Some
praise for David and his work...
The
Village of Sliding Time
The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood
Crows
Do Not Have Retirement
How I Joined Humanity
at Last
On The Village of Sliding Time:
Your teenaged
self arrives at your door one morning. Like in Dickens’ A Christmas
Carol, the boy has come to guide you on a journey through your past,
yes, but this is somehow different. The boy is as amazed by the present
as he is knowing of the past. It is the path the speaker travels with
this, his younger self, that is the narrative of David Zieroth’s
engaging long poem The Village of Sliding Time.
--Zieroth,
the former editor of Event Magazine, was raised in rural Manitoba,
and currently resides in North Vancouver. It is within these two locales
that Zieroth fixes his story, as they are the landscapes of his past and
his present. Though a poem of sixty pages, the spacing of the poem, combined
with Zieroth’s accessible language and enthusiastic pacing, make
for a quick read. Fortunately, The Village of Sliding Time is
a book that deserves to be read and savoured often.
--Like
any poem about the remembering of a life, the narrative of The Village
of Sliding Time is interlaced with allusions to life’s bookends
of birth and death: feet like “the bent curved feet/ of the old,
the small boneless / limbs of babies…” (18), a boy “called
home / through the stony pasture” (28), a “wet sack / of kittens…”
(32). The long poem that comprises almost the entirety of the book is,
itself, bookended by two poems, “How I Came To Be” and “Had
I Stayed on the Farm,” which explore the birth and (imagined) death
of the author, and help to further situate The Village of Sliding
Time at the delicate balancing point between creation and destruction.
--Perhaps
it is this awareness of the fragility of life that spurs the author to
recount his childhood and youth at a dizzying pace. Using clear language,
the poem truly does slide between lines and stanzas, each image spilling
into the next. For these are true memories, often brief and incomplete,
names and places piling on top of one another in what seems to be a tangled
mess. But then come the moments of transcendence and clarity, those crisp
moments of childhood: trips to the beach, train rides, snowstorms. Moments
that stick in the mind and demand attention. At these places the speaker
slows, the descriptions become more detailed and passionate. It is clear
here that memory is no egalitarian — it picks favourites —
and when its favourites are this pleasurable, this bold and rich, who
can complain?
--Near
the end of the poem the author takes over the role of tour guide, leading
his younger self through modern, cosmopolitan Vancouver, a world as chaotic
and wondrous as the speaker’s own nest of memories. The poem, then,
is projected into the present and, ultimately, the future. Through this,
hints of what it means to be human, to remember and to create, emerge:
--I
can tell the boy has seen death
--on
his own, it is not death
--that
will separate him from me
--when
I die
--will
he die too
--maybe
a minute later
--catching
up
--and
becoming me
--one
last little
--togetherness
--flowing
back and forth...
--As
the poem closes, we, as readers, are left much like the boy at the opening
of the poem: both knowing and amazed, ready for the journey.
--—Rob
Taylor, poetryreviews.ca
•••
David
Zieroth begins this account with the night of his own conception, continues
through early childhood to schooldays and ends with his family's move
to BC... [He] skillfully avoids cynicism and nostalgia, engrossing the
reader in a memory album that is not narrative, although narratives are
implied... Loneliness, family ties, farmyard slaughter and schoolboy pranks;
this is a loving but not mawkish reminiscence. The undertone is an awareness
of death that insures against the sentimental... It amounts to an engaging
and highly readable memoir.
--—Hannah
Main-van der Kamp,
BC Bookworld
•••
The
opportunity to relive one’s past is a fantasy that has tempted great
imaginations throughout the history of poetry. It is a temptation that
has yielded some of literature’s most enduring long poems: Wordsworth’s
“Prelude”, Czeslaw Milosz’s pointed A Treatise on
Poetry, or Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology
in which a long series of poems feature individual voices looking back
on the lives they led. With The Village of Sliding Time, David
Zieroth effortlessly reinvigorates the conventions of the reflective long
poem with the restless imaginative detours of a good dream play.
--A
boy who has “the gift / of sliding time / under your slippers”
and “can make / anyone you want to see / walk down this hall / and
into your arms” leaps out of a man’s past to knock on the
door of the present, which opens on a world teeming with stories and legends
that maintain the reader’s curiosity in a way that occasionally
rivals the magical realism of contemporaries such as Alberto Rios or Italio
Calvino.
--Zieroth’s
poem conveys an endearing sense of awe at how the circumstances of birthplace
invent our childhoods—and indeed our lives—in a way that is
entirely beyond our control. Though “the maps / are not set out
/ to read with ease” Zieroth navigates through a past made retrievable
only by grace of poetry, a powerful testament to the power of imagination
to help us persist through losses imposed by time.
--Zieroth
revels in this admitted aidlessness, eschewing forced answers and convenient
philosophies to simply communicate the wonder of being alive, a bemused
joy he articulates simply and with consistent substance. “Could
we claim our real life / while everyone knew / we had to fight off the
skin / we were born in / shed it” Zieroth reflects at the poem’s
onset.
--The
Village of Sliding Time is a celebration to which Zieroth never fails
to invite the reader. Though the history he draws upon to sustain the
energy of an 80-page poem is a distinctly personal one, it is always related
in a way that welcomes the reader to share the experiences of the life
he explores. The child in Zieroth who makes him “see what once I
lived / and where” is in every one of us, constantly mindful of
happiness that cannot be relived and failure that cannot be undone. Here,
though, that child enters the present in the flesh and with the ability
to return to us what we thought time had taken for good.
One thing Zieroth makes clear, however, is that his poem is about more
than just one person’s life. Throughout the work, Zieroth firmly
establishes a conviction that each life is actually a series of lives
inhabited and left behind for what awaits, and it is the opportunity to
revisit the lives left behind that Zieroth offers through a language so
vivid and immediate that past and present become magically indistinguishable
from one another.
--Despite
the poem’s length, it feels as though it documents a single epiphanic
moment in which the past explodes into a series of abandoned rooms visited
by the speaker and his younger self, a guide one might liken to a kind
of teenaged Virgil refreshingly indifferent to moralization. One room
“with its smells, dry leaves, petals” is accompanied by “children
/ near the stacks of / newspapers waiting for someone / to let them in.”
In another “Orion’s / belt of jewels” is “used
for / making children gape / and grope toward / what can’t be touched.”
And in another “every child / loves the touch / at the end of the
day / from the hand / that wrings the rooster’s neck, / reaches
in / for the wet heart, the gizzard / tossed to gulping dogs, kidneys
kept back / for a husband’s sweetheart stew.”
--The
complete absence of pretense in the poem’s plain and brief opening
line immediately introduces one of the Zieroth’s key strengths:
an unwavering commitment to telling a tale that is as universal in its
appeal as it is powerful in its delivery. If abstract moments such as
the “ice” that “leapt with the draft upon pane / into
filaments of shine and angle / recalling I could be no longer / that cool
bright light of / almost emptiness / so entirely filled with / more than
me” disrupt the poem’s momentum by forcing the reader to linger
longer over the lines than the poem usually demands, it is, fortunately,
only that rare misstep bound to occur in a poem of this length and ambition.
--At
the same time, however, Zieroth’s peculiarly sparse punctuation
creates an enjambment that speeds down the page like a river after weeks
of rain and tempts readers to move quickly through the poem. This would
be a mistake, as the poem’s accessibility conceals a deceptive subtlety
that generously rewards repeated reading. There is something about the
detail of “the bundle of clothes” the boy “noticed for
the first time... the / dresses made and remade / out of which / so much
desire would arise” that begs readers to return and savor memories
of the ease with which the slightest discovery in childhood awakened the
capacity for surprise. It is memories of simple pleasures such as these
that Zieroth took a long time to harvest, and it is a testament to his
success that the book’s staying power promises to last much longer
than the years it took to write.
--—Gianmarc
Manzione,
The
Modern Review
On The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood:
It was said of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler that when he led an
orchestra through Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the audience felt as if
they were hearing the composition for the first time. To take something
that has become familiar almost to a point of cliche and give it the fascination
of novelty is an art—an art that David Zieroth has mastered in this
memoir of his early life.
--To many readers, either through personal
or vicarious experience, an account of life on a prairie farm is not new.
How Zieroth manages to transform our perspective of well-explored territory
is through his ability to record and describe experience exactly as it
appeared to him at a particular stage of his life. Occasionally he writes
as the omniscient adult who looks back with the retrospective knowledge
gained from experience and reflection, but more often as the child/adolescent/young
adult whose physical, mental and emotional horizons expand with the passage
of time and change of locale. We share his journeys of self-discovery
and epiphanies of knowledge that are reminiscent of Rousseau's Emile,
who gained the rudiments of his education from the exploration of his
own environment.
--We enter David Zieroth's world through
his childhood on the family farm, two hours from Gladstone and two hours
from Neepawa, Manitoba, as brief and separate references in the text indicate.
