Tom Pickard introduction

Tom Pickard: An Introduction

New Works Studio, 24 October 2004

When I picked up Tom Pickard’s recent volume of new and selected poems, Hole in the Wall, the first thing that struck me was the poems’ sheer density. He’s a master of the tight-as-a-drum couplet that jolts the senses awake. Often – as with Hopkins or with Pickard’s contemporary Colin Simms – it’s birds that touch off his best lines: “a cock blackbird / drills cut grass / supermarket bags / blow over the rose beds”; “a thermal flipped / buzzard shits”; “a buzzard hung / swung / above the thinning / thicket”; “purr of a finch in flight”. The aural shock of these lines – curt, bright, uncanny, impolite, insistent – and the intense, unadorned evocation of the visible world place Pickard in the Objectivist tradition, and especially of his mentor Basil Bunting. But this is only one side to his writing. The title Hole in the Wall, gives hints of other ways to read his work. It alludes, I think, to the camera obscura, and thus glances at his work as a documentary filmmaker. His poems are often documentary – not in the sense of “matter-of-fact”, but of what the CBC once dubbed “the passionate eye”, everywhere evident in his intense, politically charged poems on the lives of miners, shipbuilders and other labourers, or the recent montage sequence “Fragments from an Archaeological Dig in Gallowgate”. But the hints of the peepshow in the title Hole in the Wall are also important – the sexual illicitness and comedy/tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. He writes love poetry that takes in love’s full range: grossness and beauty, anger and delight, longing and estrangement. As a North American reader I’m tempted to relate Pickard’s poetry, not such much to the literary tradition of love lyric (though his new book, The Dark Months of May, belongs on the shelf alongside lyric chronicles such as Donne’s Songs and Sonnets and Creeley’s For Love) but to the bawdy and profane genre of the blues. And as with the greatest blues performances, his poetry leaves you feeling, not downcast, but exhilirated. Tom Pickard. . . .

Nate Dorward