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    Days Into Flatspin
    Days Into Flatspin
    Days Into Flatspin
    Ebook100 pages40 minutes

    Days Into Flatspin

    By Ken Babstock

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Days into Flatspin is Ken Babstock's extraordinary second collection and it reveals a poet in full flight, fearless and technically brilliant.

    Diving into and then beyond what is seen or the coma of looking as one poem calls it, Babstock veers into the inner core of things, animals, and places through portals that exist all around us -- clothing, banisters, marshes, locks, wounds. And these are always entry points, always a means by which to go forward and further into, forcing decisions about whether to continue on or retreat and revealing that we rarely have any choice at all.

    Babstock opens everything to investigation, rupturing the limitations of the eye and the strictures of the poetic form: a sonnet is built from a Frisbee game, a love poem inspired by a cow, a gash inhabited by a field of crickets. And throughout his poetic landscape is a solitary bird -- watching, passing overhead, biding time, always present. Days into Flatspin is a soaring collection.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHouse of Anansi Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2001
    ISBN9780887849152
    Days Into Flatspin
    Author

    Ken Babstock

    Ken Babstock won Canada’s inaugural Latner Writer’s Trust Poetry Prize in 2014 for a body of work in mid-career. His fourth collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi, 2011), won The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for The Trillium Book Award. His previous collections of poetry include, Mean (1999), winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People's Poet Award, Days into Flatspin (2001), winner of a K.M. Hunter Award and finalist for the Winterset Prize, and Airstream Land Yacht (2006), finalist for The Griffin Prize for Poetry, The Governor General’s Literary Award, and The Winterset Prize, and winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, been widely anthologized in Canada, the UK, the US, and Ireland, most recently in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, and translated into Dutch, German, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, and French. All five previous titles were named Globe and Mail Top 100 Books of the Year. Recent poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and in Best of The Best Of Canadian Poetry. A book length poem, On Malice, written while in Berlin as one of DAAD’s International Artist Residents in 2011/12, was published in fall 2014 by Coach House Books to wide critical acclaim. Ken Babstock was born in Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto with his son.

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      Book preview

      Days Into Flatspin - Ken Babstock

      Carrying someone else’s infant past a cow in a field near Marmora, Ont.

      Summer gnats colonized her molasses black eyes, her flicking,

      conical ears. She moaned, a badly tuned

      tuba, and tassels of ick dripped

      from her black-

      on-pink nostrils like strings of weed sap. Waking from a rhythmic

      nap in my arm, you wobbled your head upright

      and stared at the great hanging skin-

      bag, teats, dry-docked

      hull of her ribs, anvil head, and the chocolate calm in her eyes

      that gazed back as I carried you closer, wading

      through goldenrod, mulleins, thistle

      all artfully bent

      clear of your soft exposed feet. Ants worried the punky

      tops of knotted fence posts, and caution flags

      of gossamer and milkweed fluff

      marked each rust-twist

      of barb, but that was all that divided you and her. I felt briefly

      happy to be prop, peripheral in this exchange,

      this unfolding bundle of knowing that

      was you in

      an overgrown ditch where the air swelled, shaking itself dry

      in the sumac. What was I shown that I haven’t retained?

      What peered back long before the cracked

      bell of its name

      came sounding off a tongue’s hammer and fenced it forever? Know

      that it happened, though — you were a drooling lump

      of living in the verdant riddle. That heifer

      remembers

      nothing of you. Let chicory, later in life, be bothersome blue

      asterisks footnoting one empty, unrecoverable

      hour of your early and

      strange.

      Bottled Rabbit

      A dream: of a stand of pole birch straight ahead

      that drink into their moon-white trunks what little

      light there is, then pose in stark relief to the darkening

      beyond. The silence, though, is too complete, not right,

      nothing shifts, whistles, or scuttles through the mess

      of undergrowth. The effect, not of waking in the midst

      of dark woods, the right road lost but the wringing

      of phantom hands, a poverty of words, as the mind tries

      to flush some authentic response to this charcoal study

      by Cézanne. When waking comes it’s to radio voices, a he

      and a she, on about slips, snares, the gutting shed, and mason

      jars. It’s the cbc, in a town I didn’t catch near Gander, doing

      a segment, it seems, on the unusual folk dishes and dietary

      habits of the ever-colourful Newfoundlander. . . .bottled rabbit,

      he’s saying, "today I’ll show you how to make bottled rabbit, or

      jarred rabbit, as it’s called in other parts." And as the host

      gives a slowed-down translation that imparts a tut-tut sound

      to all the t’s, I’m seeing that reticent, cardiganed man in

      the one-act by Pinter hauling up tiny masts on a glassed-in

      schooner; only it’s a matchstick bunny now, and he’s trying to

      attach the whiskers. "You can see I’ve already skinned, cleaned,

      and quartered this one" (the whiskers quiver, fall off, the ears

      lie back. The man sighs, lights up, starts in again) "and normally one

      rabbit, quartered, ’ll fit into each mason jar." It’s here the Pinter

      set fades, morphs, becomes my great-aunt’s kitchenette twenty

      years ago; the margarine-coloured curtains are closed, so

      the light takes on a clinical, formaldehyde glow, and two jars

      are eased down from a shelved row of preserved I-didn’t-know-

      whats. A lid twists, its wax and rubber seal breaks with a sucking

      sound, bits of white fatty pulp drop from the lip and she dunks

      two fingers and thumb through the film for the pink-brown, naked

      oblongs of meat. Perhaps we are what we remember we ate, but

      I’ve no memory, now, of what that rabbit tasted like, though I’m

      tempted to say it tasted like rabbit. The host, here, pipes in

      unbelievably with Wow, it tastes like chicken . . . And thusly

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