Boat

Boat, go
     this is the beginning of utopia 
             its material is time. 

In the final section of Boat, Lisa Robertson invokes film director Pedro Costa, who “says that duration is the material that resists us.” Here, however, Robertson presents a project spanning more than 20 years, a collection composed of an “indexical” culling from decades of her “quotidian notebooks,” a book in which the poet plumbs her self-recorded thoughts, notes, and observations (“The book is a mind / I borrow from it”) to fashion a capacious, intellectual poetry of doubt and desire. This work is also iterative; of Boat’s eight sections, all but two are previously published in the full-length R’s Boat (2010), which itself included Robertson’s chapbook Rousseau’s Boat (2004). 

The opening poem, “The Hut,” one of the newly added texts, runs 65-pages, center-justified, with an evocative medial caesura acting as an opening, a tectonic rift down the middle of the page, slicing words in half if they fall in the middle of the line. The poem is a solitary meditation (“I am an athlete of solitude”) on, among other topics, the dissonance between lush immediate sensory experience and the ways “writing displaces time” or “defers time.” “The Hut,” though formally unique, exemplifies the tonal range of the book as it veers from the epigrammatic (“I’d like to make a legitimate contribution to uncertainty”) to the essayistic:

In parts of the poem, the energy and music gather into sensational lyric crescendos, as the rift becomes a wellspring for awe: