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| Mountain
Tea Peter Van Toorn Signal Editions, 2004 |
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| reviewed by George Murray and Zach Wells
George Murray, co-editor of Bookninja.com, and part-time ninja/full-time poet Zach Wells discuss the book in detail. Zach Wells, originally from PEI, lives in Halifax and until recently worked in Nunavut. His first book, Unsettled, will be published by Insomniac Press in 2004.
GEORGE: Okay, my first question: how did I miss this book when it first came out? Answer: I was thirteen and reading Xmen comics. There have been several books over that years that have hit me like a stun gun -- Crow by Ted Hughes, Orchards of Syon by Geoffrey Hill, View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska, Enola Gay by Mark Levine, Rest on the Flight Into Egypt by A. F. Moritz, Different Hours by Stephen Dunn, Electric Light by Heaney, to name a few -- but, other than Levine's Enola Gay, none of them came out of nowhere like Van Toorn's Mountain Tea. Well, not exactly nowhere. Just limbo, I suppose. First published (and nominated for a GG) in 1984 and subsequently allowed to fall out of print, it has since been forgotten by the mainstream Canadian poetry community. Forward- (and, apparently, backward-) looking Signal Editions has released it twenty years later and it reads like a salve prescribed for the wound of our time. It is definitely some of the best poetry I've read in years. I don't know if it's eligible for awards this coming year, but if it is, barring some angel descending from on high with a manuscript penned in shaman's heaven by Hughes himself, it could win everything. Second question: why was this book out of print when I made the slow, painful transition from comic book-loving bumpkin to sex hunk poet? Answer? Zach, answer me! ZACH: George, I wish I could answer your first question, but when you were thirteen, I was eight and still struggling to learn Ancient Greek. I think, more than "a salve for the wound of our times," the reappearance of this book at this point is more evidence for the health of our times--or at least the vitality of a handful of tribe members. I don't think that Canadian poetry was ready for Mountain Tea in 1984 (although its nomination for the GG suggests that at least some folks weren't blind to its manifold merits), but now, this book reads like a lot of other exciting new work coming out, work that embraces the challenges of formal constraints and innovates within the structures of set forms; that speaks in a wide variety of voices; that takes outrageous idiomatic leaps and liberties--that, as you say, looks backward even while it forges ahead. What's remarkable is that twenty years later, Van Toorn still has the jump on the vanguard. So I guess that's my answer to your second question. More and more, we're seeing poets like Babstock, Clarke, O'Meara, Heighton and others, engaged in deep dialogue with past masters. That's one of the fine things about Mountain Tea, is the fresh-minted versions of poems from Ancient Rome, Medieval France, Renaissance Germany, Nineteenth Century Japan, etc., etc. Given the sheer number of these translations, this book could've been a real pedantic tome in someone else's hands. But, to pick an example at random, look what he does with a sonnet by the 17th Century French poet de Saint-Amant:
Van Toorn doesn't just show off his erudition with his range of reference. He establishes his place in a proud pedigree of poetic bad-boys, artists who are serious about craft but who know how to party too (Campana, Rimbaud, Villon, deVega, Crane, Swinburne, Baudelaire, Leopardi to name some of them in no particular order)--and in some cases, I think he might actually improve some already fine poems. And that's what I really love about this book, is the sheer erotic fun of Van Toorn's splurge of words. He gets carried away with it sometimes, stretches it past the breaking point, but it's awfully invigorating to see a poet fail from over-reaching rather than from caution. GEORGE: Maybe you're right about the time being ready for him, but I think the young group you've mentioned (of which we are both members, it should be noted) is still a minority here. That aside, I'm interested in the line that Van Toorn walks between muscular, "Canadian" verse and formal endeavour. He plays with pop culture and classical allusion in the same breath; colloquialism, confession, and prosody in the same line. The sequence that begins the book, "In Guildenstern County", plays with Canadian dialect and philosophy, swooping back and forth between lyrical twang and ecstatic moment. It's a one two punch in the face to many of Van Toorn's contemporaries who tried to do the same thing, but usually failed in one regard or the other. I think Van Toorn's secret is the breadth and depth of his reading. He plays with the language and tropes of several disparate poets (here I see Purdy and Hopkins, among others), mashing them all together into a big soup that still somehow works. In fact, it's exhilarating:
It's a Canadian jazz. A form that finds itself in the moment it's created. Juxtaposed against some of the formal work later in the book, it shows an enormous range of talent. I came to this book on the excited recommendations of others (including yourself) and was floored by the first poem -- one that would normally not be to my taste, but done so well I couldn't escape its gravity. ZACH: Another sequence that's quintessentially Canadian without being typically so is "Epic Talk," which closes off the section of the book begun with "In Guildenstern County." The title's ironic since the poems are arranged in short unpunctuated lines of 1-6 words in heavily enjambed couplets. And yet, he still somehow manages to nail the country's epic scope, all the vast tracts of wilderness "in the deep country," "urban spaces," and historical events, with concision not to be found in other attempts at the Canadian Epic. And he knows it:
