by Jim Nason
FRONTENAC HOUSE
2023/$19.95/80 pp.
In his eighth book of poems and fourth with Frontenac House (Calgary’s publisher of record for poetry), Toronto’s Jim Nason doesn’t subscribe to Margaret Atwood’s blunt poetry of witness, which she defined in 1981 in True Stories as “The facts of this world seen clearly/ are seen through tears.” Rather, for Nason, no matter how troubled what he shares with us makes him, seeing is filtered through beauty. Take the final lines of “Rilke’s Tree”: “Empathy is a tree in rain—/ dark, oiled bark,// far-reaching limbs, ready to receive again.” Such imagery is so beguiling it’s perhaps forgivable to miss Nason’s reminder that while standing in rain can chill us to the bone, a willingness to reach out warmly despite the world’s harshness is without fail an exemplary gesture.
Of course, not every line in Self-Portrait Embracing a Fabulous Beast flirts dangerously with gentleness and light. Nason sets his poems against a backdrop overcrowded by COVID (“See, you say, raising a hand no longer there.// You whistle and your notes fly above pot, pan and glass”), humanity’s threat to nature (“The dusty wings of a dead bat fanned out/ on the floor of a Congo cave”), our brutality to the marginalized (“a man face up on the grass,// wearing a half-on-his-face blue mask.// Police wake his sleeping buddy,/ send him away shirtless, staggering”), and the pratfalls of queer bodies pursuing love, whether through sustained intimacies or casual carnality (“Life with its belly to the ground, an elongated groan// instead of hiss—it’s hard not to project onto a snake—/ shame is the sex you had in the overgrown grass”). How to connect in a broken world preoccupies Nason, with a very full suite of poems giving lusty voice to pillow talk between men: “Hold me you’d said.// Then, lip to lip/ you on top// pushing. The art of surrender/ inch by deep inch.” Acquiescence doesn’t always ram through the deal: “My words unleashed/ then yours, bruising.// Descending stairs// and the exit door/ with no handle.”
Nason frames his diverse subjects with references to his peers among today’s gay-male poets, including myself, plus to his heroes in the centuries-long queer canon. Lorca, whom Franco’s ilk disappeared during Spain’s civil war, surfaces twice, including in the title poem, inspired by a portrait with the same title that the murdered poet made of himself. Rather than describing it (and Lorca) wash by closely-adhered-to wash of colour, Nason recounts his own life, impressively turning ekphrasis on its head: “I am many arms and feet/ a strutting/ glorious/ line-scribbled day.” His lightly limned personal tribulations polish the lens through which he glimpses ample grace to celebrate.
John Barton is an editor and the author of 12 books of poetry.
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