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The Lease
Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)
Inspired largely by the poet's experiences as a young man working in the Saskatchewan oilfields, Mathew Henderson's The Lease explores masculinity and the roles morality, violence, and hard labor play in it. Equal parts character study, cultural documentary, and coming-of-age narrative, Henderson's poems make it clear that however we may try to stay apart from them, the stubborn and often unflattering realities of masculine culture persist, not just in isolated, dangerous environments like this, but in our very idea of what work is.
No mark survives this place: you too will yield
to unmemory. Give everything you are
in three-day pieces. Watch the gypsy iron
move, follow its commands.
Tend the rusted steel like a shepherd.
Shortlisted for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets
Mathew Henderson lives in Toronto, Ontario, writes about the prairies, and teaches at Humber College. The Lease is his first collection of poetry.
Inspired largely by the poet's experiences as a young man working in the Saskatchewan oilfields, Mathew Henderson's The Lease explores masculinity and the roles morality, violence, and hard labor play in it. Equal parts character study, cultural documentary, and coming-of-age narrative, Henderson's poems make it clear that however we may try to stay apart from them, the stubborn and often unflattering realities of masculine culture persist, not just in isolated, dangerous environments like this, but in our very idea of what work is.
No mark survives this place: you too will yield
to unmemory. Give everything you are
in three-day pieces. Watch the gypsy iron
move, follow its commands.
Tend the rusted steel like a shepherd.
Shortlisted for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets
Mathew Henderson lives in Toronto, Ontario, writes about the prairies, and teaches at Humber College. The Lease is his first collection of poetry.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 6, 2013
Mathew Henderson’s The Lease is a sneakily brilliant, beautiful work. The collection of 50 poems, most of which are one-half page or less, describe Henderson’s life on the oilfields of northern Alberta and Saskatchewan: laying pipe, moving rigs, feeling lonely. Hard men, harder women. The collection’s full of little details, turns of phrase that you just know other writers are going to try and steal: “quiet,/ liquored fucking”, “hung up his husbanding boots for good”. And while writing this good easily repays your attention and patience, what marks Henderson’s book as an extremely good work of poetry is its marriage of subject and form: how the stuff Henderson is writing about is structured in a way that poetic expression seems uniquely suited to capture, decoct, accommodate.
The setting for these poems, the physical space involved is just too large, expansive, to countenance all at once. Working in the prairies means working amidst space that transcends perspective and exists primarily in your imagination, wrapped around by sky. An instance of the sublime, the bulk of which largely unknown — physically, directly — yet still there, amassed and edgeless:
"At three a.m. there is no world but what’s contained
by the flare’s domed light. A great dark glass over
an insect; you are the only thing with feet and hands
on a flat and dying moon. A man trapped twelve hours
in the caves of the opened land with no one
searching for him, no one to know he’s gone".
Also the particular work being done, an oilman’s relationship to this:
"There is earth below your earth, a deep room where
gas and oil, rock and stone, circulate like slow blood
through a body".
Your relationship to the text of The Lease — its language terse, precise yet allusive, lyrical — ends up being identical to the relationship between Henderson and the land on which he worked and lived, verily made a living. Language as picture of reality, of the lived experience Henderson’s trying to communicate, limn, transfigure.Henderson’s poems don’t just recount but represent, or conjure, as all stories do, but here the conjuring’s emphatic, the result of poetry directing so much attention to what’s off the page.A different kind of formal convention that pales, corpse-like, next to poetry like this:
"Everything you remember lives inside
the chicken-farm homestead
with its back-broken frame and that reek
of old water sitting still. At night the house breathes
with open windows, swells at the seams.
At sunrise, it exhales a dust so fine
you think of bull hearts, dried and ground.
When it’s gutted of furniture you find imprints
in the carpet: four beds, two dressers, a shelf.
And from those years when no one kept it,
from before the oil and the oilmen came, the mark
of where the deer walked in, lay down and died".
Whether you write it or not, there are good reasons to read poetry, nearly all of which are exemplified in The Lease: precision, imagination, patience, but especially the use of formal ingenuity to enliven. The best kind of artistic transfiguration feels not just appropriate but necessary, singularly apposite to communicating the artist’s heart and mind. I read quite a bit and don’t often feel this way, even about prose, good writing notwithstanding. (And to be fair, Henderson’s writing could, at times, be harder: imagine Cormac McCarthy without the uptown vocab, panoramic allusion.) What’s remarkable about Henderson’s book — the reason to take a chance on a 27 year old’s first work from a small press — is its demonstration of artistic judgment, what this looks like and why it matters. Writing that’s meant to be read, like light through ice, hard and clear and true. Try not to shield your eyes.
