Shane Neilson's ​The Reign

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Goose Lane, 2025)

​Shane Neilson’s latest book of poetry, The Reign, is the second to ground itself in New Brunswick, the province of his birth. The first, 2019’s New Brunswick, took up the legacy of his family, in particular his mother and father, and the broader representation of the province itself. It was personal in its material and Lowellesque in its complex attentiveness to form, working in its best moments (of which there were many) in a mode that could be called something like confessional regionalism. The Reign extends and builds on New Brunswick, but the words “extends” and “builds” hardly do justice to a book that is so vitally charged with originality, that is relentless in its inventiveness, unapologetic in its strangeness, and deeply compelling. It is less an extension of Neilson’s earlier work than a mutation of it that transforms the first book’s interest in form, and shifts mode into a surreal New Brunswick Gothic through which quasi-human bucks prance, run and rut, and in which doors abound as both a symbol and a poetic form.
 
Loosely narrative in structure, the book follows Willard, an intellectually disabled man left behind when his community is expropriated for a military base, or, as Neilson writes, “our childlike hero of the expropriated.” Willard moves through the landscape, not so much inhabiting it as becoming one with it, and falling in love with Casey, a scion of the Irving family, the industrialists who are still, to this day, the effective aristocracy of the province.
 
The book progresses through fourteen sections, sometimes adopting the voice of Willard, sometimes of the forest, sometimes of the poet, changing as it proceeds, the form shifting between long lines and short, including images, emojis, and what, for a lack of a better term, I’ll call door poems. It’s a vertiginous array of styles, but it largely works, and the effect of this mutability is to highlight a set of continuities within the transformations of the style, continuities that always refer back to Willard and to the landscape, so that the poems are restlessly inventive but the reading experience is one of feeling located, grounded, stabilized in a specific locale with a history, a community and a culture, rather than being unmoored by the shifting form. It’s a fascinating effect, and speaks, I think, to Neilson’s deep familiarity with and investment in his subject matter.
 
I have called the book New Brunswick Gothic, and it begins with sex and violence that are not co-present, but interpenetrating, interchangeable in what suggests at once that they are a deformation of something authentic and authentically good, of love, and that this deformation is, if not ubiquitous, at least ascendant:

​Life reigns
 
The corporals, in love—as they beat each other in the barracks.
 
Listen: cannonades sound from training grounds.
 
Buck privates at boot camp startle in army issues.
 
Mixed-rank couples fuck in moist PMQs built regulation.

​Life bleeds into love that bleeds into violence that bleeds into sex over the course of less than half a dozen lines, and all of this happens against the background of industrialized murder in the form of the artillery fire, and, as we see later in the section, the murderous pollution of the PCBs spilling from the Irving’s factories into the river. There is what I want to call a rough polish to these lines. They are attentive to sound and rhythm without ever acceding to the blithe smoothness of closed form (more on this later). “Sound” plays off of “grounds.” Bs, Ps, and Rs are picked up from the second and third lines and used to stitch together the fourth. A rhythm is established in the third and fourth lines, and then not so much broken as sent off-kilter in the fifth. It is a style that, at least in its implementation, is unique to Neilson, and, at its best, it makes for captivating reading.
 
If the foreground of the setting is sex and violence, the background, or, rather, what was been forced into the background by colonialism, and military and corporate power, is love. It emerges in the opening section: 

​Love here
is stubborn,
held-behind
eyelash veiled
visions of
flailed stumps
and fractured
saplings, love
that remains
in collapsing

​And love is the persistent theme of the book, the counterpoint it offers to the forces of depredation, displacement and exploitation. With love, alongside and intermingling with it, it gives the reader Willard:

Only Willard is permitted a full account. Willard—dunce, idiot, moron, retard. The fool— 
            all names he was called in school.
 
                                    Willard, near-mute scholar of place,
 
                                                of peace
           
who will
                       
                                                                        leave
 
not. 

