12th Canadian Challenge - 15th Review - Clusters

The story of how I settled on this book of poetry, Clusters by Kenneth Sherman, is somewhat droll.  The Star had given a generally favorable review to Cluster by Souvankham Thammavongsa (well, more of a blurb really), so I thought I should read it for Poetry Month.  (I guess April is always poetry month, perhaps to offset the "cruelest" moniker Eliot gave it all those years ago -- was April always tax month, I wonder?)  I did put Cluster on hold at the Toronto Public Library but thought that Robarts might have a copy available.  As it turns out, they don't have a copy of Cluster at all, though they had a few of Thammavongsa's earlier collections, as well as some chapbooks (in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library).  However, Sherman's Clusters showed up in a title search, and, as it was poetry by a Canadian author, I decided to check it out (while waiting for my hold material to arrive).

There's no point in beating around the bush -- I didn't much care for Clusters.  I only thought 2 or 3 poems were of interest.  It's not that these are terrible poems overall, but they don't have particularly strong imagery or wordplay, so you are left with just the ideas behind them, and I am not really on Sherman's wavelength.  The 3rd section of the book concerns itself with various exotic locales that Sherman visited and then the 4th has some ponderings on God and the divine (definitely not my cup of tea).  I think it's very unlikely that I will read any of his other collections.

The poems I did like concern themselves with mundane, everyday life -- sending the kids off to summer camp and getting by in the suburbs (presumably of Toronto).

Here Sherman talks about feeling the absence of his children in "Summer Camp": "Our little ones are gone. / Now our most important person / seems to be the mailman / who brings their sometime letters / ... / We read and grasp at morsels, / hunger for more details. / But already part of them is private. / They grow away from us ..."

In "The Suburbs" Sherman hints that the very mundaneness and ordinariness of the suburbs (while generally something sought out by those who move there) may be hiding something.  "It is true.  There are painful regrets / and drama behind each door, / ... / But how considerate the region is / with its regular / goings and comings ..."  There may be even deeper secrets, things paved over in this era that has lost touch with the natural world -- and perhaps even the ancient gods...  "We ask / if there were once gods in the cedars / who have abandoned us.  We wonder, / as night wraps around like a mask, / at the pressing disorder of stars."

If there had been a bit more of this throughout the collection, I might have been more into Sherman's Clusters.