The History Forest by Michael Trussler

Many creatures inhabit Michael Trussler’s The History Forest. The owl, to be sure, covers, bookends, and stares with folded wings, a mummified panopticon that glides into “The Pelt of a Chinese Gazelle Wrapping an Ancient Teacup.” There is a wrapping quality to Trussler’s writing: his reversals, inversions, and enfolding metaphors enmesh the reader in his perceptual fields and forests. “An owl’s time isn’t ours: the curve of the beak / that preens as carefully as Tuesday’s archaeologist / brushed dirt away from the newly discovered.” Much unfolds in this opening tercet (whose sole punctuation is a colon) to explore the owl’s nocturnal life in contrast to our diurnal cycles. Its temporal habits are couched in visual terms in the curve of its beak, the hard consonants closing curve and beak, and carried through to carefully, archaeologist, and discovered. What resides inside that curved beak is a simile that stretches time to an archaeological past.

“An archaeologist feathering the mind of the forest and forest of the mind, Trussler carefully brushes away surfaces to discover the new.”

An archaeologist feathering the mind of the forest and forest of the mind, Trussler carefully brushes away surfaces to discover the new. If the owl’s curve discovers a Pompeii skeleton from the past, it also “forecasts future kills, an augury.” Section 1 ends with death in the future and a dash – one of Tussler’s many markers: “inside what’s invisible / to each incomprehensible night –.” His curve is also a carving of metaphors, spaces in stanzas and forests, and times in all tenses. With the help of the owl, the Borgesian poet tries to comprehend invisibility.

Section 2 alters the point of view, all the while keeping an eye on the owl: “From behind, the owl looks like a cross between a koala and a lynx.” This simile curves to a cross of other animals in The History Forest. “When its head circles round / to take in the bunch of us down on / the lawn beneath him.” The curve forms a full circle, its own lens competing with the poet’s photographic eye. The singular owl contrasts with the plural pronoun of those beneath him, as he becomes a kind of trickster taking in a bunch of us: “the bird’s present right here but in some / unshuttered quadrant of ivory-bordered green as well.” He is both in nature and in the poem’s photograph. “Each time he returns to the elm / or fainter ash, he tricks the future into providing protection somehow.” Spatial camouflage is also historical, from the archaeologist’s brush to the present to future protection.

The third section of the poem elaborates the owl’s activity: “Except: an owl’s time isn’t parallel to anyone’s.” It stands alone, not even paralleling Keats’s nightingale. “Its drowsy / attentiveness to dusk / is an entrance into night’s approaching.” This stanza shapes the change in light, accentuated by the oxymoron of drowsy attentiveness and alliteration of drowsy dusk. Night’s “deepening glut” turns back to the earlier “future kills” and prepares for its violent potential: “With talons the bladed-grey of scree.” Internal rhymes reinforce the connection between creature and landscape. Like Tuesday’s archaeologist, “the mind / of this owl can detect / what’s beneath the ground upon which we’re standing.” Like the archaeologist who discovered the skeleton of a man who couldn’t flee Pompeii in time, the owl detects our mortality: “The mind / of this owl holds a clarity / untethered to communication.”

Poet and owl continue their dialogue, which invokes avant-garde artists, Méret Oppenheim and Francis Picabia. The concavity of the feathers surrounding its eyes has enlivened “the pelt / of the celebrated gazelle fur wrapping a teacup.” The association between the owl’s feather and the pelt of a Chinese gazelle wrapping an ancient teacup is intriguing, as the forest is brought indoors and domesticated. The still life is moving through pictorial juxtapositions of cubism, impressionism, and expressionism – a Chinese puzzle within a puzzle, a spacing between gazelle and its fur. These exotic containers are contained in the gaze of owl and artist: “what’s known / is an exception alongside a microburst of raw and forest-dappled blood-light.” Art enlivens the dead pelt in blood-light; the hyphenated descriptions paint nature red in tooth and claw.

“The owl is a gaze that’s here and elsewhere” – the elsewhere of allusion, compression, and unravelling. “Its eyes could read a poem … the bird itself / has eaten its way out of a dictionary.” The final surreal curve is a cubist departure, a “debacle / of soundless flight –.” Trussler stirs a forest in a Chinese teacup as he haunts the sylvan setting of history. His pelt responds to John Hollander’s “Owl,” which ends with “The flutter of substance, the mind’s / Life in the fallen leaves.” The troped owl sits at the centre of knowledge; who poses questions of wisdom and Minerva’s identity in The History Forest.

Trussler’s initial poem, “Panpsychism,” prepares for his “omniverse,” a verse and universe that combines through associations and inclusiveness. Whether through photography or philosophy, lines of Spinozistic pantheism and Buddhism run through his thought. “Retrace the omniverse. An underworld of day-streams, / crow-speak, food colouring and pencil crayons.” The poem’s six sections retrace creation by juxtaposing associations in planned and random manners. The underworld encompasses the subconscious of day-dreams and streams of consciousness, while “crow-speak” links the poet to his ornithological call and avian crayons that colour nature. His imperative goes colloquial in Eden: “Get / out of here, said God, to the two posing for a selfie / by the last original waterfall. Go on, git.” After this fall he gathers all the creatures: “peacocks, flamingoes, / humpback whales, and antelopes as lithe as wind farms in / Germany, rehearsed and unrehearsed: all symptomatic of what’s / crowded in a forest at night in a zoo.” Between the solipsistic selfie and the Buddhist’s transitory ego, between prehistoric and postmodern, and between mirror and echo, “Something wyrd is all around,” in fate’s weird word.

Like many of the poems in this collection, “Apparitions” is dedicated to Don Coles. From its Ovidian opening line, “Things changing into other things,” the poem turns to the speaker’s “peripheral vision,” which takes in a spider crab, patients in hospital beds, an otter, and the speaker’s own shin injury on a rock. The spacing of the lines imitates peripheral vision, crab legs’ motion, and the poet’s staggering amidst scattered tide pools. These apparitions and metamorphoses include a belated appreciation of Monet’s paintings and Ted Hughes’s observation that an otter “re-enters the water by melting.” That Hughes says this “patiently” serves as a bridge between the earlier patients and a tall and endangered “poet over ninety needing / the Demerol dripping.” Impressionistic spots of time and intimations of mortality blend all apparitions.

Similarly, Trussler pays tribute to Jan Zwicky’s ecopoetics, Bruegel’s green sky, and Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics of atrocity, as he collects nests and mirrors in The History Forest.

The volume concludes with a prose diary, “Bodhisattva on a Bicycle,” where apparitions resume: “Appearing from nowhere, the world sometimes catches itself within various mirrors.” Mirrors multiply as the “baroque thuds on the raw”; gnomic language accompanies photographs, birds encounter binoculars, and the shadow of the Holocaust intrudes on Saskatchewan. A cyclist points out a rare black-crowned night heron. This camouflaged incident soon involves a visitor from British Columbia who takes a photo of the heron in full flight. By the process of association the visitor’s parents were survivors of the Holocaust, and Trussler remembers visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. Other diarists enter this diary: Hélène Berr, Etty Hillesum, and Anne Frank. A personal experience of the Holocaust impinges on his own consciousness since his wife and son are Jewish: her ancestors immigrated to Canada from Poland in the early twentieth century. “How can one possibly understand the implications of that decision?”

He continues his philosophical and rhetorical questioning: “Does juxtaposition – whether it’s formal in an artwork or random in actual life – create something new or is it arbitrary?” He follows with a memory of his son’s cockatiel “Echo” (named for his skills at mimicry), and concludes with Lodz as associative thought in Sebald’s The Emigrants. The History Forest is replete with associations, echoes, and mirrors. The birches of Birkenau and beeches of Buchenwald migrate to Regina’s fainter ash, where a vigilant owl circles round to take in readers and their peripheral visions.

Michael Trussler is the award-winning author of the short fiction collection, Encounters. His work engages with the beauty and violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is a professor of English at the University of Regina.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Regina Press (Sept. 24 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 88 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0889778949
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0889778948

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.