anglo-Canadian.”

Thereis such an interesting way that Birchard uses writing, uses what we might thinkof as poems, as a way of thinking through writing and big ideas. “Augustine,rhetorician / that millennium and a half ago,” opens the piece “Homage to SarahRuden for Her Confessions,” “yet crazy as Beckett or Roberto Benigni /by virtue of the sedulousness and circularity // of his case, for want ofconfidence enough to match her / predecessors, drives our current ladytranslator to her cups.” This is Birchard, the well-read thinkingreader, the intellectual crafting poems out of reading notes, allowing thelyric to explore and examine. He writes of St. Augustine and The TroubadourClub in West Hollywood, Jack Kerouac and Saint Pancras, moving across incredibledistances through a short cluster of lines, stepping one foot ahead of another,keeping such detailed notes as he journeys. His poems blend study with journey,a wandering through language that explores alternate corners and catalogues of language.Dedicated to the late writer and critic Stan Dragland (1942-2022), Birchard’sbricolage, his own ‘journeying through bookland,’ one might say, is certainly comparableto Dragland’s work, but holds a different tenor, whether to Dragland’s work or thework of that other poet of bricolage (as Dragland wrote), Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall. “Exiting the cinder block shower next morning,” writes the poem “Butterflies& Turtle,” “not a / soul around, sunlit, stepping into his gotch, hisshoulders / and damp, bare back were suddenly a drift of Painted Ladies /alighting. // Guy fetches the camera a look of small-c concern.” There’s a densityto Birchard’s lines that hold a different kind of weight, perhaps, well beyondthe myriad of alternate reference, offering not just connecting reading andideas from across an alternate spectrum, but, veering occasionally into OldEnglish, one that holds a depth of language, and language meaning. As the poem “Company”writes, to close:

Smoked a rollie, usingthe tinplate ashtray. Sat, gazing round. Inside unaccustomed hush—out of thewind. Lit no woodstove. Book of Common Prayer in syllabics. Lit no kerosenelamp. Despite no roof overhead for weeks, we would not crash there. Nah.

Understood. At dusk,canoed back to make that heathen camp of ours in sandy, hallowed precinctsbetween Native graves and water.

Slept.