Tag: Michael Trussler

42. Michael Trussler, 10:10

A book titled '10:10' by Michael Trussler, featuring a white cover with circular images and text, placed on a wooden surface.

I haven’t been reading much for a couple of years, and that’s bothered me–a lot. The reasons aren’t hard to understand. I’ve been working too much and not sleeping enough, which has meant that when I get home, I’m too tired to concentrate. I still don’t get enough shuteye, but my job has eased up a little, and so I’ve been able to get at a few of the new books that have found their way into our house. Yes, even though I’ve struggled to read anything, I’ve still been buying books; I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s one of the things writers do.

I ordered Michael Trussler’s 10:10 when it came out last fall. Michael is a colleague and a friend, and I admire his writing. It’s erudite, thoughtful, concerned with the ways we are damaging the planet and ourselves, our horrific histories of genocide, and yet it also takes visual art–Vermeer, Rothko, Brueghel–as a sign of our potential, as a species, to do good things, to make beautiful things. Unlike me, Michael doesn’t seem to struggle to find time or energy to read, if the dense texture of allusions and quotations in 10:10 is any evidence–and it is. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a year, and I was finally motivated to open it when I learned, early yesterday morning, that it has been shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Literary Award. Yes, of course, many worthwhile books don’t get that kind of recognition, and yet I am so happy that Michael’s work is being recognized. He’s been prolific over the past several years, publishing three books of poetry and a memoir since 2021, and I know how much hard work and sacrifice has gone into that productivity. I knew 10:10 was on the shelf at work where I keep poetry, and I brought it home last night. I ended up devouring it in one sitting. It is a wonderful book.

The title made me think about time–Timex watches used to always be advertised with the hands showing “10:10,” and that’s true of other analog timepieces as well–and sure enough, the passing of time, and the way it is experienced in simultaneous layers, are both themes here. That simultaneity is hard to evoke in writing, since language tends to be linear (one word, one sentence, following another), but Michael plays with punctuation, enjambment, and textual interruptions of various kinds to suggest the way he might be sitting in his home office, writing, while remembering standing outside the building where Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz, lived, while also recalling things she wrote about the experience of living in Nazi-occupied Holland. “The Edges of What’s Known?” includes lines from other poems or essays in the book–I’ve learned from Tanis MacDonald not to force genre categories onto hybrid texts, and I’m going to be careful not to make this mistake here–as another way to indicate a slightly different form of simultaneity. But that’s not exactly what 10:10 means. It’s a reference to Edward Kienholz’s large 1965 installation The Beanery, a life-size interior of a bar in which all of the human figures have clock faces, set to ten minutes after ten, where their actual fleshly faces would otherwise be. The title essay/poem, “10:10,” recalls different visits to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where Kienholz’s installation is located, in different decades of the author’s life, and it considers how his relationship to visual art has changed over time, as well as its connection, however oblique, to human violence: the war in Vietnam, the Holocaust. It ends with a couple of lines of poetry that interrupt a story about a 2014 visit to the Stedelijk, lines that seem to situate the text right here, in Regina, on a wintery day, far from Amsterdam, and yet on the following page we see a photograph (the author’s photographs appear at key points in this book) of a canal in that European city, “impossibly far from / here–.” Complexity, simultaneity, violence, and visual art as a kind of compensation: it’s all here.

So too are the climate crisis and the extinction event humans are causing, notably in “Solastalgia.” That title refers to Glenn Albrecht’s neologism, a word that combines nostalgia, solace, and desolation, or so I learned in a poetry workshop this week; it’s the sense of loss we experience when a place or ecosystem has been destroyed by human activity. The fragments in that text juxtapose different moments in Michael’s life, all of them suggesting the inexorable and accelerating passage of time, the need to love what remains NOW, because it’s leaving: “Better order now, the sky recommends, restaurant’s closing.”

I could go on about this book, which to be honest deserves a better, more skilled reader of poetry than I am. The winners of the Governor-General’s Literary Awards will be announced in a couple of weeks. I haven’t read the other nominees–that would be a worthwhile project, wouldn’t it?–and so I have no idea how 10:10 compares to them, but I’m happy that yesterday’s news prompted me to bestir myself to read it. Congratulations, Michael–you deserve the recognition.

14. Medrie Purdham, Little Housewolf

I’m teaching my colleague Medrie Purdham’s book Little Housewolf this week, so I spent a couple of hours this afternoon rereading it. It’s such a delight, this exploration of the small and the domestic, of family and relationships. Looking back through the book, I see poems about a hinge, a slight burn on a woman’s foot, a painted turtle, insects, a baby tooth, a thimble, mug shots from the nineteenth century, a cup of herbal tea, a misheard word, Lego, a child’s bath. Even the ekphrastic poems tend to consider miniatures or similar images, like newspaper clippings. Well, those are the ostensible subjects, but the poems themselves reach far beyond those objects or images. “The Thimble’s Bucket List,” for instance, which is probably my favourite, is really (I think) about dreams, ambitions, desires for accomplishments unlikely to be realized: “To play a shell game with two others and a pearl,” “To stand empty in a crosswind, whiffling,” “To jamb the torturer’s tong like a stone in the beak.” The exception, the desire that’s within the thimble’s reach, brings us back to earth, to another small domestic object, a Dorset-wheel button:

No, instead, to work.

To settle into detail. To work a Dorset-wheel button, spoked with a
hundred stitches. To keep revisiting the centre. To be touched again,
again, again, again, again.

What the thimble really wants is connection, labour, a focus on the specific and the concrete, and the beautiful–not unlike the poems in this appropriately short and lovely book, which brings so much into its ambit. Every time I read Little Housewolf, I am checking references, tracking down allusions. This time, I found myself searching for “sheep may safely graze” (a lyric from a Bach aria, written by Salomon Franck), “stars will never harm you” (I couldn’t find that one, but it must be something; I’m going to have to ask), and “the war of the / Romantics” (a dispute among composers in nineteenth-century Germany), among other things I couldn’t place and/or hadn’t heard of before. There are others, but I uncovered them on earlier excursions through Little Housewolf. There’s an entire world in these poems. Their focus on small things does not mean they’re not ambitious or even global in their embrace.

I don’t think I’ve ever quoted a cover blurb in this blog, but my colleague Michael Trussler’s description of the language Purdham employs in this book is too appropriate not to include here: “Listen, you can almost overhear the individual words murmuring gratitude at suddenly finding themselves appearing on the same page together.” Yes, the linguistic surprises, the absolute accuracy and felicity of the diction–wow. Would that I could write like that.