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Message: Reading Gary Michael Dault’s Southwester: 35 Poems Perhaps it's the July humidity, the kind of superheated air that reminds you wistfully of long country drives through faded brick-and-batten towns, roughly painted 'antiques' signs looming like mile-markers, produce stands tilting at the verge of the highway, clover, manure, skunk and dust mingling and oddly sweet as you pass a tractor turning onto a gravel sideroad. Or perhaps it's Gary Michael Dault's exquisite pen tracing snapshots of southwestern Ontario into poems perfectly evoking passage through rural Ontario, the roads long and the conversations short, the shadows of a hundred small towns stretching across the highway as if to broach an escape. Throughout Southwester: 35 Poems (limited handmade edition, Lyricalmyrical Press) are tensions arising in small towns whose appearance is the sign of their vanishing. A boarded-up hotel "where the road turns / as if to avoid it"; vacant lawnchairs sitting "like yearning parentheses"; a rural gas station whose ancient, teenaged attendant "stares at me / and leaves through his eyes." Each poem is numbered before it is named, like a series of concession roads, and as such the poems navigate memory the way the creases of a roadmap contain the crumbs of the journey. Dault writes, Somewhere between Cambridge and Dundas there's a place that has sausage rolls and we search it out getting hungrier as we first mistake gas station and general stores for it until there it is finally at the bottom of the next hill the sausage rolls flaky beyond belief so that in one tentative bite there is an exultation of buttery crumbs all over your pant legs and down into the car seat and you think well there's nothing to lose now so you carry on eating and the car fills up with this warm new landscape. But if both traveler and landscape are transformed by the journey, Dault's poems remind us that we cannot truly know a country if we only pass through it: there's no alignment when you're driving all rivers are perpendicular to you And it is this lyrical geometry that makes Southwester resonant, like a kind of poetic physics in which both distance and duration are transformed by perspective: "some lowcut girl / nobody to see her sunrise breasts", main street storefronts looming in recollection "but maybe that's just / because you were small," fields like "long quadrilaterals / pitted against you / for you know you will never / attain an order like that," Highway construction where No detour is temporary the way it claims every dislocation leaves long damage when you are given the highway back you cannot resume the original speed of your dignity 'Southwester' is country terminology for a gale blowing from the southwest. At this time of year southwesters appear when humid days grow overcast with the slow gyre of storm clouds forming overhead. The wind rises and stills suddenly, droning cicadas disappear into silence, and "you can see it coming / grey over the mustard fields / trees empty their pockets." You ask directions to the highway while gassing up, wondering whether the town you are leaving will vanish in the downpour. But later, on the highway you notice So many trucks on the 401 It's like driving down the main street of a town that's moving with you. [In conjunction with the Imagining Toronto project, Amy Lavender Harris writes regularly about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities.] www.readingtoronto.com
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