Holding Pattern

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

These are poems with an awareness of transience, mortality, and the
realization that in the moment something is glimpsed, that moment is
already passing. To try to fix such passing moments in words is the
poet’s job, and Shane Rhodes does it well: a spider’s web becomes
“nothing but a history of passage, / a thin line of grief
holding—steadfast / and heavy—a night in the 21st century.” In the
opening poem, “Night Storms,” a long-stopped pocket watch begins to
tick in response to some change in wind or barometric pressure, and
becomes the vehicle for remembering its first owner, the poet’s
grandfather, as well as other elder members of his family.

The 54 poems are a mix of free verse and prose poems, and cover subject
matter as diverse as goose hunters and a piano tune wafting on a breeze.
Rhodes will sometimes evoke or even quote Emily Dickinson or Franz Kafka
and their own musings on mortality. But the overall tone is clearly
Rhodes’s own.

The one section of the book that does not work as well is the title
poem, which takes up the final 12 pages of the collection. A sort of
poetic “to do” list, it is studded with footnotes purporting to
explain certain allusions, but in fact serving as either cheeky wordplay
or parodies of scholarly notes, or both. I found it an unsatisfying
close to the book, but the earlier poems are evocative and enjoyable
enough that Rhodes may be forgiven.