Console: Poems

The lyricism of poet/novelist Channer’s second poetry collection (after Providential) demands constant attention from its audience and rewards that attention. Music (particularly dub, with its emphasis on remix and pastiche) both grounds and catalyzes the collection, acting as metaphor, form, and subject. Poems muse on place, exile, and belonging, weaving between the Jamaica of Channer’s youth, his current New England home, and various memory-driven wanderings, from Senegal to Amy Clampitt’s cabin in the Berkshires. Sound and water, as well as creatures of the water, often launch remembrance or connections, and the poems both question exodus and display a liberating embrace of the nomadic self and home (“For now and months to come I’m Berkshire, too”). Temporal mash-ups are scattered through the collection (“I’m half dissolved to Kingston,/ maybe ’72”), lending to its often dreamlike associative atmosphere (“what is then and then this now?”). The long second section, “Hurricane Suite,” splices photos from historic flooding in Providence, RI, with poems that mix music, Biblical story, memory, and myth (“There’s reggae,/ Jonah, whale. It’s with them/ I myth travel”), ultimately questioning what might be learned from devastation.