The Ridge by Robert Bringhurst

Although the title of Robert Bringhurst’s latest volume of poetry, The Ridge, conjures up a visual image, one must also consider its aural implications, for Bringhurst is as much concerned with sound as with scene. The monosyllable is rigid, a bridge that connects, an edge, and a ledge that conceals and resounds. Given his background in drumming and typesetting, the listener looks for rhythms, tones, the click and snap of placement of letters in his ridges. His voice leans and lingers on the ridge of syllables, snaring vowels and consonants. Bringhurst bridges the distance between typography and text, breathing around silence on the page, holding consonants for a prolonged beat – a translation and trans-inhalation of lungs and languages. The ridge is a jagged listening space where the id of identity gets swallowed up through the initial “r” and final “j.” It is a sculpted place containing long poems, sequences, and an abundance of meaning.

“Bringhurst bridges the distance between typography and text, breathing around silence on the page, holding consonants for a prolonged beat – a translation and trans-inhalation of lungs and languages.”

Although the eponymous poem, “The Ridge,” appears in the singular, Bringhurst is a poet of plurals, a polymath engaged in polyphony and multiple backgrounds. Perhaps his poetry rests between ridges and registers – in-between spaces of breathing, listening, and being. The eye travels down the page of “Contents,” beginning with “Ten Poems with One Title” – each one titled “Language Poem.” Between the singular “one” and plural “ten” the reader approaches stanzas: “The heron has practised his silence longer / than time has been time.” The vertical bird partakes of eternity – his silent practice elongated. The sentence ends with this bird perched on eternity, stretched beyond time, because he is present from Indigenous times, and silenced until the observer voices him in verse. The sibilance of his practiced silence syncopates with alliterated time. A different syncopation takes over in the rest of the stanza where enjambment releases the bird’s motion: “When he rises and speaks, there is no one in the cove / who doesn’t listen.” Prose punctuation works with and through the sounds: the heron is ancient Haida speaking of oral cultures, colonial injustices, and an ecosystem at risk. The cove is a cave where sounds of “no one” echo in parallel: “there is no one / in the cove who couldn’t translate / what he says.” Listeners become translators in this moving silence and absence where the heron “had been lost in translation.” The final sentence stretches this speaking silence: “Everything speaks for itself in this world, / and everything rests in what is unspoken.” Although this sentence begins in plain sense, it ends in a metaphysical direction, the resting returning to the opening stillness, prior to rising and speaking. A stanza of ten lines epitomizes “Ten Poems with One Title”; its numbers are arbitrary and necessary. The cove is carved, the heron heard, and time translated and transcended. Heron and no one listen to breath in the air of ridge and language.

The second stanza shunts from heron to woodpecker: “Hairy woodpecker too – mystified, miffed, / or exasperated or pleased – utters / his one word and jumps or hunkers / down and squeezes hard.” This woodpecker doubles down, even as the lyrics lift. After the heron’s camouflage, the woodpecker’s carved motion is crafted through caesuras of dashes, while hairy echoes heron. His one word multiplies through alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia – a riot of senses. The four “or” s multiply choices, moods, and movements to conclude the stanza on an ontological note, the bird being in itself: “hanging on for dear life to what is, / or swimming right through it / as if it were there. And it is. And it is.” Those final six syllables peck at existence, wood-crafting every beat and breath.

The third stanza questions these sightings, these callings, this birding of being: “How many more words would it take / to make up a language?” And the answer to that question rests among the silence of no word, the woodpecker’s one word, and the infinite words attending the heron’s eternity. “Does language have to have words?” This is not a rhetorical question, for the speaker provides answers, meditations on meaning and meanings. Like birds in motion, “meaning” swims through many lines: “What it must have / are meanings … These are the meanings that lurk here…. The meanings / a language must have are the meanings / it doesn’t have.” Meanings may stand uncovered, or there may be a pointing at meaning or a gesture. Language dances: “one speaker, two gestures; one gesture, / two speakers.” This chiasmus is an exchange of singular and plural, sound and sight, punctuation and pointing. Typographical dashes pause and gesture at meaning, which “might make the first blind lurch / toward a life of its own.” Meanings reside between “lurk” and “lurch” – hidden, waiting to be and a sudden epiphany. All of these rebounding images and re-sounding rhythms make their way to the final line “in the breathing space between meaning and meaning.” Bringhurst’s breathing space is a focus of language in a mouthfeel of meanings.

If the first “Language Poem” is long and ends in present participles of ongoing motion, the second “Language Poem” is terse – a mere quatrain of closure in three taut sentences: “The gesture is open, the symbol is closed. / But not wide, and not tightly. The difference / is small: just a twist of the fingers, a shift / of the eyelid, a cinch of the claws.” The opening line balances on the comma’s fulcrum, while the second line qualifies the first and is similarly balanced. The enjambed intermediate lines open up the difference, which is pictured in human anatomy until the final animal shift that simultaneously opens and closes symbol and gesture. The visual eyelid mediates between fingers and claws, and registers and re-gestures onomatopoeia. What appears so easy to grasp remains elusive, and vice versa. “Language Poem” is on the tip of a tongue and finger, the ridge of language and gesture, and Pacific landscape.

Each of the ten “Language Poem” s rebounds in some way with the others in the sequence. Bringhurst ranges from conversational modes to lyrical and reflective. His third “Language Poem” begins in medias res with a sudden “Sure,” before reflecting on a (Nietzschean) talking horse, which serves as a prelude to “the roots of language,” metamorphoses, grammar, and “the well of words.” The poet speaks to the well-being of words, to “the one-armed man / who hears within his heart / the sound of clapping.” This ultra-sound detects murmur and clap, drumbeat and typeset – monosyllables slotted into place. Wit and polish run through the lines, as abstractions of language and meaning are made tangible. “The truth is always / everything that’s there, and that is / harder, even harder said than done.” The music of metaphysics and the metaphysics of music recur in dreams, in bird forms, in the sound of the ground. “Meaning is as meaning does”: it abstracts, paints, personifies, exchanges body parts, and bird-sings. It addresses Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as many other voices who have influenced Bringhurst’s thinking and singing. “Ludwig says,” is a kind of refrain in this philosophic poem and, as Simon says, it is directional and guides us to “wait, then, or hesitate, a little.” Poems are serious and playful waiting and hesitating games – precisely paced.

Nestled within all these languages are other languages – cuneiforms, calligraphy, Chinese characters, Haida words, Haydn’s notes, and Greek fonts – each carefully typeset, each ridged to the page, each etched in significance. After Pound, being, meaning, and mind fold back upon themselves. All is proposed, qualified, and undercut by the end of the tenth poem in the series: “There is nothing to do that is not being done, / nothing to say that is not being said, / and so much, so much, that is neither.” There is much in repetition and negation – two directions waiting for meaning. Negative ways, in-between ways, and waiting ways provide means of approaching meaning patiently in the grammar of air, acoustic emphasis, and rumination.

The second section of the book, “Picking Up Sticks,” contains six distinct poems. If the title suggests a child’s game, it also refers to an environmental cleaning of wood, as well as a crossing of the Styx, given that the first poem, “All Night Wood,” is dedicated to the memory of P.K. Page. The poem’s three stanzas pivot on the word “what,” first in the form of a question: “What / is a civilization but / love laid down in a skein?” After that tangled question the second stanza repeats “what” as a tentative answer: “What they spell in the air, / … what they know but what cannot / be helped.” After all of the talking, dancing, jumping, singing, and spinning, the third stanza turns to the ontological and oneiric: “We are what we dream of.” What is found in the skein is “some unfinished weaving” and a fire “to last until morning.” Night words and sticks rekindle in the afterglow of embers. As Page turns to page, the poet’s higher calling in picking up sticks is a memorial to all who have gone before.

From the twilight of “All Night Wood” Bringhurst moves to “How the Sunlight Gets to Where It’s Going.” From sunrise to sunset, origin to destination, the speaker progresses through negatives beginning with “there is no other way,” and ending with “There is no / other way of being / what we are.” This laissez faire existentialism appears in German from a poet “who apprenticed as a sculptor.” Once again, Bringhurst sculpts being and breathing through a via negativa, the neither / nor of his cantillation: “No handhold / or foothold” and “There’s nothing / to end on.” The sun may rise in Connecticut or Tennessee and fall into the Pacific in “The Well” where “Down is up” and “Up is down.” A vertical vortex stills “in the ocean of no, in the ocean of yes.” The poet takes the sound out of many dichotomies and polarities, and reinserts in polyphonies. Art withholds even as it abounds in meanings, music, and metaphysics: “The heart can hold its breath / and still keep time.” Heartbeat and drumbeat reverberate in the well that overflows with timekeeping.

The next section, “Seven Poems with One Title,” presents a series of lute poems where the reader lingers to listen: “The first qualification for playing / the lute is exactly the same as for making / the poem.” This enjambed sentence establishes the parallel between poetry and music, not just in sound, but in anatomical and visual realms as well. Eight three-lined stanzas and the spaces between them string the words on the page, as Bringhurst typographs and choreographs music and its instruments. The lutenist-poet retracts a statement through a negative, and in the qualifying shift hints at musical meaning. The lute’s fugue is dialectical, for the “first qualification” is itself soon qualified: “It is to be able / to sing and yet not: / to pass through the same door / as the others but find yourself / nowhere.” The counterpoint of line and string and sound sings through punctuation and the withholding of punctuation when the ends of lines run on and the persona disappears. Similarity in difference, and difference in similarity: lute and poem occupy the same space but soon disappear, “so that the song / slips out of sight, like water through / split rock, and is gone.” From door metaphor to water simile, the stanzas work “through” the same door and split rock to arrive at an absence. Yet that very absence changes into something else, shifts position in anatomy or instrument or air: “and yet it comes / back lower down, later on, and farther away.” The lute frets and displaces sound, air, and body with the typographer’s ink and click. Polylingual lutanists play for life, “reaching for something they cannot hear.”

“Three and a Half Interludes from The Crucifixion of Earth” follow the lute poems. Based on Haydn’s Opus 51, these interludes are intra-textual, intertextual, and intergeneric – the proximity of lute and interlude translating the music from section to section. Haydn’s score appears on the right-hand page opposite Bringhurst’s contrapuntal translation from redeemer to earth. Haydn writes largo, and the poet responds to the damaged planet – purgatory, paradise, heaven, hell, cancerous cultures, and elegiac ecology. “Going Down Singing” contains nine poems that reprise the “ing” suffix, the epistemology of knowing, and negatives of antithetical thinking that strives for a way out. Follow the sounds of “un” prefix and “ing” suffix to grasp thought and intonation of a waterfall: “The scroll unscrolling / without end, the sound / of everything unfolding.” Everything, something, and nothing sing with present participles in an ongoing flow of water – uncomposing, unspelling, disassembling, surrendering, floundering, learning, going, finding, falling. The waterfall is all onomatopoeia, or as much as can be captured by breathing suffixes and other sound effects. “All grammar and roar. / Declension and con- / jugation and stammer.” The hinge of syntax arrests the waterfall and aerates the well of humanity.

“Standing By” begins with Frost’s words, “Whose woods these are I do not know,” before moving on to Gary Snyder’s What Happened Here Before. Like the poet, the woods sing “in their polyglot language” and “in the fingers and palms of a drummer.” This poem precedes the twenty cantos of “The Ridge,” which encompasses many of Bringhurst’s earlier concerns and cantillations. The opening rhythm establishes the directions of place and displacement; while the lines run on, they are invisibly punctuated by parallel phrasing and prepositions that imitate the terrain: “I lived with the woman I loved in the house / that we built on the flank of the ridge / at the end of the road at the start of the trail.” The past tense, the end, and the start suggest process and permanence – the ridge’s endurance. The dominance of monosyllables and the strength of flank-ridge and start-trail prepare for the phenomenological contrast between trail and road. While the first sentence goes unpunctuated, the second pauses in commas to differentiate road from trail: “The road is harder, wider, smoother / than it needs to be or ought to be, but not / by a great deal.” That great deal has been struck by the pavers of the planet against nature’s narrower trail. The road eventually gets you to “the asphalt ocean.” Two competing ecosystems – the mechanical and the natural: “Disconnection / is what keeps this road from swallowing / the ridge, the hills, the island and the trail.”

The trail multiplies through similes: “braiding and unbraiding like a river …. fissuring and shifting like a sentence.” It is a flowing river and moving text covered by the air of metaphor: “that air is not just something some of us / can breathe but something you can write on.” Bringhurst’s things, somethings, everythings, and nothings form the base of his ridge and writing; the breathing, thinking, singing, and dancing colour them and bring them to life. The poet is also the forest’s architect, drafting and blueprinting a temple of trees: “what remains of a great synagogue, / temple, mosque, cathedral: call it any / sacred name you please.” The forester of the ridge is also an archaeologist, geologist, and anthropologist, attentive to the depths and layers of history and peoples who have inhabited the land. The ridge trails to pine blister rust, en route to full scale destruction of the ecosystem. En route to the apocalypse is a “ruffed grouse drumming, drumming, / drumming, drumming, rufous hummingbird.” Drumming is surrounded by humming, ruffed by rufous – the sounds and spacing, the rare colour within a wider intonation of the drum’s rim. Drumming or dreaming is a gesture, trail and doorway to Kwakwala – the ridge’s Indigenous past and presence. The ridge also contains Plato’s cave and Wittgenstein’s “Astonishment is thinking.” First thoughts astonish, seconds admonish. “The Ridge” astonishes until the very end when it trails off to “That’s how / it goes and keeps on going.” Then the final coda, “Toodle-oo” – a familiar farewell, a parting of trails and tour de force.

The volume’s finale, “Life Poem,” recapitulates themes and techniques from all that has preceded it. Copula verb, casual tone, and tentative retraction initiate the poem: “Life is language, I wanted to say. Only problem: / it isn’t. Not language exactly, not language / as such.” The second stanza questions the weighing and measuring of life, language, and meaning: “Is it something like a language? A metaphor / for language? Or is language a metaphor for it? / Of course, of course.” Thinking out loud, or near silence, the poet crosses over, repeats, and branches out to “many languages.” Versing his concern in this tug of words, he breaks it down and diverges to “six or ten essential syllables / and twenty-odd occasional inflections.” First language and many languages contain phonemes, morphemes, slow sounds: “phrases, clauses, sentences congeal and then repeat, / repeat.” As if these hints offer a temporary template to the congealing flow, the acrobat’s “or not.”

To the book’s cover: Richard Wagener’s wood engraving features a blood-red or sunrise background offset by two disintegrating black shapes left and right. The ridge may be between the two abstract forms, or each one may constitute a fragmenting ridge of a fracked ecosystem. The processes of woodcutting and typesetting involve ridges at various stages. The ridge is nature’s mouth: its tongue in trails, teeth on edge, and bedrock breath. The Ridge is capacious: to the east, Canada; to the west, the vast Pacific sunset.

Robert Bringhurst, winner of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and former Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, trained initially in the sciences at MIT but has made his career in the humanities. He is also an officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of two honorary doctorates. He lives on Quadra Island, BC.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harbour Publishing (March 4 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1990776256
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1990776250

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.