Through ‘the lens of late adulthood’
Compulsory Figures
by John Barton
Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$20.00 / 9781773861661
Reviewed by Brooke Lee
*
Prolific Canadian author John Barton delivers an impressive thirteenth poetry book, Compulsory Figures, a collection that is not only evocative and visceral but masterfully precise, honouring its namesake (a reference to the formerly common training routine of figure skaters to practice control, precision, and balance).
As the fifth City of Victoria Poet Laureate from 2019–2022, Barton was also made a life member of the League of Canadian Poets in 2021, an acknowledgement of his contributions to queer writing in Canada.
His memoir, Lost Family, told in sonnets, was nominated for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and, as noted by the Victoria Festival of Authors, was “…pull[ed] off with poetic aplomb in 140 syllable segments.”
The free verse poems of Compulsory Figures begin—in two opening sections—as orderly prose poems that are dense, conventional, following the ‘rules’, and packed with autobiographical fragments reframed through the lens of late adulthood.
The poems are also obscured by cryptic wordplay and a haunting grimness that culminates in the full spectrum of sensory experience.
Consider these lines from “Already So Ghostlike Under the Elms”:
despite not having been as exposed, their own rain-pummelled
foliage denuding them with speed through autumn, limbs
pleasantly unsightly in grey, lightning-blazoned bark
Divided into five unnamed sections—perhaps ‘stages’ in the grieving process and/or life stages measured by decades—each one (with the exception of the fifth) contains a significantly greater number of poems than the previous, and the themes of death, identity and loss recur, with cemeteries and gothic westerly winds—from boyhood haunts to ghostly texts like “All Hallows”:
I believed for years he’d left us
only once, that one door closing
behind him without me at first
knowing eight weeks before
The macabre is ever-present and many ekphrastic poems appear, such as “Drowning Sailor” after a 1946 painting by Jack Nichols (a Canadian war artist) and “Collapsing Icefields” after visual artist Christine Koch. A cento or ‘patchwork’ in “La Musée Hypotheque” is also featured from American poet Carolyn Forché’s lengthy poem “On Earth”:
apparition in a vacant house
blue lobelia rising along the gate
city through the filth of a bus window
down a desert road aerially strafed
Earlier, in “Biome Tapestry,” Forché is quoted for her “fire of human becoming” concept, a reference to her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, which explores social conscience and the act of witnessing. Inspired by Forché, Barton writes,
elements of our spirit appear killer, making
style a witness, floral and embroidered, needles
picking up threads earlier dropped; inner-city houses
the flu emptied cleared by COVID-19 a century later
In Section Three of the collection, greater clarity emerges (with increasing resolution), where Barton embodies Canadiana in wide landscapes and long rural stretches of road in “Driving to the End”:
from crest to spared crest, enticed
over ridges ascending into a view
pale flashes of windows throbbing
below, ringed by outbursts of scrub
and mountain picked out in indigo
your outline printed against the sun
As well, the (dis)comforts of a rustic home, where the speaker is never quite at ease, are explored, a sense of imposterhood looming while Section Four waxes artistic with structural variation and playfulness. “Grove Cemetery” is presented as a different kind of love sonnet, and the visceral aftermath of survival is strongly felt in “Charter For Our Forests”:
couplings and triplings pre-lubricated
tree to tree in our eternally non-existent
creator’s knees-apart, open-air bathhouse
where dying from hiv or bludgeoned to
a nullified pulp is no longer the sterilizing
cost of entry exacted without negotiation
Throughout the collection, Barton references other queer writers such as Christopher Isherwood, Frank O’Hara, and Paul Monette, with their lives and work serving as guides for him in navigating a queer male coming-of-age, and especially during the HIV epidemic. “Our past is a community / rink visibly inscribed…,” he writes in the titular poem.
The fifth and final section of Compulsory Figures breaks the progressively lengthening pattern (as it contains fewer titles than the previous section), and the poems reach a peak—where appetite has grown, pleasure is laced with danger, and fleeting moments of tranquility are abruptly taken over by fear and paranoia, and the collection’s core is expressed most resonantly through Barton’s confession in “Rereading my Isherwoods”:
Isherwood as narrator or narrator as Isherwood
his ghostly cipher more of a guru to me
than any father I could find
*
Brooke Lee (she/her) is a freelance writer and editor in Montreal who writes fiction under the pen name River Lee. For more info, visit her website at riverleewriter.ca. [Editor’s note: Brooke recently reviewed Billy-Ray Belcourt for BCR.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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.
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