Un

Ivan Drury’s Un catalogues human rights violations and Western imperialist aggression in an uneasy poetry of witness, focused, as the poet explains in his acknowledgments, on the “US-led occupation of Iraq and Canada’s occupation of Afghanistan.” Un hews closely to archival sources, weaving passages from Che Guevara’s Congo Diary and the U.S. Armed Forces Survival Manual with news reports about black sites such as the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, where prisoners are held without legal recourse and where many have died while in custody. The poems are narrated by a speaker who comes from a place where “families fell normally apart” and “violence was not stranger violence,” a white, middle class community where “distance was insulation.” What emerges is a meditation on the prefix un as a form of violence: 

the un-naming of
names

the un-drawing of
maps

Drury understands the limits of this project, noting that “I am casting off from Canada in search of un / as though my recognition could be a cure.” We learn that Un began as a long poem in 2007, and I imagine years of activism led to what the poet calls an “occasional pessimism that runs through these ruminations about imperialism, socialism, and apocalypse” as atrocities failed to generate enough outrage to hold governments accountable: 

After twenty years the generals
took their claws off the Afghan pot
and the Taliban boiled over.

Though the frustration feels genuine, lines like “bend it like / Bentham” and “Lucy in the sky // with indefinite detention” feel jarring in tone, out of step with the collection as a whole. 

Un cuts deepest where Drury suggests that the injustice he observes warps the world on an elemental level, such that “under such global-force winds / even steel evaporates.” Tropes of light and darkness recalling Plato’s Cave are all-pervasive in this collection, which is also filled with moments of wonder: 

beneath such a hood
what memories
what projections

lights
walls.