I’m writing this review sitting by my back yard fire pit in Edmonton, a locus that seems apropos as a correlative invoker of energies akin to those found in Cluster Flux: procreation, the prehistoric, the dance of eros and the encroachments of death. The stand out sequence in Stymeist’s collection is indubitably the long poem in seven passages called “Mass Transfer.” In fact, I liked it so much that I would purchase this piece on its own as a chapbook, though it also proves an essential counterpoint to the lyrics that intersperse it here too. Echoing the fierce snap of Solie’s spondees in Short Haul Engine and AR Ammons’ hyphenated listings in Garbage, this sequence is a paean to movement in a kind of geographical-machine dream, as the gloriously tragic train scars the once-perambulations of animals, the Indigenous. And ahhhhh a poet with an ear. The fact that this often comes as a revelation is a pointed comment on the prioritization of subject matter over sound in much current poetry. Stymeist’s poem pops with alliterative verbs: “jolt and jive”; “plank and ping,” punches with nouns: “scab-lands, scree and talus.” The engine whips by and “tugging, jerking, we lurch,” later “ramping, whining” through the “novel topography.” All locales meld, from Darjeeling to Las Vegas, meshing “fizzy drinks” and “live chickens” with “statuettes of Buddhas” while we, as humans “streaming” never quite reach the “terminus.”
In another poem in sections, “Midsummer Disjunction,” painful juxtapositions abound, where the early days of the pandemic collide with Crohn’s, the poet’s more regular ailment, then lift into nature’s marred illuminations: the “opportunistic robin,” “pernicious weeds,” and the “growing orange globes” of rapacious pumpkins. Nothing is static or stagnant in these pieces. There is nowhere to hide and that’s as it needs to be when truths require confrontation. Other poems of note are Traces (“my chest fills with night” I appreciate though I would axe “I gasp for air”), Waiting with my Daughter (ooh the words “sympatric”/ “guppy”/”azure” in combo!), Origin Stories in which a “sack of fish” gobbles “every fleeing ghost,” the bawdy Chaucerian romp of Prick Song and the hilarious and well-researched Ode to a Condom that nods to Olds with its “animal spurt” but goes further with Falloppio, Cassanova and Goodyear. Sometimes, Stymeist slumps into endings as in the flat statement of “self and other/globed together” of Dual Core or the unnecessary repetition of always remembering to “feed the dogs” in The Sleeper and what is up with Oblation slapped on the same page as Sea Jelly? But the ear mostly remains alert in the entangled accuracies of Cluster Flux. Hey I even relished the Kandinsky cover (although I’m not a fan of French sleeves). And I was so happy to feel the hand of Heighton too behind this eminently tuned attention of a book.
Marrow Reviews by Catherine Owen 