Never More There
By Stephen Rowe
Nightwood Editions, 2009
Review by Nick Schuurman
Where lies the line dividing history and folklore?
Weaving back and forth between memoir and myth, Newfoundland educator Stephen Rowe reveals the complexity of the question in Never More There, his debut collection of poetry. In this honest and unpretentious window into one man's intimate and difficult connection to the world around him and the history that lies behind it, the line is blurred, and at times altogether removed; the cord that runs between things ordinary and surreal becomes tangled in these reflections and recollections.
Never More There forms a diverse and loosely strung together collection. These are poems about history, landscape, and the forces of nature - about folklore and family. His poems are earthy, but not campy, avoiding the typical clichés of nature poetry. Rowe captures in his poetry a sense of both the ordinariness of life and the chaotic mystery that pervades it; light, wind and seaweed are in one sense objects of myth, while at the same time entirely commonplace.
The range of style in which Rowe writes is equally varied. The poems fluctuate from a more traditional metre, to free verse, to Haibun - a synthesis of prose and Haiku form. The latter is employed in one of the books' longer poems, "Below the Spruce," in which Rowe writes of his connection to the histories of the generations that preceded him. This retelling of stories by means of dense paragraphs, each followed by three simple and bare lines, produces a unique and moving effect:
you'll find me / below the spruce / a bear rooting soil
The collection's potency is in its descriptions. Rejecting the mechanically-catalogued adjectives of some poets, Rowe sets objects astir, giving them substance and movement. Consider, for example, from "Aubade," the following lines:
…the light crawls through the window, caterpillars the walls, / scuffs the floor to bed wheels tile by tile, climbs yellow-grey / bed legs screw by screw, blue bedsheets grain by grain
Mortality is the tender wound that is exposed throughout this book. The author's reflections on death and dying are frequently and forcefully pieced together in poems such as "If I Should Die," in which he tells the reader to "give my body to the sea," describing its harsh journey that will follow with equally and appropriately harsh imagery:
salt-stung, wave-whipped / among the indifferent flap of seaweed / But not before you burn my flesh / the flame's tongue lash and vigour,
and "Lords of Large Experience," a series of poems recounting the sudden death of a friend.
Though his poems are heavy with descriptions, the imagery he invokes is by no means static. Never More There is a book whose pages breathe with relationship. Rowe uses (and perhaps overuses) the means of personification to bring to life the likes of lakes, wind, snow, spring and winter. In the course of these lines the landscape becomes a companion, a stranger, a mythical creature. These careful anthropomorphisms give flesh to the vague and difficult reality of how we relate to our geography - a relationship that is, as his poetry would suggest, at times as strange and real as that shared between one human and another, if only in observance.
Never More There is landscape poetry, in a broad and almost spiritual sense of the word. Read it slowly and deliberately and keep an ear to the ground for things to come from Stephen Rowe.
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Nick Schuurman lives in Cambridge, Ontario where he is finishing up his degree in Theology and Intercultural Studies. He also writes at nickschuurman.blogspot.com.