The reality of poetry is its ability to speak to a part of ourselves that is asleep much of the time. When that part awakens, what is real and what is metaphor can seem indistinguishable. A sense of unreality enters our belief systems, altering how we see the world.
The poetic world of Realia by Michael Trussler (Radiant Press, 2024) takes nothing for granted. It opens with When Eyelids, an ekphrastic essay that compares two seemingly disparate works of art: the 1810 painting The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich and Kevin Carter’s 1993 photograph of a starving child in Sudan being watched by a vulture. Trussler describes both monk and vulture as a Rückenfigur, “a figure seen from the back, an optical technique…recognized as a means for the viewer to move inside the painting.” Although the essay is not necessarily meant to be an introduction to this collection, it works well as such in two ways. The first is how its subject matter of visual art lays the groundwork for the visual techniques Trussler employs, including arrows and other pictorial images as punctuation or dividing points, some actual photographs that accompany certain poems, interesting use of white space, inventive line breaks and, at times, boxed-in footnotes that appear in the middle of a poem. The second way is his use of quotations throughout, mostly as epigraphs for each chapter, or the aforementioned footnotes. One can think of these as Rückenfigurs, ways to allow the reader to move inside the collection by giving context to the, sometimes cryptic, nature of his poems.
Realia by Michael Trussler, published by Radiant Press (2024).
One of the book’s epigraphs gives the definition of realia, adapted from Merriam-Webster, in part as “… also sometimes used philosophically to distinguish real things from theories about them – a meaning that dates to the early 19th century.” In his book Why Poetry, poet Matthew Zapruder points out that it is important to take the words in a poem at face value, rather than trying to read some hidden meaning or oblique symbolism in them. In this way, words are the realia of poetry.
Trussler’s relationship to language can feel both alienating and deeply personal, often at the same time, as in the relatively short This Poem is the Human Equivalent (ii), which continues from the title:
of some
worn tires, a
classic snowglobe, a fitbit fetish. No, it’s
really the feral
umbrella growling following me I am behind
myself I am lost I’m lost I am an edgeless obstacle
gone astray—
The impressive section titled Inside Oceans Is: A Lyric Essay for Katherine Mansfield, mixes verse, prose and epigraphs to create a paean to a literary heroine while also weaving in one of Trussler’s go-to themes: the questioning of perception.
It astonished you how a house made
of words is always
better than anything we
can be or forget or say: a house
made of words lifts, flings
us away from our times. And yet
without your rage, your quicksilver delights, and anarchy, your
vigilance, no words can happen, pool
beneath each other, each story
of yours saying
No
each story saying
No
once again to the long betrayal, each story
the encounter between faces, and still, even now, no one
knows for whom stories
are told.
As the book’s title, Realia, implies, Trussler covers a lot of ground as his mind’s microscope explores the minutiae of existence, until the only evidence he can trust is his own sense of doubt. But in the end, the only reality is language. As he writes in There’s Been a Murmur “Words are objects. They have multiple dimensions on the screen, in my mind and on a page in a book. Each with its own personality, a core that persists over time.”
Realia author Michael Trussler.
Michael Trussler lives in Regina. He writes poetry and creative non-fiction. Three-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award, Trussler’s work has appeared in Canadian and American journals and has been included in domestic and international anthologies. Also a photographer, Trussler has a keen interest in the visual arts and is neuro-divergent. He teaches English at the University of Regina.
Reviewer Steven Mayoff
About the reviewer, Steven Mayoff:
Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. His acclaimed novel, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief, was released by Radiant Press in 2023. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.