Arboreal citizens & a sad cog

Future Works
by Jeff Derksen

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025
$18.95 / 9781772016284

Reviewed by Steven Ross Smith

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Into the future we go, beginning with “More Than Human Labour,” a long series of prosaic imaginings—absurd, surreal, witty to sometimes silly, and most often political in nature, of animals and other lifeforms, “on the job,” such as: “Organized pollens clog voting machines in Iowa.” It’s also a future that, in some instances, looks a lot like the present.

In the brilliant “Memory of My Heavy Metal Years,” Derksen renders fleeting vivid scenes from his youthful working-and-playing life, with effective repetition of the phrase “There goes”: “There goes those years / beachcombing along the Fraser.” At the same time, he turns the recollections into a social, political, and environmental statement, sometimes without directly saying so: “There goes the / aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic … Broken down / pissed out.”

References are generally current, taken from popular, economic, and political culture. The book also has an underlying—or perhaps we should say, out-leafing—symbol—trees in city settings—set up initially by the inside cover photo of an urban tree, and by an epigraph from Lorine Niedecker: “I think of a tree / to make it / last,” and by six more tree photos at the book’s end. Symbolic, as the trees are surviving nature surrounded by—shall we call it—civilization (or less expansively: urbanization).

It’s an interweaving. There are hydroelectric turbines, bauxite, Leonard Cohen, collected books and album jackets, aluminum, and Zooms. Even Derksen’s father cameos.

In “All Day Long and into the Night,” a song transforms into a poem which cites lyrics and line fragments from pop songs and rolls with them or makes little turns toward a different statement than in the original. Often, they comment on labour, friendship, and searching out “love” and “connection”: “Night time is the right…”; “where / is the love”; “right back here / where we started from.” Clever poems, accessible and complex in their leaps.

Another poem, “I approve the minutes,” is a lament, at once personal and universal in its state of disillusion—a state that seems to drive so much discontent in today’s world, and that leaves one vulnerable to dark, or extreme, or diminishing forces, a kind of soul theft. “I’ve internally // betrayed myself, a class / dream which was a daydream,”and “The recommended training-module template / was not filled with the joy I expected // and the saddest cog was me – .” Derksen has the gift of being able to embrace the language of institutions and structures—with their cold terms and semantics—into modes, sometimes personal, sometimes societal comment, that draw engagement, critique, and are accessible.

There is no question that Vancouver- and Vienna-based Derksen (The Vestiges) is political in his “Works” underpinning. Though serious in his ‘main’ messages, he’s not beyond having fun with words. In “A Sad Gain,” word links play—metonymic/phonetic/phonemic—to provide a frizzy, wobbly wire-walk: “a fecund / second  a heard third  a thwarted  first  a onus / proposal  a honest nest.”

In a final branching and sweep, in the Urban Trees section Derksen unfurls eighteen poems, varied statements about the arboreal citizens that have become preserved, colonized, or value-added species with whom we two and four-legged, and winged urban inhabitants, share our spaces.

It mixes respect, affection, and identification with statements on ecology and economy. It also addresses trees as victims of war, as in bombing trees: “trees of the ‘War of / the Cities’ trees of Derna / trees of Smara trees of / Aleppo.”

Yet perhaps there is hope: “trees work against being governed” … “take a day / a month trees have time.”

Steven Ross Smith, Banff Poet Laureate 2018-21, loves live music and walking on beaches and in forests. He can sometimes be seen kayaking coastal straits and bays. His poetic work often juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven-book series fluttertongue. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions. Three collaborative chapbooks have appeared with Jackpine Press; The Green Rose, a collaboration with Phil Hall, has appeared from above/ground press, and in a new edition from Lake’s End Press. Over many years Smith has migrated westward from Toronto to Saskatoon to Banff, and he now lives and writes in the region of the W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, Victoria, BC. [Editor’s note: Steven recently reviewed Stephen Collis, Harold Rhenisch, Kevin Spenst, Eimear Laffan, and Tim Lilburn for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster