Underwood Log

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.

Underwood Log is a traveller’s tale in a poem sequence that traverses
much of the globe as well as the temporal universes of myth, legend, and
fiction; it takes “experience” to be all that one can read in both
the places one visits and the books one reads. As such, it is a highly
engaging trip, with a complex narrator/protagonist. New has set up an
intriguing double narrative: in one series of poems, an unnamed
interrogator questions an “I” we take to be the poet (for he lives
in Kitsilano and talks about the meaning of travels in space and time);
in the main sequence, each poem is titled by longitude and latitude, and
addresses a changing “you” who cannot be fixed as any single figure.

The whole reads well, certainly as well written as prose (as Ezra Pound
demanded), sometimes achieving a beautifully judged image. As “I”
says, “you tell your story travelling” following those who were here
before, leaving clues for those who come after, “bones and bones, an
underwood of dreaming.” This “underwood” is certainly that of the
forest of fiction, but it’s also the typewriter, a pun on which the
whole long poem turns.

Underwood Log moves through forests and woods around the world and in
every kind of story, always returning to the arbutus of the poet’s own
place, Vancouver. At its best, it attains a heightened beauty in its
imagery, as

in “density and wet / coast, cape and blanket, fronds // lacing /
rain-shelter,” or “the wind touching leaves into cradles, // thunder
breaking like / breath on the body, // the long eyelash of rain—.”
As a poem of both physical and mental travelling, it offers readers a
globe-trotting vision of possibility.