Wrack Line

Wrack Line
by M.W. Jaeggle
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9780889779532

It’s a rare and wondrous thing when, while reading a poetry collection, I start conceiving poems in my own mind. Vancouver-born M.W. Jaeggle’s highly distilled first book of poetry, Wrack Line, has done that for me, and I feel indebted. This is a poet who looks and listens to the world around him at one already rare level, then amps his senses to an even higher plane. One cannot help but tumble under the spells he ingeniously casts with his poems about shorelines, wind, creatures, solitude, silence, loss, and guilt, and then you look away from the page, reflect upon his finely-crafted lines, and realize you’ve surfaced—as if from the sea—into gentle sunlight.

M.W. (Michael) Jaeggle is presently a PhD student in the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo, but the book’s title, elegant cover (northern acorn barnacles set against a creamy background) and the poems within strongly suggest that his heart remains on Canada’s west coast: a “wrack line” refers to the ecologically-critical organic material (including seaweed and seagrasses) left on the shore by wind, waves and tides. It also includes less desirable debris, ie: “blanched Pepsi caps”.

The poet alludes to time and the quality of being present (“I have found the time,/given myself to it, feel it as it is), and reverence reverberates through many of these poems. He writes of “an inner pew,” granite “made to kneel on the colony, prostrate before the sky” and “the grace which comes/from being that stillness”. Childhood is mined in pieces like the irresistibly-titled “Poem by Fridge Light,” which concerns the places one inhabits in childhood—ie: a fort made in the brambles, “its thorns piercing the hairless legs under our jeans”. In those remembered places “there’s no wristwatch on a nightstand,/just a mind kidding around/someplace unaware it’s unawake”. In another poem the narrator ponders the Pacific silver fir: “The tree presses, bark scours my back,” he writes. “Here, I is no history, Now,/ I am time”.

Form-wise, expect variance, including prose poems, free verse, poems written in couplets, and the ekphrastic poem “Colville’s Horses” that comprises the book’s fourth section. In these pieces—inspired, of course, by Alex Colville paintings— the last line on one page becomes the first on the next. Alliteration and consonance are frequently employed, and I noted the poet’s affection for the letter P: palimpsest, parapet, polled, apricity, parallax. In the long poem “Amor de Lonh”we find “There are teachers of all persuasions/perched in shore pine”.

One of my favourite poems is “Salmon Run, Horsefly River,” which reveals the poet’s heightened observation skills: “Five more red backs dart through/the platinum-glint riffle, where the water’s surface/is knuckled with granite stones”.

Jaeggle is a discerning poet. He listens to the sounds of water and “the lulls of sand,” and notices “bait-lathered hands”. His debut collection’s a metaphorical “basket” of “attentiveness” … and hope: “while we suture/our broken and partial worlds/with seagrass left behind by the tide,/each in our own way a historian of waves”.

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