Scenes from the Present: New Selected Poems

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

Those who have followed the career of the prolific C.H. Gervais will
recognize several of the poems in this collection, since many of them
(albeit often revised) are taken from books he has published over the
last 22 years. What holds this collection together is the author’s
fondness for a cinema-verité approach (as suggested by the title), and
his preoccupation with the very impossibility of poetry itself.
“Poems,” as he insists in piece after piece (the selection includes
a number of prose poems) “cannot be fictitious,” yet the very
process of writing enforces an inevitable abstraction: “Such is the
evolution / of art—separating from / The body in a blur of motion /
trailing & faint, but alive.” As a poet, he finds himself constantly
pondering “how to stop the moment”; the consequence is an
irreducible suspicion of his own voice (“Like the / salesmen, I went
on talking, talking. Fearing / the truth would / get in the way”). It
is the recurring confrontation of this suspicion that gives Scenes from
the Present its thematic unity and its (at times almost mannered) habit
of deliberate understatement. In its studied minimalism, this collection
is unlikely to appeal to a mass audience; but it will reward you if you
are, in the words of its epigraph from Thomas Merton, among the few who
“dare to penetrate your own silence and dare to advance without fear
into the solitude of your own heart.”