Play Out the Match.

Kim Fahner is a poet and the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

In Michael Knox’s first collection of poems, Play Out the Match, poems of desire dance next to those of death, travels become more metaphorical than literal, and sharply engraved imagery is what links the pieces together in a truly compelling way.

The title poem, “Play Out the Match,” which is also the first, is brilliant. It tells a story of “Old oak of a man. Body / like a bunch of hard fists / an easy clench on a pint of the black stuff,” a man who faces his physical death as he would a football match. Despite putting on a brave face, the man “Faced suddenly with something / you couldn’t square off with in the rainy streets,” feels fear. Given the diagnosis of illness and coming death, how does a person respond? Does one give up, give in, or play out the life given to him?

Poems like “St. John’s,” “Signal Hill,” and “Cursing Your Name” will speak to anyone who has had the sheer pleasure of visiting Newfoundland. In “Signal Hill,” for instance, the reader is swept up into memory as Knox writes: “a fathom of jagged rock beneath me the ocean brawls / wind sprinted from Ireland / swoops and sails gulls like paper / over Smallwood’s harbour.” In “Outport,” the poet wonders “What would I have been three centuries ago?,” questioning the tendency to over-romanticize our cultural roots. He refers to his ancestors sinking “Irish spades into gritty earth” and thinking “all the way back to famished Dublin,” of “hungry days on famished farms.” He realizes how heredity works into the equation of ancestry when he writes, “My wiry body is my great grandmother’s” and that this “island has built us of bone.”

Whether he writes of a “slate sky/Ontario,” Montreal, Trenton, Toronto, Glasgow, or St. John’s, Knox’s poetry is bright with his sharp imagery. In “Ganonoque,” for instance, he writes, “This grey late autumn / has made a wind-shivering boneyard / of our orchard.” In “1920” he writes, “February is a mailed fist clenching my tender ear.” Wherever you look in this collection of poems, the images are wonderfully crafted. Knox’s poems are stellar pieces, and their artistry is a testament to his obvious poetic talent.