Description
In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour, sharpening the landscape of 80s and 90s northern Alberta with a controlled, imagist eye.
A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming.
Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all of its guises—but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.
Praise for Who Else in the Dark Headed There
“Poems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extreme—as it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly.”
—Jan Zwicky
Praise for Garth Martens
“The curtain is raised on blue-collar work. Here’s a poet of sweat and ambition and all the sensory detail and wild character that builds a world. Heroic, this writer is smoother than concrete.”
—Jury citation, RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
“Densely percussive, displaying a range of registers and a fiction-writer’s penchant for voice character and intent . . . we have a lot to look forward to from Garth Martens.”
—ARC Poetry Magazine
