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标题：David Zieroth. The Fly in Autumn.
作者：Wells, Zachariah
期刊名称：ARC Poetry Magazine
印刷版ISSN：1910-3239
出版年度：2010
期号：June
语种：English
出版社：Arc Poetry Society
摘要：David Zieroth's eighth collection--he has also published an acclaimed memoir, The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill--won the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. The Fly in Autumn is imbued with a distinctly existential hue, reflecting changes in its author's life, as Zieroth has, since his previous book, entered his seventh decade and retired from a 25-year teaching career. The poems are positively obsessed with death and the mystery of what happens next. The potential grimness of the subject matter, however, is leavened by Zieroth's injections of wry humour and what the publisher calls an "absurdist twist." Many pieces explicitly relate the content of dreams or take place in the liminal zone between sleep and waking, such as the excellent "Sinking," in which the speaker wakes up and starts sinking through his mattress, down through the foundation of his apartment building, eventually to come "face to face with molten flame, / calling him, undoubtedly calling, though last night / he could not have imagined any such sound." In several poems, reincarnation is touched upon as a possibility (the beautiful title poem is spoken in the voice of a very Zierothesque blue-assed fly). Appropriately, rebirth and metamorphosis are embodied formally in the poems. While most of the book is composed in the syntactically straightforward, plainspoken free verse mode that has been the stock-in-trade not only of Zieroth, but of most Canadian poets of his generation, he makes significant departures from it here. Besides a pantoum, 16 of the book's 50 poems, including its opener, are 18-liners arranged in ABBACC heroic sestets. That this is a radical departure and a reinvention is made clear in the poems themselves. In one of them, Zieroth steals Rilke's famous admonition that "you must / change your life." In another, the speaker refers to his past "lingo" being "stale, J used up, degraded down to lists." "These Poems Have Attitude" speaks overtly and humorously of the adoption of a more "old-fashioned" way of writing: "loose-lip hipsters hate how near // we stand to one another, in our tight rows, / how easily we break into marching songs, / not afraid to show we belong / to something more than prose-like uncontrolled jitterbugging moves." Prose-like the poems certainly aren't, but neither are they starchy, as Zieroth plays around with line-length (anywhere from four to fifteen syllables), caesurae and enjambments to keep his lines free-wheeling within their constraints. One is as likely to find a straight iambic pentameter--"To enter rot and raise no arm and shout!"--in one of his looser poems as in these set forms (one of the Byronic eighteeners is actually a footnote to another one, putting the lie to any notion of "closed" form). For all that The Fly has to recommend it, Zieroth and Harbour could have cut 10 or 12 weaker and somewhat redundant pieces and had a better book as a result. Nevertheless, the collection's core content makes its GG laurels well-deserved.
关键词：Books;Poetry

David Zieroth. The Fly in Autumn.

Wells, Zachariah

David Zieroth. The Fly in Autumn. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 2009.

David Zieroth's eighth collection--he has also published an acclaimed memoir, The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill--won the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. The Fly in Autumn is imbued with a distinctly existential hue, reflecting changes in its author's life, as Zieroth has, since his previous book, entered his seventh decade and retired from a 25-year teaching career. The poems are positively obsessed with death and the mystery of what happens next. The potential grimness of the subject matter, however, is leavened by Zieroth's injections of wry humour and what the publisher calls an "absurdist twist." Many pieces explicitly relate the content of dreams or take place in the liminal zone between sleep and waking, such as the excellent "Sinking," in which the speaker wakes up and starts sinking through his mattress, down through the foundation of his apartment building, eventually to come "face to face with molten flame, / calling him, undoubtedly calling, though last night / he could not have imagined any such sound." In several poems, reincarnation is touched upon as a possibility (the beautiful title poem is spoken in the voice of a very Zierothesque blue-assed fly). Appropriately, rebirth and metamorphosis are embodied formally in the poems. While most of the book is composed in the syntactically straightforward, plainspoken free verse mode that has been the stock-in-trade not only of Zieroth, but of most Canadian poets of his generation, he makes significant departures from it here. Besides a pantoum, 16 of the book's 50 poems, including its opener, are 18-liners arranged in ABBACC heroic sestets. That this is a radical departure and a reinvention is made clear in the poems themselves. In one of them, Zieroth steals Rilke's famous admonition that "you must / change your life." In another, the speaker refers to his past "lingo" being "stale, J used up, degraded down to lists." "These Poems Have Attitude" speaks overtly and humorously of the adoption of a more "old-fashioned" way of writing: "loose-lip hipsters hate how near // we stand to one another, in our tight rows, / how easily we break into marching songs, / not afraid to show we belong / to something more than prose-like uncontrolled jitterbugging moves." Prose-like the poems certainly aren't, but neither are they starchy, as Zieroth plays around with line-length (anywhere from four to fifteen syllables), caesurae and enjambments to keep his lines free-wheeling within their constraints. One is as likely to find a straight iambic pentameter--"To enter rot and raise no arm and shout!"--in one of his looser poems as in these set forms (one of the Byronic eighteeners is actually a footnote to another one, putting the lie to any notion of "closed" form). For all that The Fly has to recommend it, Zieroth and Harbour could have cut 10 or 12 weaker and somewhat redundant pieces and had a better book as a result. Nevertheless, the collection's core content makes its GG laurels well-deserved.