Green

Green
Written and illustrated by Zachari Logan
Published by Radiant Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedah
$25.00 ISBN 9781998926251

In reading visual artist and poet Zachari Logan’s art/poetry hybrid collection,
Green, I was struck by the recurring motif of seeing, and Logan’s recurrent
inclusion of the natural world’s diverse creatures and plants. Awe and wonder are
integral elements in this innovative work, a fact that Logan asserts in his
illuminating introduction, which concludes: “[this work] is, ultimately, an
exploration of my own enchantment with the world …”. The title also reflects
Logan’s artwork in this collection: the fifty-one pages of drawings—mostly of
leaves, branches and blossoms, and all done “in green ink, pen and
pencil”—were completed in a sketchbook he purchased in Venice.

Logan’s a well-known Regina, SK artist with a global curriculum vitae. Indeed,
prairie gophers, “old wasps and potato bugs” are comfortably juxtaposed against
the “turtles of Morningside Park” viewed at New York’s “East 96 th Street” and
“Vitosha Boulevard’s/bulging trees in Sofia”. Logan was invited to exhibit his work
in Bulgaria, and references Bulgarian painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev (the “̒Bulgarian
Bruegel’”) as well as Caravaggio, El Greco and Canada’s Tom Thomson in this
superb collection.

While employing a range of poetic styles, most of these reflective poems are
written in free verse and many are narrative, including “The People I Meet on the
Street,” which contains the terrific line “To walk on the sidewalk/is to draw time
with your feet”.

Time is another of the poet-artist’s preoccupations (“Night dreams of a way/to the
day”), but seeing eclipses all else. We meet “A Blind Raccoon in Central Park”
with “Milky eyes,” and Logan reports phones “that reflect back a silver-coin gaze”.
There are “concerted eyes,” “vehicle eyes,” “miniscule design human eyes,”
“Carousel eyes,” “once open eyes,” and “glass-rounded eyes,” as well as many
uses of “gaze,” plus “red glow side-stares” and the sun’s “afterimage/in bright
fuchsia that dims to lush green”. The fixation with seeing is perhaps expected of
an artist, but Logan delves deeply beyond surfaces and employs unique
descriptions in remarkable ways, ie: hares’ “winter coats of built-in/anticipation”
and, my favourite—a cat scratch in the prose poem “The Old Cat” is described
thus: “A tiny/red stain on blue jean; an intentional, unintentional valentine.”
Another zinger, from “Burgundy 1-17”:

One full moon and I’m still
at your death bed gazing at a burgundy rose
in a bouquet.

Contemporary concerns like the current US administration and climate change are also intimated. Any reader will know whom Logan’s referring to here:

All of his
horses and all
of his men
could not bring
the price of eggs
down again.

This is a wide-ranging and nuanced collection. The poems spring off the page
with hares and hornets, millipedes and blackbirds, crickets and ravens, and the
artist’s myriad experiences, ie: “painting the exhumed root systems of nearby
weeds;/all clumped and fleshy like tiny human organs”.

Different from looking, Logan explains that “Seeing .. is being able to visualize
the experience of looking and transcrib[ing] it into a given material; to have it in
turn gaze back”. Yes. Mission accomplished.

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