Fruitfly Geographic

Heather Doody teaches in the English Department of Sir Wilfred Grenfell
College at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Brockwell’s latest collection of poetry attempts to scrape away the
veneer of contemporary culture and technology to glean what remains at
the core of our human experience. While the poems in the section “Trip
Reports” use geographic distance to achieve this end (such as when
common pleasures break the language barrier in “Aukland”), those in
“Visits to Museums” and “Evolutions” use temporal distance.

“Pitches” is a superb example of Brockwell’s mastery of rhythm as
he weaves long prose lines of advertising language together with
shorter, softer lines that lament the absence of silence and express a
longing for freedom from contemporary white noise. Not every poem in
Fruitfly Geographic has the striking intensity of “Stone in the
Field” or the chilling beauty of “Meditation on Spheres,” but the
collection as a whole is a success in that Brockwell manages to cut
through the sometimes plastic and noisy present in order to show us the
beauty and chaos in nature and the evolutionary threads that tie us to
it.