Hammertown

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University.

Hammertown is Peter Culley’s second volume of poetry. The title of the
collection, which comes from Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual
(“it was a fishing port on Vancouver Island, a place called
Hammertown”), is an appropriate description of the geographical
upheavals in the landscape of the poems. The first poem, “Greetings
from Hammertown,” opens, “Huge uproar lords it wide. / A tim’rous
grader halts / before an overflowing ditch, its / big bad boy body
slumped / as if thwarted at its gigging.”

Culley’s use of apostrophes for contraction belies his attention to
rhythm. His deliberate diction also calls attention to his preoccupation
with the sounds of his words. “Snake Eyes” is the title of a group
of six poems written without the use of punctuation, which highlights
both the sound and the juxtaposition of his words. The first poem in
this group, “A Poem for the English Poets,” begins, “excoriate
forks deform / the yellow wallflower stained / with iron forms cushioned
/ usage chloroforms the / evenings poplars theses en- / tomb the
sleeping bee a plume / of purple Methodist dust.” This group of poems
is also interspersed with photographs of buildings that further
emphasize their concrete imagery and concern with urban realities.

Culley includes people in his environmental impact survey. In “The
Provisions,” he writes, “such matters convened / under the heading /
‘infrastructure’ / are a species / of art, that is / attended to /
sporadically / by hooded figures / walking on their knees / down endless
halls / of polished granite”; and in “A Letter from Hammertown to
East Vancouver and the East Village,” “I try to think of you / and
can bring to mind / only the great parabolic bridges / in whose shadow
you live, fist-sized rivets / of red iron, buoying above / the molten
stream of thought / into which / each day you are thrown!” Ultimately,
Culley writes from the point of view of an observer who documents and
laments the battered landscape.