Shane Neilson's New Brunswick

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Biblioasis, 2019)

New Brunswick, Shane Neilson’s first book of poetry following the completion of his Affect Trilogy with the publication of Dysphoria in 2017, is both an extension of and a departure from those books. In New Brunswick, Neilson turns his attention to his home province and the difficult knotting of geography, politics, history and personal connections that constitutes place. This new book maintains the mixture of craft and raw emotional intensity that defined the Affect Trilogy while plumbing Neilson’s roots and delving into his relationships with his parents. The book is dedicated to 

the New Brunswicks
                of Elizabeth Margaret Neilson, Feb 5, 1940-Nov 9, 2014
                and William Douglas Neilson, Jan 9, 1942-Oct 26, 2017

​And “Pass By,” one of Neilson’s own poems, appears before the table of contents, serving as both a prelude and an invocation. The poem begins “Circumnavigate funeral plots—walk the coasts.” And ends

                                Problems laugh advice:
goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
New Brunswick born and in New Brunswick we’ll die.
 
                                                                                Pass by, pass by, pass by. 

Together, this dedication and this poem set a tone for the book that is at once urgent in its emotional appeal and retrospective in its orientation.
 
The three long sections that make up the heart of the book are “Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table,” “Elegy for EMN,” and “Loss Sonnets.” The first two are single, longer poems. The second is an elegy, and, although the first is not explicitly labelled an elegy, it is an elegy for Neilson’s father—at least in the sense that it mourns him and grapples with his legacy, although it misses the resolution typical of an elegy. The last of these three core sections is composed of individual poems tied together by place and a pervasive sense of loss.
 
Although these shorter pieces are strong, Neilson and the book are at their best in “Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table” and “Elegy for EMN.” The poems of “Loss Sonnets” work, and some of them work very well, but the larger frames of “Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table” and “Elegy for EMN” allow Neilson to carry through more complex patterns and articulate a greater range of emotional nuance. Take, for example, the repetition of the injunction “Be true to things” in “Elegy for EMN.” The poem consists of 17 numbered sections, and this phrase is introduced in the 6th section as part of an extended meditation on New Brunswick:

Season nation asleep at the cockcrow:
 
Your poetry a property of things. (Be true to things) What of the young
entrepreneur who built an empire of gas bars and facial rinses, what of gay
premier who smoked marijuana for the Queen? (Be true to things) What of shale-
gas anxiety that is susurrus in the spring, the fault lines of future levers in the
hands of political farmers? (Be true to things)

It reappears nine sections later in a question-and-answer dialogue between the poet and his mother:

Q:           Mother, will you die?
 
A:            (Be true to things)

And it returns for a final time towards the last section in the poem:

I said “I want you to live” but she was unchanging.
Her gift was Book. She held it as model:
Read this and know names. Be free. (Be true to things)

This repetition, the way it gathers force from the material that intervenes between each appearance of the phrase, allows the final repetition to layer aesthetics, place and personal loss together in a powerful compact moment that simply quoting the poem doesn’t do justice to. 
​
“Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table” is grounded in the materiality of the titular table—an inheritance from the poet’s father—and through it moves fluidly from Neilson’s present to his past and ranges across his relationship with this difficult, sometimes abusive man as it simultaneously probes the question of what to make of it and how to write it. The third stanza ends:

                                                Imperfections
meet my skin as I palm the table, my hand
to your hand. The strongest man I ever knew,
but never knew, is gone. I span the table
with my hand in the darkness. What should I feel?

​The table both provides a fitting and complex image for the man and his legacy and lends a solidity to a poem in which this question is never wholly answered and the emotional confusion that prompts it is never entirely resolved. The poem ends:

                                                That you
are gone is not a question, but an answer
spread out as a rough-hewn table. The fable
of a man is told in two versions, one for ear
and one for hand. We came from the same
land but differ. Pain and love I do not understand.

These lines are particularly resonant because of how Neilson bends form and sound to the service of affect. As the title of “Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table” indicates, the poem is a sonnet sequence, but fractured, its structure disrupted by its content. You expect a sonnet sequence to end with a set of rhymes that bring a tidy close to the poem, and Neilson gives you these rhymes, but there is nothing tidy about them. They are irregularly placed, jammed together or stretched apart, falling variably at the beginning, middle and ends of lines. “Table” is separated from “fable” by a period, two spaces and three letters; “came” and “same” are similarly proximate; “hand” in the middle of the penultimate line rhymes with “land” at the beginning of the final line and “understand” at the end of that same line. The effect is to produce what is clearly an end, but one without the conventional formal closure of a sonnet sequence. It is a fitting conclusion for a poem whose central relationship is unfolded but not resolved, and that ends with a failure to comprehend—“I do not understand.”
 
Both “Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table” and “Loss Sonnets” reflect Neilson’s ongoing investment in the sonnet form. His Affect Trilogy began with the sonnet “Standard Advice” in Complete Physical, and the sonnets in New Brunswick are one of the continuities between these three books and his latest one.
 
The end of “Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table” is also typical of Neilson’s use of formal structures—it is more often about deploying or invoking a form in order to stretch or break it, to deform it. “Head Pressed to Stone at St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery,” one of the “Loss Sonnets,” begins:

I say your name and I do grieve. All names
dredge the deep, but they fail to take heed
and sprout. Hereabouts, mustard seed got choked
by conglomerate needs that punish the small.

​There are no end rhymes, but the interplay of “grieve,” “deep,” “heed,” “seed” and “needs” recalls the sonic networks of the sonnet, and establishes an expectation for the remainder of the poem. It is an expectation, however, that is not fulfilled as the poem ends:

                Land remans, awaiting the farmer
of future nostalgias. Mom, I miss you.
This differgreen is slow, wild, beautiful assertion.

These lines are blunt, direct. They have none of the internal melody of the poem’s opening, but that bluntness, that refusal of a particular kind of beauty, folds the deadening effect of grief into the poem, and makes for a complex and satisfying conclusion.
 
Although many of the poems in New Brunswick are sonnets or variations on sonnets, the pieces alongside these cover a surprisingly diverse range of formal possibilities. There is “New Brunswick: A Timeline Legend,” which is just that—a poem in the form of a timeline. There is found poetry. There is free verse that sprawls across the page. And there is a substitution poem. This is one of the book’s strengths. It gives it an aesthetic vitality that is among New Brunswick’s most engaging features. 
 
If I have a criticism of the book, it is that, at times, it feels like there is more there. Neilson’s New Brunswick (both the book and the province) is richly detailed, simultaneously grounded in the personal and public histories of the region. Neilson’s last project was a trilogy. Although I am extremely hesitant to suggest that this book is the start of something of similar scope, New Brunswick leaves you with the impression that there are more poems to be written, and they are poems that, like the ones in the book itself, you would very much like to read.  

---

Aaron Schneider teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he also runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, filling station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Chattahoochee Review. His first book, Grass-Fed, is available from Quattro Books. Visit his website here.