Silt

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.

Jordan Scott dedicates this first volume to Wladyslaw, Stefania, Wiesia,
and Krystyna Kujawa, and to his father, thus signalling the sediments of
history and family memory that form the silt of its title, filtered
through rivers and immigration to the poetry he constructs here. He
prefaces each of the four sections with quotations from Wiesia’s
journal, while Wladyslaw and Stefania play central roles in the stories
that emerge in fragments throughout.

Many of the early pieces resist easy understanding, even as others
offer glimpses into the travels and tribulations of a DP. They shift
between “I”s who must be the older folk and an “I” who seems to
represent the poet now trying to make sense of “a myth of downward
occurrence / [that] guides the midden motion / and all this hesitated
heap” of remembered gnarly diasporas. But as the fragments slowly
build up, and phrasings that seemed opaque return in new contexts, the
book as a whole comes into focus.

The escape from Poland, the new life on the Fraser River, the desire to
comprehend what these forebears went through—all these inflect the
broken English and fragmented structures of Silt as it refuses any easy
lyric nostalgia or old-country anecdote. It sets itself as antidote to
these, rather, and insists on a kind of Brechtian sense of estrangement
in its making these strangers strange.

Silt is a powerful first book, if also one that sometime falters in its
experimentation. Or perhaps it’s just this reader’s desire for both
fragmentation and rhythmic intensity that sees it that way. At any rate,
it’s a brave work, and one that will repay attention as it reveals
just how difficult it is to catch the moving past in the silted memories
that are all it leaves behind.