REVIEWS

Pomona Summer: Poems by Allan Briesmaster,Art by Holly Briesmaster

Hidden Brook Press. A 32 page book of poetry and artwork,

Cover Art by Holly Briesmaster, Cover design by Richard M. Grove.

ISBN 1-894553-62-4 $12.95 per copy.

Reviewed by Katherine L. Gordon, author, editor, publisher, judge and reviewer.

On this grey April day, Allan and Holly Briesmaster’s book Pomona Summer brightened my mail-box like a square from a summer quilt. The shape is so appealing, a wild-flower burst on a pond-green background riots from the cover. Allan chose an intriguing approach that resembles a ramble through the park, unfolding in four long poems of many stanzas, covering his summer of sojourns in Pomona Mills Park from June until late August. His verses capture the compact imagery of haiku though they are more flexible in shape and line, and redolent with delicious summer immersion. Innovative language and exciting spacing technique add drama and enjoyment to the sights and sounds of singing summer: “deepgreen”, “In/out tricklery”, “constant-quavery”, “Cattails fatted on green juice of earth”. The rustle, breeze and beauty of summer are exquisitely caught, as is the life of the park. “Horned & armoured, stingered ones” dive through the verses, birds dip and slide, vivid in Allan’s words and his keen eye for movement and beauty.

Holly Briesmaster’s art is another dimension of this beautiful book. I am reminded of pyramid paintings where the essence of things most loved in life decorate the dark. Holly can freeze a duck amidst stylized pond plants so that you can absorb the icon of pond-dreaming, or she can convey the flurried movement of swallows feasting rapidly and gracefully as the day ends. These two gifted people can elaborate an image with a sameness of spirit, yet distinctive visioning. Holly’s pond-scape on Page 6 is a place where you might expect to find a water nymph among the reeds, a magic part of the park echoed in Allan’s words: “tint-of-bone,” “that one-third horned moon”, “brown-tip cattails, tall as I/ make alien shade”.

As “the light narrows” in the unfolding days we watch the charmed circle of summer close. Allan says “most fades ... past recall,/ while ‘art’ undarks one small candle.” They have taken us into the sanctuary of Pomona Park and brought the summer to a vibrant space in time. That small candle lights the spirit. The final accompanying picture fret-works into another season. You will use this antidote of warmth and light to un-calendar the harsh days of winter. Summer will be in your hand and heart each time you curl up with this bright symphony of summer where the park is cameoed and there is waiting: “thick mauve wine;/ clover beside vetch.”

Katherine L. Gordon

April, 2005

Pomona Summer by Allan Briesmaster with artwork by Holly Briesmaster; Hidden Book Press, Toronto. Flat-spined, full-color cover, 32 pages, ISBN:1-894553-62-4.

Written as a series of walks through Pomona Park, this collection of epigraphic verses draws common breath with a fusion of different sources. As Allan Briesmaster says in his carefully worded postscript, the verses are not intended as haiku primarily, even though he is well aware of haiku and its traditions.

I tap no image
off grey whirls
below the pseudo- Japanese bridge

Summer in Southern Ontario is a short season. Here one can feel the heat, the slow pace, and the fleeting moments in the underlying small miracles of life.

Wood Duck siblings’ wise
fleet cruise, free of rivalry,
maintains paradise

with scant need to hide,
Heron targets his calm lookout:
through long shallow glide

Holly Briesmaster’s drawings are never an after-thought, but very much in the foreground as a true partnership in the nature of symbiotic haiga. Pomona Summer is a collection not to be devoured, but to be entered gently, quietly, lest we miss this shared world.

Sun sparks behind trees; ...
I’ll leave. -
For me, or not, may the rest stay of these.

I feel the “haiku world” would be hard put to come up with better. These are koans of fact, not formula. The dedication To Our Friends could as easily be With Our Friends drawing in an inclusively wide circle.

most fades ... past recall,
while “art” undarks one small candle.
they flare on, till Fall.

Written by Edward Baranosky

Weighted Light,

Allan Briesmaster, watershedBooks, 1998.
First appeared in Fiddlehead: Autumn 1999.
by Adam Dickinson

One has a sense of walking into a headwind of snow when reading Allan Briesmaster’s Weighted Light. Indeed, weighted light itself could be a fall of snow, a condensing from an overcast. At first, blustery, the lines come to you with syntactical tangles that are startling, but they win you to their rhythm. The poems create their own kind of amble at times, which becomes unconscious in its effect, like recognizing a friend from behind on the street.

In one of the opening poems of the book “By Public Transit,” the poet creates a jangle of sounds and pauses: “Chubby acned faces/ flush. Whisper. Booksack-weighted;/ giggling through their braces.” Sentence fragments and words left to dangle at the end of lines, or separated by spaces within the body of the poem, recur throughout the collection.

Yet, alliteration, occasional rhymes and other structural concerns are also common, tending to further complicate the texture of the rhythm as syntactical breaks are counterbalanced by patterned sounds and iambic thrusts. The occasional pauses in the syntax serve as interjections, sometimes forcing a consideration of a sentence in different ways. They create the sense of a sculpture, a removing of the hands for a moment and a stepping back:

Such a reptilian repose you little

brown wound river! Safe asleep within

your so broad green inviolable borders of reeds

More a fixture in this wilderness

than the massed beaver- and man-bitten trees you keep

at distance Unhistorical

as those far rounded cliffs you or

old glaciers maybe once unmade (“Reedy River”)

Whether the glint of a comet in its interstellar course, or the glowing bulge of an apple squeezed from the background of a tree, light in its myriad densities is considered in this book. The first section is entitled “Personal Cosmos,” and in it we are introduced to an “Onion Brunch” that, through the “butter light of Sunday noon,” “re-strings the mind.” The gestures of “Elemental malice” on Lake Superior’s north shore (“North Shore Suite”), and those of a mother lifting her giggling three-year old into the wind (“Mother and Girl”), are made to enact the things around them, made to reveal their own cosmology.

The second section of the book, “Light Bending,” consists of what the author calls “adaptations”: works inspired directly by other poets’ poems. They respond in tone mostly, transferring the meditative locus of one writer’s work to the circumstances of a sympathetic imagination. “In Curved Light,” for example, is written after Jan Zwicky’s “Absence,” from her book Songs for Relinquishing the Earth. The poem departs from Zwicky’s distilled observation that “When the sky is no longer a roof/ one’s eyes are finally open,” and comes to ponder its own lifting gaze:

You feel a plausibility hung through

the silence under the still trees newly bare.

Except the star-commingled branches tremoring.

They’re not asleep yet; it is the outbreak time

of the November buds. Light weight, on emptiness

Throughout Weighted Light we are made aware of a kind of toil at the bottom of many of the poems – people crowd onto buses, a lover positions himself in bed, birds persist in their maneuvers in the rain. Briesmaster holds these moments out before us and allows their own iridescent mechanics to flourish. He lets us feel the weight in our hands, the “cupped loop of fire fluttering at the wick.”

Copyright Aeolus House 2005