Mining for Sun

by John Reibetanz

John Reibetanz is good on grief: "You, mother, / dying, left what was hard first: / bones weeping into/ / your veins like flutes, teeth/ vanished on some hospital/ lunch tray" This conjunction of a profound sense of loss with the clearest-eyed observation and acceptance of the entropy of the mundane is characteristic. His poetry has a cultural breadth seldom seen in Canadian writing. He sees the pageantry of the Bayeux tapestry with the eyes of a rural quilter, whose son died beneath a tractor, who would focus on "the spear - strayed from the main design -/ / that takes a wide-mouthed Tabourer aback, / and recognize the pain/ of someone caught in the wreck/ of a vast, wayward machine."

His lucidity and eloquence have earned the praise of such celebrated poets as Richard Howard and Richard Wilbur. But it is always the heart's music which most informs his poetic craft: and that is what keeps it true.

128 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2000

About the author

John Reibetanz earned a BA in English from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and an MA and a PhD in English language and literature from Princeton University.

He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Transformations (2006), Mining for Sun (2000), and Ashbourn (1986), as well as the critical study The Lear World (1977). His poetry has been included in several anthologies, such as The Signal Anthology: Contemporary Canadian Poetry (1993) and Aurora: New Canadian Writing (1978).

Reibetanz won first prize in the 2003 Petra Kenney Poetry Competition and was a finalist for a 1995 National Magazine Award. A member of the League of Canadian Poets, he teaches at the University of Toronto and lives in Toronto with his family.

He was elected a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 2010.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I for-

get and bend o-

ver to sweep up

what once I could

in one unthink-

ing fluid move.

Or go to leap

up after some-

thing: and the thought

glows and fountains,

something else free-

zing the body,

gravity's side-

kick holding me

back, or spiting

my rise with dam-

age. It is like

phoning the num-

ber of someone

who has moved a-

way. Or like go-

ing to visit

the house you were

born in and (get-

ting it right - the

town, the street, the

lot - from heart, map-

less) coming on

a gap, a rect-

angle of white.

- First Frost, pg. 21-22

* * *

'Where do passions

find room in so

diminutive

a body?' asks

Hector St. John

de Crevecoeur in

Letters from an

American

Farmer, shocked by

a finger-long

power bobbin's

hot current: wings

spinning themselves

invisible,

a needle-mouth

siphoning half

the body's weight

each day, a heart's

thousand stitches

per minute, and

(most distressing)

the petit point

that leaves a limp

red-threaded bag

where there was once

a rival bird.

Passions find room

by purging the

hummingbird of

everything not

passion: no song;

no orifice

to smell the bloom

it plunders; legs

mere filaments.

Yet, a songbird

might sacrifice

size, leisure, peace

for a brief life

whose song is flight,

whose heart converts

sugar to speed

spinning, spinning

the sun's gold thread.

- Hummingbird, pg. 69-70

* * *

1. In hills too liquid to sit still,
two trappers paddle across a lake,

birchbark canoe and buckskin vests
absorbed by mist, disembodied

but for the red scarf in the bow,
the blue scarf partner keeping pace,

their quiet dip and rise miming
waves over the quiet waves.


2. So for some years. One morning
the red scarf cannot leave the tent

where the canoe sleeps. From his knife
the wake of one long cut severs

bow from stern, the cradled bow
as on a wave borne from the tent

by blue scarf to the knife-edge where
water's' mirror doubles all


3. in mere illusion. He climbs in,
paddles the bow across the lake,

his dip and rise mimed by red scarf
who, in the tent, paddles the stern

through thoughts too liquid to sit still,
dissolving distance between bow

and stern, absorbed, both afloat
on quiet waves over the waves.

- A National Dream, pg. 82

* * *

Creation

Beneath their duvet
(one side blue, the other black)
bright-eyed stars dream on.


Tomatoes on the Table

At six, between the
sheets' white silence and the streets',
red bells wake my eyes.


Near a Subway Station

One shoe in the street
and breath over the grating
calling Orpheus.


Gerald Trimming Hawthorn

Flint-barked barbed hedger,
your brief white word-blossoms yield
small red stone-filled fruits.


The Inside Rail of the Indoor Track

knows nothing of in-
wardness compared to that ship
whose deck it surrounds.

- Insides/Outsides: Five Haiku, pg. 97