Chaulk’s poetry debut filled with power, precision
Poetry is often thought as something dreamy, detached from the real world. Mike Chaulk’s debut collection infuses lyrics with workmanship, makes poetics of the utilitarian, the grit, and, as he frequently denotes it, the haunted.
The opening 47 poems are titled by numbers, interconnected sonnets each a page long.
The first introduces references to white bears, lopping through the stanzas, as the creature then stalks through several poems: “Another White Bear Island. Lots of those, / first mate says, / I knows one’s out Groswater. // Lot of those, islands named for white bears seen, / that ghost now the north with translated name”; “When suns a certain way, the nanuk shines, / ancient on dark granite overlooking. Is this / the only bear I’ll see? … is this enough? / It guards there in legend. Is this enough?”
Throughout the poems words and figures — motifs and icons — ricochet and echo, and phrases repetitively chime.
And he quickly sketches the movable setting, aboard Labrador coastal boats: “On deck, cold cuts dark and fills bones to seize, / snowy barrens, clenched muscles pushing to flake / the spring line to fairlead, tie a heaving line. / Two more cleaved ‘hands show, grunt, climb to the bow.” Family is also a throughline. In the fourth poem, his father pilots his Beaver aircraft over the bush when “the engine gulps thick, stops, and young father / looks out to where my cloud-shaped mother, / his future, births chains of bright years, and me.”
There’s the striking image of the plane as “a steel whale among clouds.”
Such crisp visuals are a constant.
In another poem, for example, when he is suddenly awoken, “Light makes lucid the world like a new slide / from a projector I’m still stuck inside.” Alongside this people consume Purity crackers and bologna sandwiches, Rockstar energy drinks, and Coor’s Light.
Labrador’s geography is a constant, often seen from the sea. “The ship steams abreast distant Mokami”; “Chart’s changed, I scan closely, / read a Sweethome Island off starboard.”
And there’s an extended cycle about Capt. George Cartwright, the English army officer, trader, and explorer whose name is literally inscribed on the land: “The Captain’s marble cairn in the corner looks / out the bay, spotted with blood-red lichen. / Sent over here from England. A land he loved / and claimed by name, or else named for later. // I’m unsure.”
These combined elements give the writing compactions of place, persona, and pace.
It’s often quite personal in memory and conversation.
“My dad tells this one story of firsts, / of the time, not so young, he learned // the taste of watermelon, of how kids / would chase the shipment through Northwest River, // dirt clouds ripping off tires along the bridge / to hard Sheshatshiu, an Innu reserve. // He calls it the best thing he’s ever had, / a new taste paramount.”
Chaulk’s formatting is honed and individual, incorporating parenthetical asides, dashes pushing lines, and textual gaps, even missing words when the thought they would express is simply too awful.
There’s often dialogue within the pieces.
While watching “Hockey Night in Canada,” “Where’s that old Michael Ryder to now?” Or “The Young and the Restless,” “The missus watched it for years, got hooked / at some time or other not half bad though.”
There are also considerations of language within language, as with Chaulk’s weighing of his accent: “Five months in now and full as an egg with it, / though I still keep the o in boys for the b’ys / so as not to overstep, taunting their / Bud Lights, ubiquitous, over card games.”
The lines have such flow and layers: “Some seamen don’t dream at sea, old tales say / and when ashore, they only dream of the sea. // So grows their ghosts, their pain-courting hecklers, / burning like lit fossils in shallow ground.”
The last 15 pages are enfolded in “Crown of Broken Blood.”
This cycle explicitly wrestles with being mixed-race.
“I was young, confused for why I looked not / like those with clout, unable to transform / lack of light skin to positive presences, proud– / of something else … I’m convinced that not / knowing how to say I’m Indigenous / means therein burns a lie closing in on / dim-lit embers capable of full fire …”
These bounce one piece’s last line up to the following’s first.
Again this is poetry of supple leaps, fluid links, and precision.