By Catherine Owen
Ghost Work
by Robert Colman
Palimpsest Press (2024)
The elegy, for me, is poetry’s core. You have no choice but to take risks, delve deep, accept the dark. And it’s a truly needed genre, even by those who don’t generally read poems. I’ve personally been the poet laureate of funerals for total strangers whose families never yearned for a poem prior and suddenly, for the service or memorial card, they do. Boom, illumination.
Robert Colman’s Ghost Work is a spectrally slender collection or perhaps feels so due to my relentless hunger for the elegy (though there were days I couldn’t even open the book as certain pieces made me too weepy). The combination of Colman’s pared-down lyricism and that coiling craft of recurrent lines in pantoums and triolets. I must say I DID miss the inclusion of a villanelle, along with his unraveled sonnets and ghazals offers the reader a teetering feeling, a poise on the edge of loss.
In five short sections that appear to honour, as the final title states, “The Last Five Minutes” of Colman’s father’s life, he carries us on the brief and yet endless journey between the forgettings of dementia (“He remembers nothing of panic or fear, dark houses/ringing a doorbell to tell a neighbour he is lost” – January Storm), the interruptive fading-consciousness of The Memory Clinic poems (“Am I still me?/I breathe/towards a voice”), and a son’s realization of the shade his father is slipping into (“I saw your body/balter on a stair…we went -/you leaning blind…Your robe/loose/as feathers” – How You Left). Oh how I love “balter”! And the birds that enter, entrance us throughout all the sequences, from metonymies of “wing beats” and an “egg-yolk yellow” tie, “bluebirds through the blinds,”; the Penguin books in his father’s library by association, the “bird-like words,” “quail’s eggs,” the “Blue birds” that “hover over a warble of mother-/voice” and “nightingales”. But then, “We’ve lost the ear to identify the bird,” the warding off of a bird-resonant ailment “thrush,” “No birds assaulting worms on the lawn” the day he died, and finally, the whole poem, “On the inadequacy of the trapped-bird metaphor” that ends, “the bird unappeased/cracks feathers in your chest.”
But perhaps it is the strain towards transference that creates the most poignant instances in Ghost Work as with the first piece, “The Bell,” where the son speaks to his father: “Did I tell you?/I’m gardening/from seed this year. Trying to recall/in the way you can’t now…so I plant/the phone, too, its fragile/opaque root a way of reaching out to you.” I can hear this frail and determined phone conversing with Kayla Czaga’s father’s hairbrush or Richard Harrison’s father’s almost-lost jar of ashes, a dialogue in which everything, in the end, signifies, and nothing, ever, fully encapsulates love.
Catherine Owen is the author of 15 collections of poetry and prose. Her latest books are Riven (ECW 2020) and the essay collection Locations of Grief (Wolsak and Wynn 2020). She also writes reviews for Marrow Reviews at WordPress.com, hosts a poetry podcast called Ms. Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws, and runs the online magazine The The.