For rob mclennan, poetry is a way of seeing, and what is seen in harvest: a book of signifiers is always a landscape as it inhabits the poet and his various personae. In the absence of capital letters, with only minimalist punctuation, and with a denial of the possessive case, (all formal signifiers of precedence and ownership), these poems do not appropriate the landscapes of their gaze, but rather liberate them.
What is harvested here are the signifiers for journeys: tickets, postcards, letters—recording unseemly haste, enforced idleness, losing one’s way, and sometimes finding it again. All coloured in the deceptive hues of a populist and egalitarian style, these poems are allowed to signify their own powerful and at times devastating ambiguities, from “a magic more elusive than any spell she whispered” to “the salt waste left by the flood, where no seed grows.”
the present is a small thing & moves very fast
in the same river, which as they say,
moves. it takes
& takes & takes. a polaroid
too long
to develop.
“For mclennan, there are no rules. His poetry defies convention or classification.”
— Room Magazine
rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017.
…won’t want to emerge from. From “The Harvest Sturdies”: “from a hand-me-down couch through the …
…Lac”: “I grew it I tended it I harvested dried and stored it I knocked it over and …
…of hard labour: fishing for cod, planting and harvesting potatoes, logging on the north shore of the …