site-specific poems

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.

site-specific poems offers a masterful display of writing in which
intellectual and emotional currents flow together to create a work of
deep art. As with Cartouches (1995), Tostevin’s previous collection,
site-specific poems is a profoundly elegiac volume. In both books, she
mixes memories of a parent (her father in the former, her mother in this
volume) with memories of writers she admired and knew (bp Nichol in
Cartouches, a number of others in site-specific poems).

Tostevin is one of the few poets who can truly marry theory to lyric in
her poetry. In this collection, the “sites” of the title include
Tilden Lake (“au Nord de North Bay”), the paper most writers still
use at some point, the computer screen, various places in which memory
inheres, Roy Kiyooka’s presence, the Spain of various artists and
Federico Garcнa Lorca, and her own garden. The ways in which the poems
approach and enter these sites of both sightings and citings are
remarkable in their range.

“A Portrait” is an elegy for Tostevin’s mother, just as a
sequence in Cartouches elegized her father. In both poems, the subtle
details of a singular personality emerge in the careful way the language
registers the subject’s highly specific qualities. Her poem for Roy
Kiyooka catches his lovely eccentricities. “The impulse to jot down.
Index / finger tracing paths through lampblack” is what drives all
these poems. And that line break demonstrates the subtlety of
Tostevin’s ear, how a verb suddenly shifts into an adjective and
pushes the mind in new directions.

The poems or sequences of site-specific poems gather the gold of memory
slowly about them; each one specific, they nevertheless connect in such
a way as to make the whole book much more than the sum of its parts.
This is a book that lovers of poetry will find enriching and moving. It
can only enhance Tostevin’s already excellent reputation.