Anvil Press; $45 List Price, $36 at Book Warehouse
I discovered this wonderful new book today, which maps Vancouver through nearly 100 poems centered in various locations across our grand and gritty city. Each poem is accompanied by a full-page colour photograph by Derek von Essen, and it’s surprisingly fun to read verse about places you know and love, like Gastown in “4:00 am” by Wayne Stedingh, the VAG steps in “What Jack Shadbolt said” by Trevor Carolan, Wicked Cafe at 7th and Hemlock in “Purgatory” by Christine Schrum, or taking the good old B-line in “99 Express– 8 a.m.” by Bibiana Tomasic. And this is just naming a very, very few.
Yet my favorite, hands down, is a speculative poem about what it would be like to be on Wreck Beach when the dreaded “Big One” earthquake hits, excerpted after the jump:
from WRECK(ED) BEACH, 1997 by ZSUZSI GARTNER
“The ocean spits deadheads, sending logs rocketing through the city / like battering rams to crack open the Roman walls of the new library, / The Bay, GM Place, St. Paul’s Hospital, splitting heads as they whistle / by like heat-seeking missiles. All over the city film sets collapse as the / earth heaves.
The naked scramble madly up the cliff face from their beach, / clutching at branches and swollen arbutus roots, brambles tearing / at their pubic hair and genitals, as the ocean roars behind them, a / towering inferno of water swallowing pan pipes, arthritic dogs, / coolers of dope and sangrias.
They’re shocked, not because the end has come, but because it’s so / New Testament when they had thought it would be man-made– / a cold, clinical apocalypse, so they could say WE TOLD YOU SO.
There’s no longer a cliff and we’re clutching at air.”
