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After much anticipation and many accolades for Ken Babstock's first poetry collection,
Mean, patience is rewarded, two years later, with the appearance of his second,
Days into Flatspin. Babstock is an impressive and confident young poet, writing on topics ranging from drunken fistfights and rural cooking techniques to stolen bicycles and clothespins. In "Carrying someone else's infant past a cow in a field near Marmosa, Ont.," he is able to supply new descriptions of things as familiar (to some of us) as children and cows, writing "Summer gnats colonized her molasses black eyes, her flicking, / conical ears. She moaned, a badly tuned / tuba, and tassels of ick dripped / from her black- // on-pink nostrils like strings of weed sap." In poems on human and animal experiences, wounds and sufferings large and small, Babstock writes heartfelt and hard-lived poems with lines so beautiful, punched in the gut, they glow, writing of "garter snakes // playing wet grass blades with cadmium scales," or "light nodes pinging off the Rideau Canal." He knows how to weigh the language with rich tones, and he knows what the physicality of the world means, when given true speech.
--Rob McLennan