Prayers

As a child I said my prayers before bed, on my knees, head bowed, hands folded over the pillow before me. This was my "hour". The Roman Catholic Church has seven canonical hours, beginning with the "midnight office," which can be recited at daybreak, like the public morning prayer in the Church of England. A.F. Scott concludes his "MATIN: MATINS" entry in his Current Literary Terms: A Concise Dictionary of their Origin and Use (London: Macmillan, 1965) with "A morning song of birds."

On Wednesday I attended a Massy Books reading by John Lent, in town (from Vernon) to share with us his latest collection, A Matins Flywheel (Saskatoon: Thistledown, 2019). Lent spoke at length of his life since a 2016 heart event, providing a context for a series of long-lined poems (matins) born from the earliest hours of the day when, at 3am, he would awake in pain and move to a chair overlooking the valley, watching in awe as it filled with light.

Like the last two recently published books of poetry I have spent time with -- Danielle LaFrance's JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Vancouver: Talon, 2019) and Jacqueline Turner's Flourish (Toronto: ECW, 2019) -- Lent's book carries with it the names of those he knows and/or have influenced him, threading them through lines like Turner does with hers (LaFrance gathers hers at the end, in a section called "NOTESKNOTSNOTSNAUGHTS").

The tendency to supply contextual information beyond the "Acknowledgements" page has expanded in recent years, and we are better for it (poems, as Jeff Derksen once reminded my younger self, come not from individuals but from communities). The context Lent provided before his reading is the mark of someone who has spent many years teaching, but who knows also what it is to appear before friends, some of whom he hasn't seen in a while. Writers like Daphne Marlatt and Aislinn Hunter, who were there listening as I was to poems like "3. LOVE: A DEADSPARROW", an excerpt of which appears below:

quite get it right. And I knelt
there sobbing for this piston
life out here in the height
of air and sun, the dark
earth grinning back up --
me sobbing for this piston and
exulting in it, too, knowing
this small being had risked 
everything to be loved
like this, cradled by such