Biblioasis, 2009. $17.95.
Reviewed by Marcus McCann

Shane Neilson's first full-length collection, Meniscus (2009, Biblioasis), comes a full four years after he was anointed the youngest member of Carmine Starnino's The New Canon. Amidst all the anxiety that Starnino's anthology engendered (where were Nathalie Stephens and Margaret Christakos? Why do all these poems sound like David Solway?), Neilson's contributions received little comment. Still, it was quite a coup for the young doctor to be included in the controversial tome. He was, after all, under thirty when the book's index was solidified, and he was one of just a handful of poets without a trade collection under his belt.

Fast forward four years, and Neilson's produced a bumptious, imperfect debut. The book boasts many of the themes Starnino favoured in the construction of his anthology: a hyper-butch narrator, the sounds of physical labour, plus a healthy dose of poverty, booze, violence and heartbreak. Here, the narrator's hard-working, hard-drinking, wife- and child-beating daddy is the loose connector for many of the poems.

Like the other New Canon poets, Neilson's got an ear for odd rhythms and favours alliteration over rhyme. The result is a sort of gumboot-in-the-washing-machine lyric that's never quite balanced and never quite settles down. Listen to the repeating consonants and off-kilter rhythm in the opening lines of the title poem, ostensibly about alcoholism:

A concave elegy, the liquid
hammock you sipped to drift
into oblivion; the bent
crevasse you crept into; the scythe
that dully cut your years

It's beautiful, right? The first enjambment is brilliant, suspending “liquid” over the line break, then giving us a word that reorients what came before (liquid turns from noun to adjective) and helps us reconceive of the subject. The lines are near iambic, but sway and charge like a drunk, dropping a syllable here, picking up a syllable there. But the most vivid syncopation comes from the repetition of hard consonants. In the first two lines, you get veritable machine gun fire — k-k-g-k-d/k-p-d-t — which all but disappears in the third line (no hard Ks, no Gs or Ps) only to rumble back with “crevasse you crept into.”

Many younger poets use this kind of verbal play to avoid grandiose statements or, sometimes, to avoid making any kind of heartfelt statement at all. Neilson doesn't shy away from big topics, naming abstract concepts like love and hate, life and longing in poem after poem (a confidence he may have picked up from AF Moritz, whom he thanks in the acknowledgments). This results in the odd hiccup, when a Really Big Idea (word caps) crowds out the music and imagery of the poem. But when the word sounds and the ideas jive, the results are electric, as in this section of “Exterminate My Heart”:

I've looked
on pallid husks, assuming
char-marked passion, cindered

love that went where it would.

Oh, and the collection's a bit of downer. Did I mention that?

Whether Neilson's inclusion in the New Canon will prove a blessing or a curse remains to be seen. A line has been drawn, as artificial as it is, that puts Neilson in a generation with 40- and 50-year old heavyweights like Ken Babstock, Stephanie Bolster, Karen Solie, Kevin Connolly, and John Barton. If he were born a few months later, his lot would have been cast with writers a whole generation younger (Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jason Guriel, Jordan Scott, Mike Spry, Matt Radar). How Meniscus is received, I suspect, will depend in part on how we come to think of its author generationally.