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Did we really believe
our love could have survived
on that boat something or other
had us build of spavined cedar
pitched and thatched against the flood,
with two of nothing but ourselves on board –
no raven to hoist behind the rain,
no dove returning with a sprig of green?

Notes on the Poem
In "Ark", John Glenday subverts an age-old narrative. With a matter of a few incisive edits and reversals from the expected, he uses the upended story to frame a relationship in an almost startling and certainly unflinching light.

Whether viewed as symbolic, mythological or even historically possible, the narrative of Noah's ark culminates in what is universally viewed as messages of salvation, hope and peace. Glenday takes a few pointedly placed negatives - most strikingly, "two of nothing but ourselves" - and drains all optimism from the future of the "love" depicted in this brief, prickly poem. "No raven" and "no dove" will bring back useful or promising signs. That the vessel in question is built of ruined ("spavined") material seems to seal that love's fate.

Here's a challenge to this poem's construct, and to any poem that assumes knowledge of a story or metaphor underlying it: how does this poem work if a reader somehow doesn't know what Noah's ark is? Glenday has crafted this poem's crisp musings such that it could stand as two people embarking on an ill-fated voyage unto itself, with no antecedents. But what if either the reference is obscure or the poem relies on the reference too much to get its meaning across?

A New Year’s white morning of hard new ice.
High on the frozen branches I saw a squirrel jump and skid.
Is this scary? he seemed to say and glanced

down at me, clutching his branch as it bobbed
in stiff recoil – or is it just that everything sounds wrong today?
The branches

clinked.
He wiped his small cold lips with one hand.
Do you fear the same things as

I fear? I countered, looking up.
His empire of branches slid against the air.
The night of hooks?

The man blade left open on the stair?
Not enough spin on it, said my true love
when he left in our fifth year.

The squirrel bounced down a branch
and caught a peg of tears.
The way to hold on is

afterwords
so
clear.

Notes on the Poem
In this simple but surprisingly layered poem, Anne Carson weaves together many subtle devices to illustrate the narrator's nervous excitement at venturing forth and making a fresh start. The day is cold and harsh as the narrator faces a new year without her true love, departed after five years. However, she has the whimsical presence of mind to find parallels in her situation with that of a squirrel making its perilous way through frozen branches.

The Poetry Archive, a generous UK poetry resource and repository, notes that "an alertness to the frequency of the line-endings is part of reading poetry." Carson brings points in the poem to the alert reader's particular attention through the use of some crisply placed line-endings.

"The branches

clinked."

That stark sound - made more striking set alone on its own line - marks an abrupt pause in the squirrel's progress. Is it a point at which the narrator, too, needs to ponder before leaping?

"The way to hold on is

afterwords
so
clear."

And how about those final three lines? Are they terse, desperate, slipping, clutching? Then again, does the word "clear" have so much more impact, emphasis and resonance set all on its own?

Above, blue darkens as it thins to an airlessness wheeling
with sparkling American junk
and magnetic brains of astronauts. We are flung
across our seats like pelts.

Some of us are eating small sandwiches.
Some of us have taken pills and are swallowing
glass after glass of gin.

We were never intended to view the curve of the earth

so they give us televisions, a film
about a man and his daughter who teach a flock
of Canada geese to fly.

Wind shear hates the sky and everything in it,
slices at right angles across the grain of currents
like a cross-cut saw.

Fog loves surprises.

We have fuel, fire, Starbuck’s coffee, finite
possibilities of machinery. A pilot with human hands
and nothing for us to do, turbulence being to air
what hope is to breathing.
A property.

Far below, a light comes on in the kitchen of a farmyard
turning with its piece of the world into shadow.
Someone can’t sleep

an engine noise falls around the house like snow, vapour trails
pulled apart by frontal systems locked overhead
since high school. Imagines
alien weathers that unfurl in time zones
beyond the horizon.

Notes on the Poem
How do poets decide how to title their poems? And when do they settle on the titles ... before, during or after the poem is composed? Do you ever wonder about that as you're reading a poem? Karen Solie's "In-Flight Movie", from her 2001 collection "Short Haul Engine," is an intriguing piece to which these questions could be applied.

Solie or her narrator in "In-Flight Movie" is clearly not a fan of travelling by air. From the first line, Solie builds a manic sense of someone both hyper aware of her simultaneously enclosed and unnervingly boundless surroundings, and also profoundly powerless and inert, as she and her fellow passengers are "flung / across our seats like pelts." Fear, nervousness, denial and attempts at distraction abound, from eating to pill-taking to imbibing. "We were never intended to view the curve of the earth" "Wind shear hates the sky and everything in it" and "Fog loves surprises" are especially terse declarations from someone who thinks this mode of travel is unnatural, and therefore is anticipating some form of mishap. 