Without being monotonous, the first part of the book graphically depicts
the unvarying and onerous routines of farm life. It is a far from idyllic
existence, where life for the farm animals is often nasty, brutish and
short, and for the humans an almost unrelenting cycle of hard work. One
form of respite for the family comes in the university's books-by-mail
program when books like Ernest Thompson Seton's Wild Animals I Have
Known open up new worlds for David. David's own imaginative sensitivity
appears in a lovely poetic passage in which he imagines himself as a swallow
in flight, leading his transformed schoolmates through the summer skies.
A solid anchor of reality here and throughout the book is provided by
David's father—perpetually competent, confident and hard working,
but so reticent and stolid as to inspire more respect and awe than love,
although there is a progressive growth of affection between father and
son that deepens throughout the book. David's mother is a more shadowy
figure, although she is beautifully depicted in a scene where she comforts
David after a father-son confrontation, and confides in him that she has
to act as a buffer between her husband and her children.
--As David grows older, the almost cinematically
described scenes and episodes of his life increase in detail. Even minor
characters from the nearby town are etched with Dickensian sharpness—Dr.
Boyd, the itinerant dentist, whose reputation is tainted by the death
of one of his patients in the dentist's chair; Mrs. Post, the alternately
ferocious and languid wife of the hotel owner, a Mrs. Rochester transplanted
from Jane Eyre to rural Manitoba. A family trip to Calgary brings
the thrill of visiting a new place, and the kind of disillusionment that
is most bitter in youth, when, having idolized the Stampede cowboys, David
encounters one of his heroes masturbating in a washroom.
--The scenes from David's high school life
are among the most vivid, if only because Zieroth accomplishes the nearly
impossible in two scenarios that in the hands of a less skilful writer
could have torpedoed and sunk themselves through their awful potential
for cliche: the hapless, hopeless high school football team that does
win some games against all odds, and the high school dance. Adolescent
angst and peer pressure are not new subjects, but rarely have they been
described with such almost painful clarity.
--There are contextual clues to the time
of events in references to David's high school essay, "Should Canada
Acquire Nuclear Weapons?" being written four years after the launching
of Sputnik, and the band at the high school dance playing numbers by Chad
Allen and The Expressions.
--In the fourth and final section, the momentum
of the narrative increases, and the episodes are so crowded as to be almost
disorienting, as we follow David away from home, through university, into
a brief teaching career, and ultimately into the beginning of his career
as a writer. The death of his father, described both in a surrealistic
dream passage and straightforward narrative, brings the story to a poignant
conclusion.
--Charles
Dickens wrote in his preface to Bleak House that he had purposely
dwelt on the romantic side of familiar things. In this memoir, David Zieroth
has brought not only romance but also novelty to the familiar.
--—David
Rozniatowski, Prairie Fire
•••
This
compelling memoir, like the Manitoba landscape of David Zieroth's childhood,
is elegant and spare. With a beautiful clarity he brings to light the
everyday events—sometimes lovely, sometimes banal, sometimes cruel—that
shape a life. The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill is the poignant
story of a boy's search for the man within himself. It is also a history
of how rural dwellers come to know, and to learn from, the land, their
families, and their communities—a way of learning that, unfortunately,
is vanishing.
--—Sandra Birdsell, from the book jacket
•••
As
a young man at the end of the book, weeks after his father has died, Zieroth
says, “I become, suddenly, vividly, mindful of my father’s
traits in me, perhaps the very ones he received from his father.”
--The
lovely symmetry of these observations—the looking ahead as a boy,
the looking back as a man—is only one of many delights in The
Education of Mr. Whippoorwill, a touching, humorous, crisply written
book that stands out from the welter of flabby, overwritten tomes crowding
the bookstores these days. --—Dave
Williamson, The Globe & Mail
•••
There
is a sweetness that runs through this book. It’s not saccharine,
but rather the sweetness of freshly mown grass. It is the delicious taste
of discovery, of learning how to be “somebody else,” of learning
about sex, of being grown up.
--Perhaps even more than a book about his
own life, The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill is a kind of paean
to Zieroth’s father, a statement of the powerful, respectful love
he always held for him.
--And there is yet another thing about this
quietly told book: It is an exploration of what it means to be moving
on, to find and define oneself. There is that sense of ambivalence we
have all felt, which Zieroth, describing himself at university, expresses
so correctly: “I worry that I might change and that I might not.”
--—Heidi
Greco, The Vancouver Sun
•••
Zieroth
inhabits a child’s point-of-view persuasively, suggesting the wonders
and uncertainties—such as his attempts to know his reserved, middle-aged
father—that are a constant presence in many a young boy’s
mind.
