Democratically Applied Machine

by Robert Colman

Robert Colman’s third book of poetry, Democratically Applied Machine, is a back-to-basics approach to creation. In poems that inhabit both industrial and domestic landscapes, Colman traces his inheritance to determine how his life echoes that of his forebears, even as the past blurs with the onset of his father’s Alzheimer’s dementia. These are poems with working parts; poems of lineage and legacy; poems that engage the mechanical world while retaining nature’s imprint. Democratically Applied Machine is a defining collection from one of Canada’s finest poets.

Praise for Democratically Applied Machine:

Laden with music and linguistically rich, Robert Colman’s Democratically Applied Machine embraces form’s range. Lyric, narrative, erasure, prose poem, sonnet, found poem and sestina all serve his overriding themes of work and family. “Work is done in smallness” says Colman. Here it’s done large. These poems hum with an earthy sophistication.— Catherine Graham, The Celery Forest

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2020

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rob Colman's latest poetry book, DEMOCRATICALLY APPLIED MACHINE, may have the most orange cover I've ever seen on a poetry book. 😉🍊🧡 But more importantly, the poems are skillful and thoughtful. The book is divided into halves according to its themes. The first half focuses on artisanship, working-class life, and the manufacturing industry. The second is more personal, concentrating on family and Colman's experience with his father's Alzheimer's. No matter which section of the MACHINE you're in, however, you'll encounter deftly crafted poems in various forms (prose poems, sonnets, centos, and a sestina, for starters) and a balanced awareness of nature and mechanics, of what is broken or no longer whole and what remains the same, of what we find beautiful despite (or because of) our sadness and loss. This is what makes MACHINE an unmistakably human collection.

[Esther Pfa · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are not interested in machines? - Read that book!
You never read poems? - Read that book!
You think you rarely understand poems? - Read that book!
You are totally into poems and have read them all? - Read that book!

Robert Colman has a rare way to find the extraordinary in the trivial, the magical in the technical, the human in the inhumane condition life sometimes is. And he captures all this in a few piercing words - a concentrate to be devoured page by page.

Even if you are not a poetry savant, those words will reach you- and like every good poem, change your life a little bit :-)

Enjoy!

[Peter Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rob Colmen's eloquent lyrics capture a world that all of us depend upon but most of us ignore, a world of job shops, assembly lines, lathe operators and iron machines. He voices a pipe welder's fealty towards every nuanced movement on his rig, he fuses the motion of man and machine when "The engine's disengaged / but the body echoes, miles / of highway become / a skin-hum," he documents a father's inexorable descent into Alzheimer's where memory and language slowly begin to disintegrate. Grounded in an intimate knowledge of blue collar industry, and balanced with a portrait of family humility and tragic loss, Democratically Applied Machine takes us through a world where "Everything is lost in the fire / and lost in the gauging." - Peter Taylor, Cities Within Us