Glengarry

by Rob Mclennan

Composed in three sections, Glengarry is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan’s youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undisclosed to him.

In “glengarry: open field (a postscripted journal)” the poet discovers that “the earth remembers every scratch & scar & step ever took, if you know where to look, how to ask in the way of assembling,” and to ask those questions of the emotional and physical landscapes of one’s youth is to discover that “history is written by everything that history forgets”; is “to half-open a story of what no longer exists”; to beg the question, “is this memory or romanticism”; to run the risk of becoming lost in the very attempt to reconstruct the elements of our past: “there is always the fear here of looking more back than ahead.” What mclennan finds on this quest is nothing more than “a portable violence of heritage & secrets.” What he discovers here, however, is that “we all live in ­imagined boundaries,” and that “if the story exists, i am living the ­language of it.”

The short reprise to his memory poem, “whiskey jack,” leads ­mclennan to ask: “what am I filled with, this quiet / conspiratorial talk, this body / of open wilderness, painted trees / & a history that functions / without markers / save seasons.”

Finally, in “avalanche,” the answer to mclennan’s rhetorical ­question, “where are you, heart?” appears in both its lyric and its epic voices: “the names of all my broken hearts are only names again” and “there is eventually a silence / there is history.” Amidst this “aesthetic of wonderful destruction” each new poem is “an illusion against destructive slide,” because “what else is human hope but momentarily borne.”

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2011

About the author

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012.

In Canadian Literature, Gordon Bölling praised his novel Missing Persons as “a welcome addition to the body of Canadian prairie fiction.” His collection of short fiction, The Uncertainty Principle has been described as: “Little flash fictions, some quirky, some funny, some touching. A fun read.” (Pearl Pirie). In a review on the ottawa poetry newsletter, Ryan Pratt wrote that “Thanks to mclennan’s discipline, our experience reading The Uncertainty Principle requires none. Organized to accommodate brief interactions (which, like the psychology behind bite-sized chocolate bars, results here in complete overindulgence), the book proves incessantly fresh, taken as a whole or in cursory, page-flipping handfuls.”

An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com), as well as organizes the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which he co-founded in 1994. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com