Night & Ox

by Jordan Scott

bronchia think
form a bombsight
think periosteum singing
particle falconry workpiece
two lowcut hills seeking
what stone is
for body
is herd
alliterations
Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.

‘A fierce, ladderlike cri de cœur – at times a cri de cur – Night & Ox pulses with sawblade nocturnes that gnaw through the very rungs on which they’re wrung. One part Jabberwocky-talkie, one part fatherhood ode, the poem seeks a threshold, where the “mondayescent” gives way to ardour, splendour, even love. Scott is a cosmoglot of the throat’s ravine, and this is his manic, pandemonic article of faith.’ – Andrew Zawacki


Praise for Blert :
‘Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft. Blert is a strange and gorgeous work of linguistic materialism.' – Dennis Lee

88 pages, Paperback

Published October 18, 2016

About the author

Jordan Scott is an internationally acclaimed poet and children’s author.

Scott is also the author of four books of poetry: Silt, Blert, DECOMP, and Night & Ox. Blert, which explores the poetics of stuttering, is the subject of two National Film Board of Canada projects.

Scott was the 2015/16 Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University and has read from his work throughout North America and Europe. In 2018 Scott was the recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.

Scott lives on Vancouver Island and teaches at the UBC School of Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Night & Ox by Jordan Scott is his fourth published work. Scott wrote much of this poetry as a young father holding his son in one hand and typing with the other.

I usually like to type a few hundred words or more in a review, but that is not the case with Night & Ox. A quick look at the cover will give the reader an idea of the poetry contained inside. Is it pen drawing of a rooster's head? Is it random? It has too much form to be random. The poetry inside is a single poem running almost ninety full-length pages. The lines, however, are usually a word or two long. It is abstract writing that does not form a picture in the mind, but rather captures the mind. The string of words flows well line to line and the reader will get caught up in the flow and feel of the words rather than any message they may carry. Some words are made up, but they seem to be real words and fit the flow of the poem. Night & Ox is an interesting piece of experimental or abstract poetry. It is worth a read for those looking for something new and different.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jordan Scott’s _Night & Ox_ is a 68 page poem that is maybe what the inside of his brain looks like, which, often is joyful playing with a tinge of something sinister. Oh, the mind of a parent :). The colloquial and not prosody was new enough to my brain for me to need a little more from myself in my reading sessions. I do not consider that a bad thing :)

[Louis Cabri]

Jordan Scott manages to evoke the elusive object of Pierre Joris's meditations, "the crookedness / underfoot" (and that which is above us, far away, too):

"But the oxen
grow tired, the sickle
of the moon has traced
a long furrow thru
this night, the will
of the instrumental
oxen tempts the
tired hand,
refusing obedience
to the crooked lay
of the land under-
hand would like
to go the easy
path, the straight
line I have to
fight knowing
it is the poem
I want, that map
true to the crookedness
underfoot [....]"

--Pierre Joris, Breccia: Selected Poems 1972-1986 (Editions Phi, Station Hill, Guernica, 1987) 98-99.

[Kirsty · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm usually all for experimental poetry, but this was just too much. Scott is clearly more interested in demonstrating his vocabulary than telling much of a story here, and the whole comes across as incredibly pretentious in consequence. It's a long poem in terms of the way it has been printed, but only runs to around 86 pages; I just didn't have enough interest to get through it.