Iron Mountain

Lynn Szabo is an assistant professor of English and Coordinator of
Freshman English Courses at Trinity Western University.

Frutkin, a Governor General’s Award and Archibald Lampman Poetry Award
nominee, has published six novels. Divided into two “books” with
several sets of subsections, his third volume of poetry sculpts images,
motifs, and insights offered by mountain and wilderness. In Book I,
Chinese landscape and museum art are the genesis for narrative verses
that become talking pictures of the characters in the art pieces engaged
by the poems’ speakers. The telescoping panoramas move speaker and
reader suddenly into the poet’s regions, transposed onto this
engagement: “Inside Gatineau Park” or the Royal Ontario Museum, the
speaker’s musings are in sharp relief with their ancient sources.

In Book II, the poet contemplates the rhythms and origins of space and
time, our wilderness in which there is “No pattern. No order. No
chaos. … No end. Nowhere to begin.” He sees cosmic and communal
entropy in the “Cubist newspaper” crumpled and tossed in the
windswept city streets, “phrases cut and clipped into something more
poetic / than the daily news.” The speaker toasts the immensity of
space and human impotence in face of worlds in which “Euclid is flying
apart— … He is done measuring for good.” In such a world, “we
humans never quite fit.”

This collection paints finely orchestrated intuitive and synesthetic
sensibilities of texture and sound (“and now he listens like sunlight
to rosebuds / blowing open”) The poems are filled with literate
allusions (to Lorca, Beaudelaire, Degas, and Daguerre, among others) and
painterly metaphors satiated with color and tactility. The poems’
speakers sculpt pictures into stories in which geography is dissolved as
the reader moves frenetically from Ontario to Venice, Madrid to Paris,
and Montreal to New Orleans. The stanzas breathe naturally and are at
ease. Frutkin negotiates the spaces between writer and reader, words and
silence, paper and ink with enormous musicality and deftness in his
vibrant and stimulating pleasures: “For him, all music aspires to the
condition of language.”