‘Things’ and representations

Who Else in the Dark Headed There
by Garth Martens

Windsor: Biblioasis, 2026
$21.95 / 9781771967082

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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Garth Martens is a salon magician. He writes poetry as performance, with an eye on keeping action from interrupting the stuff he is flashing in front of us. As a result, things romp with each other. Stagecraft—action—is backgrounded. Here’s an example from “Nothing but Glass, Snow”: “Rosecoloured the tamarack country lethal concentration zone // Someone in the house with.”

Not “with” anything. Just “with.”

Such brushstrokes of Canadian calendar imagery show themselves in a surreal, quantum world which does not choose between possibilities.

Then Martens pulls another trick out of his hat:

people labouring, pacts with dogs   cautious of human
                                                                                               touch.

Dogs, humans, it makes no difference. The caution is everywhere.

In these and other balances between exclusion and inclusion, the poems speak without revealing a self. In its place, what lacks words gains voice, as an intrusive world pushes in on an isolated self. 

Victoria-based Martens (Prologue for the Age of Consequence) portrays this defensive posture in “Map of Smoke,” a two-act drama starting with kids breaking into an abandoned house, only to be shocked and mesmerized by a porn magazine. The poem then morphs into a fire and a police raid in which “The boy is blent flat,” becoming the magazine’s centrefold himself, “as adults rush past,” leaving him as—

He’s a teak bowl of artificial apricots,

a green-chested bird,
juddery, battered, without a hole through harsh whites.

It’s a folding inward, a bringing in, an invasion, a dream. There are no pupils in these eyes. They can’t see the world directly, only the hallucinations of artifice. There is no “world,” only media.

Such surrealist play can be dramatic. Confronted with a dying doe (a victim of traffic collision) with three fawns (in “Night Corridor”), Martens writes:

For three minutes, I watch lactation, those
strict pupils
in the beam-glare. Below
arc or exit, or language,
a bassinet
that pulls a breeze inside.

This is an image of pre-childhood: infancy. In it, images precede language, the mother is a stern viewer, consciousness is scarcely differentiated, and language is an extension, a cradle that pulls the world into it but does not progress past it. With neither action nor movement, the response is awareness, just like the viewing of a film.

Throughout, Martens employs showman’s tricks; he nudges us to view language as a container for communication, while its real message, its flickering, retro effects, progress unremarked. 

One of those is surrealism. Another is lyric form, the bassinet that cradles thought in this nursery scene. It’s prose dancing in the forms of lyric, in a texture like broken shards of glass after a car crash, or the flickering, missing frames of grainy Super 8 film, claiming to record reality, even while it misses it at a rate slower than the eye can see. At other times, it’s like old VHS tapes gone bad, their colours stained, eroded, and etched out.

I enjoyed the generational shift of these tricks. For readers like myself, who saw Super 8 and VHS come and go, the lousiness of their representations of reality was laughable. For Martens, a generation younger, they’re primal. When technology and the relationship of the viewed and the viewer gets tangled in your head like that, this (in “Nothing but Glass, Snow”) is what you get:

I am, I said. I want. Growths on his hat         crusted veils of ice
I want to get back. A dark-spored poor quality thing. Let me want
                                                                                                           to.
                                                                                 No, he insisted.
I touched his hat and it did stick, to test us both.     His
cigar brown robes
weirder dusts he incubates empowder me.      Brittle, like chalk.
In turns I hang or decorate      anti-inflammisorries
pushing up through duff

There’s a story here about a world that doesn’t empower childhood. It includes the cryptic, riddled story above, the crippling effect of a mother’s alcoholism and a tormented childhood in which most verbs not verbs of being were verbs of violence and suppression. Look at it in “Viewing Old Film”:

Unsteadily ahead, my mother, new at walking, as if toward me.
Single moonglow button
conjoins at her collarbone –
rose-quartz sides of light-knit cardigan.

