Reviews: Greckol • Nyman • Flatt • Persaud • by Carl Watts • 4

Don’t Touch the Shoes: Four Post-COVID Poetry Reviews by Carl Watts   The first two incidents are connected by anti-Black racism; any connection with the third escapes me, and the association of the three seems somewhat crass. Given that the book is pitched as being “grounded in bodily, personal, and political experience,” it’s odd that even the Rohingya make several appearances. The arts are a uniformly progressive community in Canada. Given this reality, it’s puzzling that a book like Monitoring Station feels the need to show that it’s on the right side of every issue. Do any contemporary Canadian poetry collections take the position that anti-Black racism is not a problem? Do any express sympathy for anti-Rohingya, Burmese nationalist views? Maybe, but I haven’t come across them. Some of the references to global injustices seem extraneous; they limit the book’s purported traversal of planetary and generational expanses by showing its eagerness to conform with progressive tenets that are unmistakably of the present. But this is a complaint I have about many books from the last couple years – you don’t have to keep telling us you’re on the right side!, I find myself scribbling next to incongruous, dutifully horrified passages about Donald Trump. Perhaps I’m belabouring the point, but it feels necessary given that I had virtually the same beef with Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport. Like that novel, Monitoring Station is a flowing and ebbing engagement with possibility, paradox, and repetition. It’s firmly located in a formal lineage without being overly beholden to any texts or poets associated with that lineage—even if it’s maybe a bit too eager to show us how it ought to be categorized. It’s a compelling traversal of a range of recurring topical matters, even if it lingers a little too long on exactly the ones everyone expects it to. *** ON AND OFF THE HORNS: John Nyman’s A Devil Every Day and Michael Flatt’s I Can Focus if I Try John Nyman’s A Devil Every Day gets right to the point. I mean, if we can admit there are points that desperately need to be addressed. Which he sort of doesn’t admit to. That’s the point here, I think, and I think it’s a point worth making. Where am I going with this? I’ll start with the white elephant in the room.    [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Carl Watts {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]