The outsider here I think has to be the poet himself (Van Toorn is a Dutch immigrant) and this statement isn't so much a one-two punch like you say, as it is a provocative slap with a pair of reversible gloves: Watson's double-palmed outside, kid leather inside. Speaking of the more formal work in the latter half of the book, I'd like to take a close look at one sonnet in particular. The sonnet form is one that Van Toorn has studied particularly closely, and the variety of his experiments with it are remarkable. "Mountain Leaf," I think, stretches the formal limits of what a sonnet can do more than any other I've seen:
I don't think it's the best of his sonnets, necessarily, but the simple fact that this poem could be made at all, under the constraints that the poet has placed upon himself, blows me away. A poem like this is like Julio Franco's batting stance: anyone trying to teach their kid how to hit says, "Don't do it like that, son, it's not supposed to work. I know he hit .320 last year, but trust me, it doesn't work." Where "avoid excessive repetition" is a truism of the poetry workshop, Van Toorn goes whole hawg with it. Not just with the identically rhymed couplets, which is the most obvious form of repetition in this poem, but in the obsessive re-iteration of individual words and phrases throughout the thing. The poem is 123 words long, but built from only 55 individual words, only 23 of which occur once; only 14 words have more than one syllable (four of them being repetitions of "pushes). The poem mimics the bird's crazy, pointless labour, which in turn is a lovely metaphor for the poet's craft and its end result: a "stiff, crisp, bronze push." If Van Toorn does anything, it's push the limits. He reminds me in this regard of Hardy, and yes, Hopkins is a great comparison. Van Toorn's best stuff gives me the same buzz that Hopkins does and keeps me coming back in the same way. The more I look at this collection, the more I'm convinced that it's indispensable. GEORGE: Another of Van Toorn's accomplishments, one that I think all of us could take a lesson from, is knowing when and how to let go of the form and/or conceit in favour the accomplishments only freedom from constraint (or change of constraint) will allow. The section Mountain Tea highlights this quite well: eighteen sonnets in he bursts out like a startled horse with "Mountain Ties" and "Mountain Easter", the former with fat, lush lines and the latter beginning with the exquisite:
A pre-apocalyptic moment if ever I read one, especially given that the following lines are:
Much of Van Toorn's poetry is riddled with internal rhyme and sound-bonding as well as the strangely successful repetition you already mentioned. Normally I would advise against rhyming wind with wind. Wouldn't you? It's surprising Van Toorn can make it work here -- it's surprising he can make it work virtually everywhere he tries. Further, the repetitive nature of some of the poems ("Mountain Fox" is a prime example with its repeated phrases and lines almost working in a pantoum-like rhythm) creates a hypnotic rocking in the reader's brain -- like the lulling motion of an tethered canoe. Take a look at how the first section of "Mountain Fox" uses this repetition and rhyme (both internal and end) to create a very natural sounding language for this nervous, yet mesmerizing little beast:
I know it sounds cheesy, but several times I found myself drifting into reverie on finishing a poem, my thoughts actually carrying on with the rhythm. That surprised me too. I guess "surprise" is a good overall assessment of the book for me. I was surprised to have not yet read it, surprised it was allowed to go out of print for twenty years, surprised to be hooked so quickly by poems outside my personal taste, surprised at the variety of, and skill with, form, surprised at the almost psychic ability to persuade me to carry on his thoughts after they had ended on the page. Can you sum up similarly? ZACH: Yeah, everything you said. Surprised and awed. I know what you mean about the hypnotic effect. My first read of this book was aloud and I found myself snake-charmed on multiple occasions. On a more thorough critical read through it, I found poems like "Kora's High" and "Swinburne's Garden" ultimately unsuccessful, in spite of their felicities, because the one drifts too far into pure sound and the other suffers from a schism between scholarly essay and poem, but the false notes are so few in this book and the grace notes so sweet that to complain is to risk being one with "an envy-schooled tongue." Let's hope this puppy stays in print a lot longer this time around. It's a book that anyone serious about fun, sexy, intelligent, powerful poetry ought to read and re-read. GEORGE: One of the things I like about doing Bookninja is that we get to review books we care about. Whether they effected us positively or negatively, the books you see here are books we find pleasing to talk about. Zach, you're right. This is honestly not the kind of book you forgive yourself for missing... twice. Please buy it.
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Peter
Van Toorn's Mountain Tea was nominated
for a Governor General's Award in 1984. Then it disappeared for
20 years. Why? It reads like it was written yesterday (last year,
10 years back or from now, 100) by a young poet gifted with a sharp
mind and sure voice. How does a book like that disappear? It may
have been a matter of timing.| Home | Review | Essay | Misc | About |
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