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Harmonics

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By Jesse Patrick Ferguson

(Freehand Books)

"If I could file my tongue smooth / as sea glass," says Fredericton's Jesse Ferguson, "I would reassemble the whale, / set him swimming like an eloquent word / through endless noise."

From cover to closing lines, his debut collection accomplishes even more. Designer Natalie Olsen's page-number placement and use of Ferguson's visual art (a quill pen "become visible as countless white crests") merit special attention.

Although Harmonics is divided formally into two parts, fundamental tones and overtones, each riffs off the other. Ferguson's keen interest the creative arts (particularly writing, music-making, and painting) and Suzukiesque preoccupation with conservation is balanced by gut-busting, self-deprecating humour.

In Via Rail Valediction, for example, he spoofs Shakespeare, Donne, and William Carlos Williams: "Parting is such a lame wheelbarrow, / that I'll push through vastness till it be narrow."

In like vein, lines from Ovid's epic Amores conjure the ghost of Bear ("tireless yapper of backyard hours") for an animal lover who'd make Frisbees of "self-indulgent O's."

In Its Place and During Wind and Snow, both Maritime weather-related and greater than one page, show Ferguson's respect for masters of his craft. Like Patrick Lane's Winter, the epigram of the first illustrates close kinship with - and feigned resistance to - ideas of Wallace Stevens and John Keats:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

"The river's been shivved in the year's / prison yard," Ferguson writes in the second: "Out here, Keats speaks no louder / than the squeak of my boot / on the hardpack."

Editor Don McKay ­­­- whose influence may be observed in Halifax, Eastern Ontario Pastoral, and Devil's Music - has been gentle with him, which is all to the good.

An unerring ear for the sea surge will come. At the same time, the power and rich variety of lyrics such as Un, In the Wings and The Long Wait demonstrate that Ferguson's voice is as near divine as anyone could wish.

Imagine, Reader, your being Venus - "not gracing a half-shell / but running fingers along / the water-worn angles of a whale vertebra" as ocean "finds equilibrium, / an axe is forgotten, a feather / takes a long time to fall."

- reviewed by DIANE REID

For The Daily Gleaner