The setting for these poems, the physical space involved is just too large, expansive, to countenance all at once. Working in the prairies means working amidst space that transcends perspective and exists primarily in your imagination, wrapped around by sky. An instance of the sublime, the bulk of which largely unknown — physically, directly — yet still there, amassed and edgeless:
"At three a.m. there is no world but what’s contained
by the flare’s domed light. A great dark glass over
an insect; you are the only thing with feet and hands
on a flat and dying moon. A man trapped twelve hours
in the caves of the opened land with no one
searching for him, no one to know he’s gone".
Also the particular work being done, an oilman’s relationship to this:
"There is earth below your earth, a deep room where
gas and oil, rock and stone, circulate like slow blood
through a body".
Your relationship to the text of The Lease — its language terse, precise yet allusive, lyrical — ends up being identical to the relationship between Henderson and the land on which he worked and lived, verily made a living. Language as picture of reality, of the lived experience Henderson’s trying to communicate, limn, transfigure.Henderson’s poems don’t just recount but represent, or conjure, as all stories do, but here the conjuring’s emphatic, the result of poetry directing so much attention to what’s off the page.A different kind of formal convention that pales, corpse-like, next to poetry like this:
"Everything you remember lives inside
the chicken-farm homestead
with its back-broken frame and that reek
of old water sitting still. At night the house breathes
with open windows, swells at the seams.
At sunrise, it exhales a dust so fine
you think of bull hearts, dried and ground.
When it’s gutted of furniture you find imprints
in the carpet: four beds, two dressers, a shelf.
And from those years when no one kept it,
from before the oil and the oilmen came, the mark
of where the deer walked in, lay down and died".
Whether you write it or not, there are good reasons to read poetry, nearly all of which are exemplified in The Lease: precision, imagination, patience, but especially the use of formal ingenuity to enliven. The best kind of artistic transfiguration feels not just appropriate but necessary, singularly apposite to communicating the artist’s heart and mind. I read quite a bit and don’t often feel this way, even about prose, good writing notwithstanding. (And to be fair, Henderson’s writing could, at times, be harder: imagine Cormac McCarthy without the uptown vocab, panoramic allusion.) What’s remarkable about Henderson’s book — the reason to take a chance on a 27 year old’s first work from a small press — is its demonstration of artistic judgment, what this looks like and why it matters. Writing that’s meant to be read, like light through ice, hard and clear and true. Try not to shield your eyes.
May 5, 2025
Lease is a series of stark, compact poems that sketch the in stark vignettes the toxic labour culture
endured by a young man in the Canadian oil fields. Lean and unsentimental, the poems are unflinching as they capture fleeting moments of isolation, toxic masculinity, uneasy unsettling camaraderie, and moral ambiguity.
There’s a sharp precision to the writing; most poems carried a weight beyond its brevity.
endured by a young man in the Canadian oil fields. Lean and unsentimental, the poems are unflinching as they capture fleeting moments of isolation, toxic masculinity, uneasy unsettling camaraderie, and moral ambiguity.
There’s a sharp precision to the writing; most poems carried a weight beyond its brevity.
July 27, 2016
I felt guilty making dog-ears all throughout the thing, but I couldn’t help myself. Henderson twists his hands into our collars and yanks us readers — willing or not — straight into the prairie oilfields, into a world of eerie work hours, hard-ons, shots of alcohol taken from between women’s legs in loud bars. This is not easy poetry. It disturbs and distresses, made me — especially as a female reader — almost queasy. We’re given casual glimpses into easy violence, duck-hunting, women-hunting. But at the same time, Henderson shows us moments of beauty in unexpected places — a dying salamander plucked from the guts of a freshly-filleted fish, a moment of laying rig pipe compared to the "muscle lust" of unthinking sex. When I finished The Lease, I didn’t feel good or comfortable — and I wasn't meant to. I think that's what a book is supposed to do.
March 24, 2013
Today, i sent this as a gift to my brother-in-law who used to work offshore in the Gulf and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. Vivid and real, I believe Henderson's poems will resonate with him. I first heard of this book from the NYTimes review, and previewed his poems online, and willI purchase my own copy, too.
July 17, 2019
This is the HERE, BULLET (Brian Turner) of the oil driller's life.
from "Fits and Bleeding"
And there will be no woman waiting in you room/
to dab you with her shirt, lick your fist until it scars.
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October 20, 2012I don't really feel qualified to rate books of poetry (or books by friends), but I really loved this one. It's both moving and manly - an excellent combo.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews