My Brother Was a Poet: Poems by Mark Bohnen

Nabokov superimposes a chessboard on a writing table, and his verbal jousting and problem-solving serve as an example for Mark Bohnen whose poetry may be read through moves on that board. An avid chess champion in his own right, Bohnen moves his pawns and poems across lines in antiphonal directions that compete with his regular rhythms. The opening poem, “For My Sister on Her Twenty-fifth Birthday,” uses iambic pentameter and eschews punctuation, as internal placement of sounds binds siblings. A dominance of sibilants captures the occasion: “The land of Silverbirch of our past / Seems lost in the midst of a neverland.” This utopian moment summons a personal and pastoral golden age. “Land” and “lost” move across the chess board, while “lost” gets caught between “past” and “midst” — sounds in counterpoint to rhyme and time.

In the second stanza “sardonic smiles” alliterate with sister and Silverbirch, while the rhyme “ourselves” and “elves” prepares for the internal pun of “A typical tale, a puppy dog tail.” Near rhymes lead to the parallel shift at the beginning of lines: “Like all the rest with whim and fancy / Like all the rest to be set on the shelf.” Whim and fancy recur in the third stanza, and when they fly, “There grows a bond that cannot die / That slowly creeps within your bone / When no one cares, when no one’s home.” The rook’s move across the page from bond to bone to home sounds the family name of Bohnen before the final checkmate — “you come to me” and the “past” of first and last lines. Words prod the page and board, while sounds blur in “prattle and dance.”

“Lessons From My Games” addresses Bohnen’s chess board:

“Lessons from my games / Suggest a most wondrous excursion / Into a magician’s emporium.” Wordsworth’s excursion morphs into post-Romantic magic: “Enjoy the magic wand as it dispenses/ Dust of mystery over the chess board.” Bohnen’s sleight of hand and “sudden attack” exchange pen for wand, “Recapturing something unique.” His unique epiphany breaks out of a “hedgehog position” to end the first stanza and begin the second: “How I’d like to break out of mine.” Lessons and games require a breakout from a constricted hedgehog position or “close quarters” to Wordsworth’s mansion and dwelling-place. The second stanza ends on a downward note:”Without the slightest sigh I fret / To die slowly beneath a hovel of regret.” The third stanza opens on a higher note: “I’d love to fly not like a self-deceived phoenix,” but soon the territory of negatives overtakes the speaker who has renounced “the golden nowhere.” To move from mansion to hovel and golden nowhere is to renounce any utopian vision or golden age. “Without” in the second stanza becomes more despondent and emphatic in the third: “Never without a song to eulogize,” “without the ardour to fuel,” and “without an attending date.” The chessboard empties after the players withdraw.

“Chess Game” further advances the poet’s position: “The old master sat impeccably still / And the chess pieces danced to the tune of his will.” Wordsworth, Auden, and Nabokov are some of the old masters in Bohnen’s verse and quiet conversation with himself. Rhyming couplets and enjambment are perfectly suited to the dialogue of the mind with itself, the flow of pieces on the board, and contest between players. Rhythmic beats echo the game’s moves and prepare for defeat: “One pawn push, one pawn push would make the last move / As the series commencing with 0-0 would prove.” The wit, whimsy, and “mimsy” of the game, fate, final, and finish lead to the end when “Mighty Casey struck out.” Bohnen contends with old masters from Hopkins to Dylan Thomas in his game plan of ludic lyrics.

Fate plays out on the chessboard of experience in understated ways that call for understanding in masked features. In “Game Plan” the poet enjoins us to “Wrap it behind a cloak” and “Mask what you must.” Masks range from “mimsy” to a persona covered by mood. If chess offers one form of contested partnership, then the series of poems in “In Every Capacity I See You” enters into a masked relationship with an unknown woman who is the subject of the poet’s devotion. Four sestets in “The Music of the Past Has No Refrain” reveal a deft mix of sound, irony, and self-awareness. Each stanza begins and ends with the refrain that undercuts itself through repetition and recurrent negatives — no, never, undone, unchanged, unperturbed, without, and disclaimed. Each of these negatives tilts against the poet’s “Oh yes,” which is inner-directed. This sequence has an evanescent quality because of an ideal of unrequited love that lingers even as it vanishes over time.

The tercets of “Erstwhile Lover” explore a relationship where both partners and song are erstwhile singers: “I pretend I’m with you, erstwhile lover, / Sing a bit — I rediscover/ That I still admire your tune.” The monosyllables in “sing a bit” abbreviate the seasonal and seasoned lyrics as the poet wanders backwards and concludes: “And that summer vow still lingers / You my flame — my erstwhile singer, / Are those moments fled so soon?”

Invention through convention: Bohnen writes through a tradition in his suite of poems. “Untitled “ once again highlights its negative prefix with “unbroken comportment.” Underneath the “masquerade of shadows” the poet discovers his beloved’s otherness: “The voice of your alter ego still rings / Confronts sailors, lures intrepid men to hellish rendezvous, / Yet it is the other soft sweet voice I hear / As I sail into a flurry of thankless ocean.” He navigates between Scylla and Charybdis, the siren songs of waves, and chess notes.

Bohnen takes on Leonard Cohen in “Bird on the Wire” with its two carefully balanced quatrains. His tetrameters sing: “This feathery fellow alights on my line / It’s a port in an ocean, a promising sign.” The poem’s flight arises from the oscillating f’s and l’s that prepare for “The spring floats past like an illusion.” This song mediates between distance and proximity, and masks skylarks and nightingales: “I must walk with or without time’s elected / And wear the face that I’ve erected.” A bard in line, the amphibian poet swims on surfaces and in depths as often as he walks among the elected.

The volume’s final poem, “There Were Soft Voices,” underscores Bohnen’s understatement and use of the copula in other poems — “There is Sunshine” and “There’s a Hope.” “There were soft voices, / Urging, constraining, tilting my mind.” Having captured sounds, he then tilts an eye — “And everywhere the inkpot of design.” He pens images: “The pattern somehow redounded / That pattern imprinted in my mind unbounded/ Lent itself a complex web.” His unbounded mind tilts toward an “unforewarned visit” and “undisclosed future” that ends with “The promenade of unpossessed, / The sudden passage of vehicles that bless.” His complex web captures promenades and passages.

Mark Bohnen was born and grew up in Toronto. A spirited and imaginative youngster, he constructed play forts and fantasies and nurtured passions in science, music, literature and the game of chess. Mark read widely, everything from Superman comics to Kafka. He enjoyed singing too, with a repertoire ranging from standards to themes from Beethoven’s symphonies. Throughout his high school and university years (graduating from the University of Toronto in 1972) and his career in market research, Mark wrote poetry–deeply felt pieces, characterized by passion and wit and a deft and original way with language. He never attempted to publish and shared his work with only a few. His manuscripts were filed in a black binder which, after he died in 1987, remained with his sister, and which after several decades, is the source of the selections in this volume.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gatekeeper Press (July 17 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 72 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 166293940X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1662939402

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.