Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

Shaken by Physics

by John MacKenzie

In his second collection of poetry, Shaken by Physics, East Coast writer John MacKenzie employs the language of science, religion, philosophy, and grammar to shake up our understanding of the landscapes we occupy and that occupy us. Using these systems of order as a starting point, MacKenzie’s poetry presents an alternate image of order – not disorder, so much as order turned back upon itself at the level of language: “Doubt is a matter of principle./For example: If you try to walk on water/You might want to carry loaves/Or you may feed the fishes.”

MacKenzie also shakes up the conventional distinctions of order/disorder within the structure of the poems themselves. In the section “Shaken by Physics: Dissonets,” MacKenzie creates his own dissonant sonnets of 13 unmetered lines. Similarly, in “What There Is (hunger haiku)” he uses haiku stanzas (without the conventional syllabic structure) to craft a long poem about the nature of hunger and desire: “The press of you against me/Unfolds us/Like a prayer into night./This window leaks moonlight/Until we are beaded, collapse./Vanilla scent of gravity.”

Many of these poems are dark, taking as their subjects the passing of things, the entropic rule of decay and dissipation, and death. But MacKenzie also reads (and writes) the hope of regeneration and birth within the cycles of death and decay. So every black wing and hoarse cry of the crow also contains the possibility of flight. And inversely, every flight contains the possibility of descent.

At times, the poems achieve a lyric, even Romantic, tone. MacKenzie’s images are masterful and resonant, leaving ripples long after the body of the poem has slipped beneath the surface of memory: “It is January, but I am thinking of green/Leaves in the rain/And how, on their edges,/water gathers like moments/… And each drop is hung, like time/From gravity’s thin strings.” It is in this sensual imagining of language, so abundant in this collection, that Mackenzie succeeds in rendering the physics of poetry, and the poetry of physics.

 

Reviewer: Heather Fitzgerald

Publisher: Raincoast Books

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 104 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-896095-56-9

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2002-9

Categories: Poetry