-- This is a quiet, non-barnburner of a book.
File under wheat, not chaff, though. Zieroth has found a narrative voice
that is wry and tense, and his close but unfussy perceptions convey a
rich portrait of a way of life that once involved more muscle than machine.
--—Devin
Crawley, Quill & Quire
•••
A
son compelled by language crashes into a father without words. Yet Zieroth
comes to see that “the father he had was the man he needed all along.”
In a poignantly ironic manoeuvre, the son, in gathering together this
narrative, has given the father a self in language; as he pulls us into
a particular time and place, we come to know a man who embodies them so
surely, so naturally, that he would be unreadable anywhere else. The
Education of Mr. Whippoorwill is an elegy and a celebration, a struggle
and a welcoming. It is a gentle wonder.
--—Charlene
Diehl-Jones, Border Crossings
On Crows Do Not Have Retirement:
David
Zieroth's sixth book of poetry, Crows Do Not Have Retirement, is
full of poems sensitive at once to the physicality of their anecdotal
circumstances and to the larger topological questions they provoke. Moving
from events and places such as the childhood killing of animals, to encounters
with ghosts, to the ravine in his neighbourhood, Zieroth demonstrates
his skill at being able to unearth startling estrangements and affirmations
in intimate and quotidian affairs. Many of these poems shift remarkably
from concrete, innocuous settings to questions of belief, beauty and obligation:
"Is my soul a cup of milk/ that once taken/ spreads into every capillary/
giving me a personality/ to fit Friday/ or Monday with all its moods?"
("Question"). Similarly, the speaker observes in "The Gulf
of Heaven" that "I have begun to believe/ in the breast stroke
and the butterfly stroke/ because of their beautiful names/ and because
heaven must be/ perfectly conjured and framed."
-- The
book is divided up into five sections with its middle section, "Ravine:
I," consisting of three ambitious and well-crafted long poems that
operate as poetic walking tours through the anxious, dream-ridden and
spirited grounds of family life and neighbourhood. For all the anxiety
and despair that is an important part of many of the poems in the collection,
however, there is also a generous amount of humour and fun.
-- The
imaginative leaps in Zieroth's poems and the often musical measure of
his lines transport one to the places and emotions he explores. However,
the ontological questions that are continuously raised in poems such as
"Sounds Like," remind us that "presence is enough/ while
we wait." The poems in this book, among Zieroth's strongest work,
are an excellent resting place.
--—Adam Dickinson, Canadian Literature
•••
Poems
like "Letting Myself Go," about a mundane errand returning videos
and being suddenly reduced to tears by the scent of an old love's perfume
on the air, demonstrate that the anecdotal style, drawn from small everyday
events, can produce great poems once the poet has lived long enough to
have something to say.
--—John Moore, The Vancouver Sun
•••
Crows
Do Not Have Retirement is both a good sampling of Zieroth's recent
poetry, and a fine example of narrative poetry as practiced by one of
its contemporary Canadian masters. The earnest yet self-aware voice of
its speaker encourages an empathetic response in the readers it so artfully
addresses.
--—Douglas Barbour, Prairie Fire
•••
Despite
the comic title, David Zieroth’s Crows Do Not Have Retirement
is a book that aches with humanity. I admire Zieroth’s ease of expression.
He writes clearly in a straight, discursive way, encouraging language
to step back and let a strong image have the attention it needs. His new
collection strikes me more profoundly in its concentrated energy than
his previous work. With long poems and poem sequences, the new poems display
greater emotional range, as Zieroth explores some of the darker corners
of the heart in order to provide more contrast to the beauty he sees in
the world around us.
--The awareness that Zieroth expresses in
this collection is authentic and inspiring. I suspect Crows Do Not
Have Retirement was an important book for him to write, and that
vitality reaches his readers.
--—Jay Ruzesky, Event
On How I Joined Humanity at Last:
Zieroth consistently creates entire poems, not just settings for
curious anecdotes or bright images. His poems have a seamlessness that
doesn't encourage us to notice his considerable technical skills before
we experience his poems' expressive hold over us. What the poems do offer
includes a readiness to probe entangled emotions, a skill with narrative
that pulls the everyday toward parable, an unusual ability to pack many
nuances into small spaces, and an intelligence that sometimes moves with
staggering speed.
--—Brian Bartlett, Fiddlehead
•••
It's
a moving record of self-discovery that includes poems about loss, about
the glory, shame and ordinariness of one's parenting...frequently enlivened
by his considerable skills as a storyteller and the aptness of his imaging.
--—Gary Geddes, BC Bookworld
