Heavy Horse Judging

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This is Summerhayes’s second book of poetry. It is one that, after an unimpressive beginning, improves as the book progresses. “Speak the ordinary / words clearly / without insistence,” the opening poem states, and such work here follows that dictum. At its best, this style can result in the clarity, simplicity, and unpretentiousness of “winterbreak”:

slow music from the radio
the long afternoon
your breast on my cheek
your slow breathing.

Often, however, the poem fails to transcend the personal, or it remains trite, one-dimensional, as unexciting as an elementary equation. Some poems on death exhibit fine sense of rhyme, a gift the poet should use more often.

The middle section — the poet’s reflections on his garden — exhibits the same strength and weaknesses. There is a constant, irritating tendency to yoke observation to philosophy: seeing light after rain, for example, the poet states, “I must read some lesson by it in the leaves.” One should either fully integrate learning and experience, or report experience as fully and vividly as possible. When Summerhayes elects the latter course, as in “Birdwatching, “ he can be delightful:

row on row, cranking up growls,
squawking, scoffing, ready to chuck
the whole thing and go hungry.

The book’s second half redeems it. The travel poems are particularly impressive, the poet’s keen eye for detail tempered with empathy —“billboard letters have been given up to whites / white for indifference, white for loneliness.” The poetry becomes longer and more ambitious; often retrospection is evoked by a figure in the present.

The book’s final section deals with memories and observations; unlike its beginning, the voice is more confident, more willing to explore. There is sheer exuberance in the listing of “Stout Old World Weeds”; more interesting diction throughout (winter apples are “opulent eccentrics’); and the title poem, in which a Percheron is exhibited, is a fine example of content dictating form:

Fine white
Hair flowing
Like wings around
Clodhopper hoofs.

Heavy Horse Judging is a book of potential, sometimes realized, but all too often not. It could easily be stronger if cut by a third.