From Publishers Weekly
Vancouver and its environs have produced an obscene number of superb poets now mostly in their 40s; with this book, his first in 10 years, Culley's unique, seamlessly constructivist lyric comes to the fore. Hammertown takes its title from the seemingly fictional fishing port on Vancouver Island visited by George Perec in his Life: A User's Manual; Culley (The Climax Forest), who lives in the Island's town of Nanaimo, builds his poems out of similarly imagination-based visitations, misrecognitions and recastings (though largely unrelated to Perec's). Traveling far beyond their fictional base and collecting aural and visual source material ("Sepia splash along a margin"), the poems produce a provisionally connectivity, yet edit out all lapses of attention; the speaker's sets of perceptions are cut together in the manner of a film editor or DJ. "House is a Feeling" brilliantly puns on felicitous domestic arrangements and music measured in beats per minute, producing "A long mixed block of Milton/ flat a little shiny, overhung/ granite cladded, blasted smooth/ but then laterally/ scored and scratched/ as if by cats." The long poem "Snake Eyes," at the center of the book, takes off from a near-parody of Cambridge School writing, and moves through "ropy humbug loosed thangs fanks" to "buzz-free worker bee weed" until "who can tell where it begins/ park or yard or factory." Another poem, centered on beautifully stepped couplets and tercets, "though hardly molecular/ -if squinted at through eyes oracular-// betrays conclusions scarcely singular:/ the scale is still a cap full of cabbage// resting on a bag of flesh." Culley's multiply reflective sonics, winningly quixotic references (one poem prints "the tattooed maxims of Philip Whalen" beside "the heaving crystallographies/ of Wanda Landowska") and unerringly pitched descriptions forge a poetic that is as unshakably materialist and understatedly hopeful as it is sharply beautiful.
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Book Description
With Hammertown, Peter Culley establishes himself as a stylistic virtuoso utilizing a startlingly broad range of reference to result in a body of work at once intimate and prophetic. It is above all a portrait of a town. Caught by a passing reference in George Perec’s Life A User’s Manual to a "village on Vancouver Island," Culley began to re–imagine his hometown of Nanaimo, not as it is, but as it might be imagined in the mind of a Parisian who had rarely left his city.
The poems that make up Hammertown move through realms both linguistic and geographic, in which intersecting Old and New worlds, history, music and science change everyday life with both painful resonance and exotic rapture.
