Cantilevered Songs by John Lent
– available at Polar Peek Books & Treasures in Fernie
– Reviewed by Angie Abdou for The Fernie Fix’s April 2010 Issue

I’m making a tradition of recommending poetry for The Fix’s Green Issue: Alison Calder’s Wolf Tree for 2008, Sheri Benning’s Earth After Rain for 2009, and now John Lent’s Cantilevered Songs for 2010.

John Lent lives and writes in the Okanagan, and has been publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for thirty years. He’s no novice, and his poems carry a relaxed confidence that comes with experience.  Lent’s poetry captures the profound in the simple, the extraordinary within the everyday. 

A note at the back of Cantilevered Songs informs readers that by printing the book on chorine free paper made with 100% post-consumer waste, Thistledown Press saved 1 tree, 675 gallons of water, 41 pounds of solid waste, and 140 pounds of greenhouse gasses. However, that’s not the only reason this book lends itself well to this green issue. Green imagery permeates the book reminding readers of the seductive pull of the wild and the lessons to be learned there. In “Winter Blues,” spring is a “yawn of green that almost makes/ you pass out, gives you a fever,/ forces you to your knees.” In a poem called “Home,” the speaker imagines a wilderness behind the blinds and cul-de-sacs of his neighbourhood, a wilderness that “opens up for miles and simply/ miles of a thick green, moist confusion,/ another kind of everything.” Again, in a piece called “I Must Lie Down Where…,” you the reader are torn between the natural world and the constructed one. One moment you are running through a field “of long green brome” and “you begin to inhale the green/ endlessness before you, and the animal/ muscle naturalness of it,” but just as you get used to that, you find yourself clothed in silk walking through a bound cathedral made of oak. As soon as you find comfort in the “relieving solidarity” of that world, you’re back in the field “running against the sun and moon/ in the gauze-strewn blue air/ of the heart.”

In the dreamlike, hazy reality of these poems, we swing between the manmade world and the wild one, unable to rest comfortably in either, unable to even know for sure where one ends and the other begins.  In one poem, the speaker studies trees until he is “overwhelmed by green” and seems to become a tree himself: “still/ ringing, still/ enfolding/ myself for/ and against/ the wind.”  There is no distinction between humans and nature, Lent reminds us, because we are nature.  Or, in his own words: “you are here as planted/ and as green as everything else: that is the gift itself, that/ communion of air, of earth, of water.”  Lent continually merges wild landscapes and human consciousness, and his originality stems from the way he accomplishes this fusion with an ever present sense of reverence and awe.

Really, I want quote from Lent’s poetry rather than review it.  I want to say: Look at this!  Listen to this! Feel this! I want to read aloud from “Intersections,” my favourite poem of the collection, and let you hear its clear-sighted wisdom.  See, I want to say, See?

Copyright © 2010 by Angie Abdou, Ph.D.