Five Minutes Ago They Dropped the Bomb

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

Chris Faiers has published other chapbooks of poetry, many with his own press, Unfinished Monument Press. Five Minutes Ago They Dropped the Bomb is a collection of six poems and a polemic. In the polemic, Faiers asserts that poetry and politics go hand in hand. “Governments always recognize that intrinsic threat of poets to their rule.” “When poets aren’t being arrested, one should question their relevance.” The poems certainly support his opinion, but whether they will impress the government is questionable. Faiers’s poems are about the atom bomb that levels differences, the old poet-friend who has compromised his art by paying homage to university administrators, existential experience. “Worm Picking” describes the magic of an evening outside, “Peter” is a tribute to a friend. “The Poet Waiting at the Racetrack,” the best poem in the chapbook, is a delightful tongue-in-cheek portrait, wryly amusing and optimistic with a superb racetrack metaphor. Fortunately, Faiers’s assertion that poetry is political does not cloud the important issue, that poetry is art. Although some lines are awkward and some words clumsy, Faiers knows how to choose and use his words to create colourful pictures drawn from experiences that are transmitted to the reader.

Small presses such as Unfinished Monument should be commended for discovering struggling poets and displaying their work for the public eye. In a chapbook of only 10 pages, however, one would hope for a typo-free manuscript; one is disappointed.