Bamboo Church

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

“Consider quarks”; “Sweetie, consider Spinoza.” These opening
lines of two poems in Bamboo Church succinctly reveal Sternberg’s
range and tone. The first, entitled “Quark,” comments on current
scientific hypotheses with an almost metaphysical wit, while the second,
“Mobius Strip,” with a similar combination of audacity and
irreverence, invokes the “God-or-Nature” philosopher within a
sensual love poem. Sternberg can shift joyously in his language between
the learned (one of his titles is in Greek) and the puckishly colloquial
(that delightful “Sweetie”). These poems celebrate mind and body,
sacred and profane, with an urbane and infectious enthusiasm that is
highly endearing.

Here are poems for all tastes. The love poems can be unabashedly erotic
(“Pleasure”) or wittily detached (“Supply = Demand,” based on
the imagery of traditional economics). A poem on the death of John the
Baptist, narrated by the dead victim, begins startlingly and
unforgettably: “How my head came to be on that platter? / Mother and
daughter had the hots for me.” “Kinetic Study,” set in a church
service but about a woman’s sexually stimulating walk, explores the
“moving” in both senses.

Sternberg revels in unusual words (“Duplexity,” “fractal”), but
even more in placing words in unusual juxtapositions, as in “the
alternating / circuitry of the bed.” Religious words (“grace,”
etc.) are likely to appear in erotic contexts. The couple in “Nice”
(itself a pun) had taken “vows,” but vows that “crazy-glued them /
one to the other at Golden Gate Park.” He can also display a
consummate and daring technique. “Solo Flight” employs the complex
traditional form of the sestina, obeying the formal rules but subtly
undercutting them by shifting from “pilot” to “Pontius Pilate”!

The final poem, “Tomatoes,” represents, I suspect, postmodernism
(whatever that may be) at its best. Tourists buy “five tomatoes” but
receive also the family history of the vendor, where once again
religious and secular (plus commercial) elements are intermixed, the
true subject not tomatoes but the “meandering” of roads, stories,
and human lives.

Bamboo Church is not only a delightful book, but (thanks to
McGill-Queen’s University Press) it is also a beautifully produced
one.