The Weight of My Raggedy Skin

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

Like its three predecessors, this fourth collection of Zieroth’s poems
addresses the hardy perennials of separation, loss, silence, and
death—all subjects of which the poet suspects himself as being “as
yet unable to speak / for the weight of my raggedy skin.” His
awareness that you “can’t move gently into change” is bound to the
crippling suspicion that “you could say nothing”; the tension that
results is the driving beast of this bittersweet gathering of
poems—the middle group of which is entitled, significantly,
“Aphasia.” Paul Cézanne, the great French post-Impressionist
painter, frequently denounced what he called “the infernal facility of
the brush.” An equivalent suspicion of the coast-to-coast-Wonder-Bread
state of Canadian letters is revealed in Zieroth’s scathing lines
“The country is filling up / with poets. . . . People emigrate / and
become poets the moment they arrive. / What makes a country think / it
has this much to say?” In its relentless confrontation of the
inevitable inadequacy of the poet’s voice, The Weight of My Raggedy
Skin does much to answer that most embarrassing—and most
necessary—of rhetorical questions.