Evolution in Every Direction

Betsy Nuse, the former owner of Boudicca Books, is a Vancouver poet,
writer, and editor.

Evolution in Every Direction is a book of accessible, short prose poems. Brett’s subjects are poetic classics: love and sex, loneliness, plants, animals, and landscapes. But the “I” of this book, while attracted to these subjects, seems most of the time fearful or even bitterly alienated from them. Abandoned by his lover, lost in the outdoors, the speaker makes some connections with the brutishness or grandeur of nature, but feels more often threatened by the natural world, cut off from his own past and his unconscious. Only occasional moments of love or companionship evoke harmonious, sympathetic imagery.

Stylistically, most of the poems are statements, decorated with rough-hewn, at times even shocking, metaphors or modifiers. The resulting harsh juxtapositions can clatter in the ear (“the twitching scrape of branch bark”) or disrupt the reader’s visual imagination by their startling incongruity (tongue as a “fleshy thorn”). At their best (“The Compulsive Renovator”), the outrageous aggregations of images, like surrealistic collages, shock the reader into new consciousness. More often (“A Woman Alone in the Boneless Dark”), it seems the short poems can’t support their weight without collapsing.

The most effective poems in the collection are two longer pieces, “Evolution in every direction” and “Caver,” in which Brett takes time and space to build effects and create dramatic narrative. In both poems, the speaker merges with the forces of nature. In “Evolution,” he is midwife to five baby sharks at the end of a day spent slaughtering sharks while he tried to fish. In “Caver,” the narrator directs “you” to descent through the crawls and tunnels of a cave until you are hopelessly trapped in “the iron grip of the earth.” The wild images of “Caver” and the bloody descriptions of “Evolution” enhance the angry, desperate tone of these poems for a dramatic and coherent effect.