But the title of the poem would suggest the focal point is the movie playing on this possibly ill-fated flight. Is the irony that the film is about "a man and his daughter who teach a flock / of Canada geese to fly", adding fuel to the narrator's tense litany of woe, that the airline would be that insensitive with already nervous passengers? Conversely, is Solie ruefully acknowledging that the uneasy traveller is finding the most tenuous of excuses - when, obviously, grievances about fuel, fire, machinery problems and the like are much more plausible - to be unhappy? Or is she deriving some desperate solace that anyone can be taught to fly in a pinch? 

Then again, perhaps the in-flight entertainment hasn't been the story about the Canada geese at all, but rather the wild imaginings of disaster. Finally, maybe it's the consoling view of a light on in a farmhouse kitchen, where someone can't sleep because, ironically, that person imagines and wishes she *was* on a plane.

My clock has gone although the sun has yet to take the sky.
I thought I was the first to see the snow, but his old eyes
have marked it all before I catch him in his column of light:
a rolled up metal shutter-blind, a paper bale held tight

between his knees so he can bring his blade up through the twine,
and through his little sacrifice he frees the day’s headlines:
its strikes and wars, the weather’s big seize up, runs on the pound.
One final star still burns above my head without a sound

as I set off. The dark country I grew up in has gone.
Ten thousand unseen dawns will settle softly on this one.
But with the streets all hushed I take the papers on my round
into the gathering blue, wearing my luminous armband.

Notes on the Poem
"The Newsagent", a deceptively understated poem by Paul Farley, juxtaposes small, simple images and gestures against movements, activities and influences much broader in scope and implication. Doing so, what does Farley achieve in the poem's economical 12 lines?

The narrator's alarm clock opens the poem, waking him before sunrise. That the narrator is forced to rise so early suggests a demanding, menial, unnoticed and unappreciated vocation, but that plain declaration also has an element of pride to it. Not only does the narrator choose to be up before dawn, but it's almost as if he and his clock purposefully have the jump on the sun.

While the narrator convinces himself he can beat the sun, he also observes that it's his employer's actions that unleash the news. When the newsagent snips the binding around the newspapers, that brings forth the world's "strikes and wars, the weather's big seize up, runs on the pound." The conundrum is that what the newsagent is setting free are forces that the narrator surely doesn't welcome. If he has control, why isn't he releasing wonderful and benevolent things?

But the narrator doesn't allow himself to get dismayed. He picks up his papers, that cascade of woe unbundled by the newsagent, and makes his way out on his rounds. The changing colour of the sky hints that the sun will rise for another day. Till it does, the narrator's armband offers illumination.

From a dimly lit, perhaps bleak opening, has Farley left us with some defiant optimism after a mere and modest 12 lines?

The markets never rest
Always there are somewhere in agitation
Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat
Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons
Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 J mainframes
Across the firmament
Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets
As they make their nightlong journeys
Across the oceans and steppes

Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information
Trembling in the claw of Scorpio
Not an instant, then shooting away
Like an enormous cloud of starlings

Garbage scows move slowly down the estuary
The lights of the airport pulse in morning darkness
Food trucks, propane, tortured hearts
The reticent epistemologist parks
Gets out, checks the curb, reparks
Thunder of jets
Peristalsis of great capitals

How pretty in her tartan scarf
Her ruminative frown
Ambiguity and Reason
Locked in a slow, ferocious tango
Of if not, why not

Notes on the Poem
As the Griffin Poetry Prize judges' citation observes, August Kleinzahler's "The Strange Hours Travelers Keep is a masterful collection of work from a poet who inhabits the energies of urban life more fully than anyone currently writing." The poem from which this collection gets its title captures those energies in a fashion that is both fascinating and a bit unnerving.

Kleinzahler explores in this and other poems in this collection that sleepless sense of dislocation, time shifting and "always on" that is part of the modern state of being. As he observes that "the markets never rest" and information is continuously broadcast by endlessly churning computers, Kleinzahler also notes the intersections of and tensions between the natural and manmade worlds. That constantly spewing information behaves not unlike "incandescent frog spawn", then like "an enormous cloud of starlings."

Garbage scows on the river and the always awake airports add to the poem's ceaseless motion. That motion becomes an unending stream, as "food trucks, propane" and anxious human beings are all grist for the mill that is the peristalsis - essentially, the continual digestive process - of big cities.

But one anxious human being - the reticent epistemologist - somehow pauses the city's flow of energy, or at least manages to find a way to pause within it. Whether her "ruminative frown" is produced by professionally pondering the nature of knowledge or by simply scrutinizing how well she has parked her car, she has resisted the sweep of those urban energies and wrestled them, on her own terms, into a "slow, ferocious tango."