There’s only one verb: “conjoins”. Everything around it is a twin growing out of something else—out of the act of recording or the act of observing. These acts are more “real” than the “world” that was recorded.

What the Super 8 and the technique that dances to its electrical pulses on the retina leave out is mitochondrial, the line of all the little bits of grammar that hold things together in traditional English, all the “the”s and “an”s and “if”s and all the prepositions of place and time, the “when”s and “under”s and “inside”s and “outside”s and “next to”s. What is left is only half of the chromosomal makeup that makes an utterance biologically complete.

So what does Martens, child of this technological amalgam, this memory that is a forgetting, do? He sets words on a screen, so they do what the human mind and English did first: make connections between things and apprehensions of them. Instead of flowing through the tissue of mitochondrial connectivity, his memory flows through a maze of “things” and representations: technologies; illusions; hallucinations; a world of magic and wonders.

In the end, out of each of Martens’ piles of shards there rises a cry of being, the joy of arrival, of having rebuilt what wasn’t exactly broken because it was just never there. Every time there might have been something there, the poison of alcohol showed up, and the broken rag doll of a woman. Where one expected a mother, there was pain. This is hard stuff, looked at with a cold eye. It’s beautiful, fierce, profoundly defensive, smart as heck, and intrusive.

An Oulipo game perhaps, surrealist-inspired play in which the patterns that make poetry out of a dictionary assemblage aren’t the iambics of speech, or the chimes of half-rhyme, or variable feet that lay down talk in patterns of surprise, delight and recognition, but a game applying random constraints to language, to see how it will behave under pressure: a game of pressure, human responses to it, and a real need to escape imprisoning expectations. 

There are many Oulipo games. You can open a book and write down the tenth word on each page. You can do a full Christian Bök and write a volume of poetry in five sections, each using only one vowel. You can perform a thousand further interrogations, or you can play along with Martens and see how many nouns can dance together like cut-out dolls on a string or frames in a film, one after the other. 

This is not an oral language effect but language played to the beat of an electronic drum machine and a dancer hopping in one spot until their mind is numb and their body is ecstatic and wordless. As an example, here’s Martens’ poem “Doesn’t Look Far,” which captures a dancer on the shore of Spain’s Darro River:

Bearing cold-
shouldered luminescence,
clack of flecos, enters an emptied out
umber-lit span,
far-eyed, intent, champing. Bites his epaulette.

Things, images and actions are all equal flashes of light here, in a fierce, crashing rhythm drawing at the same time on Old English riddles and kennings and the limitations of industrial, technological methods of human reproduction as images.

It’s intriguing that these little heavy metal anthems remain lyrics, things to be sung in the exultation of the individual voice approaching and matching music. They’re not actually lyrics. You can’t sing them. They are neither individual nor oral. They are texts, a mind pounding on keys, dancing in synch with technology, and sometimes sticking a finger into a socket and thrashing around as the current overwhelms nerves, and always, always, the heartbreaking story of a mother who failed her child and a boy refusing to be broken, growing up to love and care for his own child in ways he cannot or won’t explain. Only wordless ways remain, as Martens replaces lost mitochondrial material with instances of connection made by any reader willing to join the illusion, word to word to word.

And that’s a triumph. A body, smashed down by technology, rises up through the pain, standing, at first bent over, then taller, then taller yet.

This human-technological union is profoundly Canadian. It’s the land of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, after all, and of Martens’ native Okanagan larches portrayed as Group of Seven tamaracks without a blink. It’s not an easy read, but neither is the country.

[Editor’s note: in support of his book, Garth Martens will read in Victoria on April 10. In Kelowna, Martens will hold a launch on April 14; he’ll follow with a Victoria launch on April 30.]

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has reviewed recent books by Diana Hayes, Mary Dalton (ed.), Gary Geddes, Tom McGauley, W.H. New, Stephanie Bolster, Lorne Daniel, Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, and Hari Alluri for BCR. His newest volume, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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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.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster