The Watchmaker's Table

by Brian Bartlett

In his most personal collection to date, Brian Bartlett meditates upon time and family. We share his son's discovery of newborn spiders and his daughter's first grasp of infinity as a concept. In companion poems on the births of his mother and father, Bartlett makes you feel as if you were alive at those moments in history. The opening poem, "All the Train Trips," displays an uncanny sense of homes and families lost and the casual friendships struck up in conversations in the "bar car." "Pearly Everlasting" expresses a longing to register the world in the body through the naming of flowers. Books and the history of poetry shape time for Bartlett, whether in found poems woven from the words of books inherited from ancestors or in the words of great poets that, despite the distance, convey a shared sense of humanity. Wrestling with time as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett speaks both for time's dominion and for human mutability.

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
Brian Bartlett’s books of poetry include Granite Erratics, The Afterlife of Trees, Travels of the Watch, and Wanting the Day: Selected Poems, which was published in both Britain and Canada and won the 2004 Atlantic Poetry Prize. He also edited Don McKay: Essays on His Works and is working on a collection of prose, Living with Poetry. He teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw this in Room 220 (Cataloging) and went and requested it so it was rush cataloged and brought to me. I don't like doing that to my co-workers but it was worth it.

4 major sections: The Sideways 8; Given Words; Breathing and Reading; Time, Flying.

To me, the 2nd section was the weakest and the one I least enjoyed. In fact, if it had held its own with the other 3 sections then I'd have given this 5 stars.

I will be looking into some of his earlier work.

Namelessness
hovers over all, infuses all.
Like lines webbing a fractured lens
the names in our eyes clutter our views.

...

from Pearly Everlasting and Others

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book of poetry to continue to read over and over. To savour every word Brian Bartlett writes.