Canadian Writers Abroad

Mark Sampson reviews National Animal (Véhicule Press, 2024)
by Derek Webster

If, in the end, all things are reduced to relics, then let’s make poems our reliquary. In Derek Webster’s new collection, National Animal, there is an atmosphere of capture, a driving need to preserve a world that feels like it’s is rapidly fading away. Webster understands that poetry is uniquely prepared for this responsibility; it is, after all, one act of creation in deep commune with other creations, in the hopes that it can reflect and archive some essence, however small, of its subject matter.

With a refreshing lack of abstraction, National Animal takes this idea of preservation one step further, in the sense that it expands our definition of an “ekphrasis”—that is, a poem describing (or in conversation with) a work of visual art. Here, an ekphrasis can include any creation, be it a jigsaw puzzle, the impoverished denizens of a run-down apartment complex, the character of Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire, or even the city of Oakville, Ontario. Indeed, in the face of our seemingly apocalyptic era, Webster reminds us that there is artwork all around, if we just allow ourselves the eyes to see what’s in front of us. As he puts it: “When almost nothing remains, story begins.”

Of course, National Animal earns its bona fides by offering up several actual ekphrases, the best of which being “Portrait with Stuffed Jackalope.” Notice how, in just a few lines, this piece embodies the ideas of capture and reflection:

… bushes light themselves ablaze,
icebergs run as lemmings into overcrowded seas,
squid-like plastic bags hang from branches

… I painted you
as Francis Bacon would, had he been painting
a predatory beauty just coming to life, eating
through the skull of an old, iridescent hope.

The nation in National Animal is, for the most part, Canada, with riffs on everything from Joni Mitchell to the surprisingly evocative line “palm tree in a Lotto Max sky” in the piece “The Writing on the Wall.” But Webster, despite his book’s title, does not limit these poems to our nation’s boundaries or the project of nationalism, as CanLit has defined it in the past. His reliquary is more inclusive than that. This is verse that travels widely and blurs borders wherever it likes. From the long poem “The Thinker”:

The snowy peaks like Nordic
Buddhas observe your heat-loss, your pain, your short-
lived strength for carrying on.

… High on the wall, hands move on the kitchen
clock, the shift to humdrum, houseplant afternoon.
What future you imagine, false –
what you learned to sing, utterly changed.
Now, no family’s orbiting agenda,
no balance of gravity and spinning out.

Readers should not mistake this as something bleak. Even randomness can be a work of art if you tilt your mind to a certain angle. What’s more, Webster reminds us that, while standing in the gallery of life and observing the chance paintings on its walls, it’s best to do while holding hands with someone else. Only together can we make meaning out of the chaos. Or, as “The Thinker” puts it in its closing lines:

Only then,
did you realize the cosmic joke: we
mean nothing, but we is all we have.

---

“Living abroad has definitely broadened my perspective on what it means to be Canadian.”  -Derek Webster on the influence of his years in Beijing, Wimbledon, and St Louis, Missouri. 

After highschool in Ontario, then studying at McGill University, Webster received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Phillips. In 2000, he returned to Montreal, where he founded Maisonneuve magazine. Webster’s first book of poetry, Mockingbird (Signal Editions, 2015) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best poetry debut in Canada. Recent work appears in Blackbox Manifold (Sheffield), The Honest Ulsterman (Ireland), Maisonneuve, The Walrus, Freefall, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, The Fiddlehead and Stand (UK). National Animal won the Quebec Writers Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, November, 2024. Webster lives in Montreal and Toronto.