No Cage Contains a Stare That Well

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Hockey and poetry—what could be more Canadian? Every so often, a
Canadian poet takes up the challenge, the latest being Matt Robinson. In
this neatly designed little book, Robinson lays out his long-line poems,
a kind of broken prose that strives to imitate the sweeps and rushes of
hockey in its metaphoric approach to the personal side of the game.

There’s a certain repetitiveness to the material, as he attempts to
capture the feel of the game, the visceral perceptions of someone caught
up in the passion for it, and the sense of loss that often accompanies
such passion. Some of the best moments in these poems come when Robinson
catches the actual moves of playing as in “A faulty strap about to
snap its / last just as you push off from the post or skip-step the
bench / door’s gullied threshold and scar hard into that first
stride’s cut / of ice.”

There’s also the humour of the dressing room, the return to the rink,
as in “tracery, interplay”: “each successive autumn, everything
you’ve grown unsure of trundled to / your local rink and unzipped; the
fragrant bloom of that.” Robinson even offers a collection of hockey
haiku in “short shifts,” which lead to this conclusion: “each
bruise thrums the low / bass ache of disappointment. / a loss is a
loss.”

Robinson tells small tales of junior hockey, coaching, parents and
their playing children, and the slow aging that is the one loss for
which there are no comebacks. Readers of poetry who are also hockey
aficionados should find No Cage Contains a Stare That Well a winner.