Brian Brett, The Colour of Bones in a Stream

"I write for forever, but I operate on the assumption that when I'm dead, it will all be dead. We're not smart enough to know what time will make of us. And time is the great editor, right?"--Brian Brett, quoted in the CBC story on his 2024 death, aged 73

Many's the time I've said so around here, and deeply do I feel it: reading contemporary poetry is work for me. I've mostly made my peace with that, but not always, because it makes me distrust my own reading practices. At bottom, I end up worrying whether I'm not getting it, getting it but not appreciating it, getting it but not liking it, or even liking it but not getting it.

Anyway: I really, really liked some of the poems in Brian Brett's 1998 collection The Colour of Bones in a Stream. For me, that's all I ever want from a book of poems, because I fully expect that the writer will be experimenting, reaching beyond their grasp, trying on different forms and modes and voices. If I'm happy sometimes, especially if I'm very happy at times, then I'll call that a win every time.

And so it doesn't really matter to me, not really, that other poems here read to me like missives from another era. That happens sometimes with poetry, especially when they run up against my various hangups and self-recriminations to mean that I can't get comfortable with the material.

In particular, poems about sex can give me more of the ick, and more often, than would be preferred by me or by the therapist I sometimes imagine I should be seeing: "I remember those breasts / I would hang onto / when I mounted you, / your knees in the air" (p43). Brett's experience of living as a child with Kallmann syndrome, which was said to have made him androgynous well into his teens, does stand intriguingly but invisibly behind some of those moments, but at this point, I'm old enough to realize that I'll never get comfortable reading "a woman's leaking breast, / semen stronger than yeast" (p14), nor reading "the deep, unknown glow in a woman's eyes / as she lifts her legs beneath you / and offers a taste of grace" (p87), even when the lines ring as true as Brett's sometimes do.

These milquetoast, prudish complaints are irrelevant, though, if I'm not looking to connect with every poem, and uniform connection simply isn't what I expect from a book of poetry. There's plenty here to keep me occupied, much more than enough to make me think this a book to reread and to recommend.

• In the short "Alive and Still in the Garden," for example, which is about looking at clearcuts, there's this gem: "We were never evicted from Eden. / We just hung around for the slaughter" (p22).
• The much longer "Sleep Well, Torturers," sits powerfully and for a painfully long time with the Rwandan atrocities, with Timothy McVeigh's bombing of Oklahoma City, and with murderousness both more ancient and more local.
• Hunger recurs as a theme in this book, with multiple poems about bread, often facing head-on the regret that can accompany hunger: "My appetite for the world is larger than the world" (p76), or "almost enjoying the guilt of the scavenger / consuming until the end of consumption" (p86).
• Brett can be a wonderfully immediate poet, and the anthemic "Take This Moment" is therefore a real high point for me in The Colour of Bones in a Stream. 

I can't find any reviews of the book, the 1990s being neither historic nor internet-present. If you have any memories or thoughts about The Colour of Bones in a Stream, or of Brian Brett, I'd love to hear them. More than that, if you're the Barb for whom Brian Brett inscribed this book in Sointula on July 31, 2004, I'd very much like to hear from you!