I’m in Iceland at an artist’s residency and I wasn’t going to bring along any books to review. Then, at the last minute, I thought to myself, I’ll just bring Kink Bands, as David Martin’s work never wholly disappoints so I won’t regret tossing it into my already ‘over-burdened with books and packages of ramen’ luggage. Indeed, translating geological factoids and archeological rhythms into lucid, engaging poems is indubitably a challenge, but if anyone can accomplish this feat it’s this musician and author of the Shakespearean-inflected ecology of Tar Swan. In Kink Bands, Martin twists textual and field research into aurally and at times, visually articulate fossil acts. Experimentation in and of itself, whether by rendering a poem into the 850 word constraints of “Basic English” while at the same time mirroring a crystalline structure, as in “Plastiglomerate,” or replicating a cellular construction in “Bedrock of Life” or simply dwindling to equation and footnote, as with the titular piece, is all valid, though it doesn’t always make for a viable poem. Yet, these bits serve more as forms of moraine amid the glacial tunnelings into Anglo-Saxon diction, shale portraits of family life and quartz-terse couplet poems such as “Spoil-Bank Sapling” (I pilfer sustenance from folded coal/If you are what you eat, I’m old) or “Lawrence Grassi Revisits Grassi Lakes” (Vugs pock the feckless dolomites…/a throat pleated with phylum furrows).
I was most moved (of course!) by the fusions of feeling and science, as in “Sinter” where his daughter claps, “two mitts/of snow, amalgamating hand-bergs” as the speaker meditates on global warming, “swelling degrees,” a “witness ablation” or in the zig-zag lexical energy of “Mouth Scarp” that zips from lines like “his labial bluff,/katabatic ricochet” to “Can you hear me, Dad?/Throat-scrums foam.” Then there are the Chaucerian reverberations in poems like “On Marbel” where the archaic English allows Martin to rhyme “earthe” and “birthe” with impunity, literature becoming its own midden-esque form of geologic time in the process. And also, the deliciousness of “lithic pimples” (Triangle Zone), “deltaic shilly-shally” (Spray River Group), the leaping rhyme of “toe” in line 1 followed by “albedo” in line 6 in Reunion and even the silly stuff in “Ideal Kink Bands” (Guitar splat froths from Rip Chords) and the dialogue between The Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin during a WWF event underscores Martin’s poetic range, facility with sound, sense of humour and intellectual rangings. It’s all a bit what-the-what on occasion, but I will guarantee it’s like nothing else you’ve ever read.
Marrow Reviews by Catherine Owen 