Most of the time, I have no idea how to talk about the deeper levels of meaning in a piece of writing, especially when it’s poetry. With some poems I read, I’m convinced there are no deeper meanings, in which case, as far as I’m concerned, the poem has failed. But when it feels like there is something there, that the poem is working, it seems to me that trying to excavate the deeper levels of meaning entirely defeats the purpose of believing in deeper meanings. If deeper meanings exist in a poem, they aren’t some tangible aspect of the poem itself; they exist in the feelings you experience as you read. As I read Stephen Collis, I’m damned if I can tell you just exactly what he’s driving at, and I’m damned if I can tell you why I like his poems so much. I just do. “…sing, O/pigs, sucking deep at the muddy breast/…or, its radical digging/at the root, burrowing to get/under the fence, and escaping,/into the fresh pasture, all my sweet suckling pigs free at the fringe/of the distinctions, a wild squealing/sound slipping through tree cover,/the farm and the far field, this/lying fallow and that bearing its yield.” These poems, all of them about animals, manage to burrow under the fence created by the limitations of language and make their way into fresh pastures of meaning. (KS)
20 pgs, $?, Stephen Collis, Intrepid Tourist Press, Box 403, Union Bay, BC, V0R 3B0