Never More There [Paperback]

Never More There is Newfoundland-based school teacher Stephen Rowe’s first collection of poems. In many ways, it is a typical debut, featuring poems of family history, quotidian observations, formal experiments, and nods to literary models and mentors that take the form of epigraphs, imitations, and quotations.

Like most first books, Rowe’s is wildly uneven, though the variety of approaches the author is willing to take is encouraging: free verse of various sorts is mixed with haibun (a hybrid form employing prose and haiku), rhyming stanzas, and set forms (true or adapted) such as rondeau, glosa, triolet, and sonnet. A sequence of 14 haibun about the speaker’s grandfather is one of the book’s weakest elements. Rowe’s speaker makes explicit the fact that he didn’t know the grandfather well, and the poems have the feel of second-hand anecdotes, the speaker’s self-conscious preoccupation with his inability to tell the story overriding the main event.

Fortunately, the book gets better from there. There are some gorgeous lines scattered throughout (“coursing with the little heat a wound can bring”) and the second section contains a handful of fully realized poems, particularly the hypnotic “I Knew a Maid,” which has the timeless feel of folklore about it.

But it is in the third section that Rowe really hits his stride. The predominantly elegiac poems in this part of the book are the most personal, and it is in this mode that Rowe seems most at ease, most in command of his language. The seven-poem sequence “Lords of Large Experience” is exceptionally moving, as are “The Wallet” (a superb sonnet with a surprising turn) and the anaphoric dirge “Aubade.”

Rowe has the guts to end his book with the word “beautiful” – which Frost famously said a poet should only be allowed to use three times in his life – and he gets away with it, beautifully. Never More There is far from perfect, but with this collection, Rowe announces himself as a poet to watch.

Rowe recasts the small tragedies of his life in Gander as soaring for-the-ages tragedy in what amounts to a memorable debut.
--Ariel Gordon, Winnipeg Free Press

Rowe's poetry is able to capture the feelings and physical reactions one has to nature and sound. He is also quite skilled in realistically personifying nature as well as connecting the material sense of nature to our mental reality. Moreover, there is an overall sense that the author is connecting much of the fragility and evanescence of nature to the mortality of life. Themes of death and dealing with loss become even more prevalent towards the end of the book. The author also dips a bit into the supernatural and mythological with personal elegies and references. As well, Rowe subtly explores the relationship between father and son, ancestry, and how things change over time.
--Jennifer Musgrave, The Argosy

These careful anthropomorphisms give flesh to the vague and difficult reality of how we relate to our geography - a relationship that is, as his poetry would suggest, at times as strange and real as that shared between one human and another, if only in observance ... Never More There is landscape poetry, in a broad and almost spiritual sense of the word. Read it slowly and deliberately and keep an ear to the ground for things to come from Stephen Rowe.
--Nick Shuurman, youngpoets.ca

The seven-poem sequence "Lords of Large Experience" is exceptionally moving, as are "The Wallet" (a superb sonnet with a surprising turn) and the anaphoric dirge "Aubade" ... with this collection, Rowe announces himself as a poet to watch.
--Zachariah Wells, Quill & Quire

From 12 or 20 questions with Stephen Rowe, Rob Mclennan's blog:

Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think the questions I want to answer arise as I go along. Obviously with my first book I was concerned with origins and people I associate with having taken me this far, but I didn't plan it that way. I'm currently working on a group of poems linked to relocation between rural and urban settings and vice versa. In this case I'm looking at how people deal with moving, what social factors come into play, etc. I don't know what I will be writing about in the future.

7 - What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

One role of the writer is to entertain, whether in a comic/dramatic sense, or in asking the reader to entertain the considerations the writer is presenting, serious or otherwise. I think there should be a level of enjoyment, of ideas and ways of expressing them, new things the reader has yet to be exposed, but also a healthy flirtation with the uncomfortable. In this sense the writer is much like a film maker or artist just using a different medium. Currently I see the writer struggling in larger culture. There are so many media out there, many with instant gratification as their primary appeal. Reading takes time and, to some degree, dedication on the part of the reader. Not everyone is into that. (Excerpt from Interview with Rob Mclennan )