​Here again is the internal rhyme I noted in the opening lines. This is also the end of the first section, and I quote it in part to highlight the strength of these endings. Neilson consistently moves the managed discordance of his writing towards moments that are not so much defined by harmony as weight of stillness and emotional resonance. Notice how these lines open up across the page, and the inverted syntax allows Neilson to end the section on the negation that is Willard’s persistence while signalling that it is a backwards-looking resistance to the violent future-oriented vectors of progress, development and exploitation. If the sections most often work by accumulating meaning in a paratactic furor, in their closing lines they consistently alter their methodology to concentrate it into moments of resonant significance.
 
The most inventive of the forms in the book is what I have, for lack of a better term, chosen to call a door poem. Doors and bucks are the bucks and the books motifs. The latter recur in the poems, and appear in the family tree that begins the books, and in several of the illustrations. They are a relatively new addition to Neilson’s poetic lexicon. Doors are also new, but they echo the family table of New Brunswick, particularly in the attention paid to the material of their making, to their texture, grain, their organic solidity. In The Reign, doors recur like bucks, but also give some of the poems their forms:

​The effect is multilayered, depending on where and how you look. The framing text situates the interior prose poem as passage, an entry way. But to read the framing text the eye must circle the prose poem it contains, and the reader will be tempted to rotate the book, turning the prose poem into a sort of pivot point. It is an effect that invites an uncommonly tactile engagement with the book, that encourages the reader to turn and tilt it, to be reminded, if only briefly, that it is an object as well as a text. This is an engagement that is uniquely in keeping with a poetic form that itself derives from a quotidian, even prosaic, but deceptively complex object.
 
Not all of the poems or stylistic approaches are equally successful. The longer lines sometimes drift away from their content, deploying devices that do not so much subvert the meaning but operate independently of it. Consider these lines from “Executive Meeting”:

​As they snort through exposure to Agent Orange and Agent Purple,
surrounded by fracking, raw sewage dumping into drinking water as
parts per million of mill effluent never measured; as maths of capitalism/
pogey X patronage pay for company toques come Christmas season, I derive
                                    a theory of everything:

​There is powerful material here, but the alliteration tends to pull against it, creating a dissonance that the poem neither resolves nor turns to productive effect. I almost want to say that these lines would work better the closer they cleaved to prose, but that may be a matter of personal taste rather than a critical judgment. At other times, the longer lines are exceptionally effective. They are at arguably their strongest in the section in which Neilson juxtaposes them with lines from poems by Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. The contrast highlights the rugged authenticity of Neilson’s writing and the aesthetically simplistic falsity of Roberts’ and Carman’s. As someone who has sat through far too many earnest overestimations of the value and skill of the Confederation poets, overestimations that required a broad-scale ignorance of literary history in both the critics/academics who produced them and the listeners on whom they imposed them, that demanded, in short, that one forget that far better poetry has been written, the contrast Neilson forces in these poems was a welcome corrective that made for exhilarating reading.
 
Whatever quibbles I might have with this element of the book or any other are just that, quibbles rather than substantive criticisms, and they are the inevitable effect of a book that is willing to try so much, that is so rich in stylistic experimentation. The Reign is, as I began by saying, restlessly inventive, and as soon as I finished it, I returned to the beginning and read it again for the pleasure of watching the performance, and so that I could take in and appreciate the details I had missed in my first reading. Neilson began his career with his Affect Trilogy, and my hope is that he will eventually (hopefully, sooner rather than later) add a third book to New Brunswick and The Reign to create a New Brunswick trilogy. 

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Aaron Schneider is a queer settler living in London, Ontario. He is the founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review, the publisher at the chapbook press 845 Press, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies at Western University. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Ex-Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, The Malahat Review and The Windsor Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed (Quattro Books), was published in Fall 2018. His collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), was published in Fall 2021. The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books, 2023) is his first novel.