Poetry begins when the properties of things-and the correspondences among them-reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself.
The poems in The Properties record encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They're alert to correspondences, attentive to the lines of force to which the poet's family quietly assented in the contested place that is the Northwest Coast of North America.
All times and places exist simultaneously. The texts in The Properties range from a twenty-first-century visitation by Herman Melville at a diner in New York City to an unknown history of the Lions Gate Bridge that begins in the Coast Salish village of Xwemelch'stn and ends with an assassination in Egypt. Igor Stravinsky, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Duke Ellington, Jeanne d'Arc, Walter Guinness, George Bowering, Andre Breton (who sought out "the interior voice within each human being"), and more appear.
Several texts continue the exploration of the documentary form begun in The Shovel. These plaited histories begin as improvisations and gleanings. The title piece, "The Properties," is a companion to the music drama The Kingfisher. A poem in honor of Browne's mother breaks a silence. A piece about his great-aunt becomes a poem about Richard Strauss. Included are the words sung for a screening of Carl Dreyer's 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, for which contemporary Vancouver-based composer Stefan Smulovitz wrote a luminous score. A manifesto celebrates the stick. There are works that return to sound poetry and repetition. Throughout, short lyrical fragments juxtapose longer texts in anticipation of a kind of capillary action.
About the Author :
Colin Browne has published five volumes of poetry. His most recent publications are Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw (Talonbooks, 2016) and The Hatch: Poems and Conversations (Talonbooks, 2015). His books have been nominated for a Governor General's Award and the Dorothy Livesay Award / B.C. Poetry Prize. He is a celebrated filmmaker; his experimental documentary White Lake was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Feature Documentary. His recent exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia (2016), explored the brief encounter between these two Modernist artists in Victoria, B.C., in August 1939, and presented the first extensive exhibition of Paalen's work in Canada. His collaboration with composer Alfredo Santa Ana, Music for a Night in May, was presented at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in May 2018. Recent essays exploring the links between Surrealism and the art of the Northwest Coast have appeared in exhibition catalogues in the U.S. and Europe. He is currently working on new curatorial projects and preparing a collection of essays for publication. Until recently, he taught in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he is Professor Emeritus.
Review :
“Colin Browne’s books can delight you in all ways. He is erudite and he is a slangster. Again in this big new volume we happily find an alarming cohabitation of learnedness and tomfoolery. He will quote from Plato and Frank Loesser on the same page. And there is so much there … Reading silently anywhere in the book, you can feel the words on your lips, he is so attentive to them. And once you sink into reading you know that you could be here forevermore.”
—George Bowering
“From rhythm sticks of phrases and words, cross-cultural as well as deeply familial, Colin Browne musics together a powerful series of poems, a mnemonic for ‘lighting up the routes between worlds.’ Recurrent war thrums in the ‘lyre’ strings of the local, even in the cables of Vancouver’s soaring bridge. These poems light up like accurate stars the “dark bight” we constantly ‘skiff’ across. The Properties is a major work from a poet writing at the peak of both outrage and love.”
— Daphne Marlatt
“In their wide-ranging, restless yet nevertheless focused reach, Colin Browne’s poems are packed with the unexpected detail only an alert mind can record, and in their refusal to explain themselves exhilarate the reader to connect, in his or her own surprised wonder, the seen with the unseen, the familiar with the strange; generating that invisible world always behind and in words. ‘Here there’s only now,’ says one poem, ‘beyond knowing.’ There’s a pedagogy here, and celebration—love, delight and thought their properties.”
—Peter Quartermain
“An environment of modulations, of feelings that don’t reveal themselves as nameable, sellable. Not aesthetic properties. Nothing redeeming in the destruction of cities. Not more musical to bomb an opera house than to bomb a factory. Hence: Stravinsky, Igor. Each tonal anchor only a pretext to swim into another key. Hence: Strauss, Richard. Such terrible accidents. Intersections not revelations. So much out, everything in. Crossings not consummations. What music exactly envies. Erudition
without knowingness, quality of always. Always of something discovered not told.”
—Donato Mancini
