On the Material

Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.

Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North America in 2008, “4 × 4” navigates issues of space and movement in the global age. As economies crumble, ecosystems fail and peak oil approaches, Collis records the production of a disarticulation of social discourse that our consumer society has generated: “After all we made money out of matter here / Now condos shield us from the computer hum / Of on-line trading and wars ?ash on ?at screens / As 4 × 4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages.”

In its bridging second section, “I Fought the Lyric and the Lyric Won,” the desire to express wins out over the desire to possess. Beauty, contemplation and human communication seem to have abandoned the world, and their absence from the everyday has re-engaged the poet’s struggle with language―has left a need to reinvent human discourse and its attendant relations.

The third section, “Gail’s Books,” is a sequence of poems in memory of Stephen Collis’s sister, Gail Tulloch. A month after Gail’s death from cancer in 2002, a ?re destroyed her house, removing every material reminder of her from the earth. All that remained was one book recovered from a pool of water in the ruins after the ?re. Dried in the air, this book, and those Collis had previously borrowed from his sister, become a way for the poet to read back into the elemental heart of absence and loss―the “material” of the books displacing, and in some way recovering, how language holds the materiality of the physical world.

Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), On the Material (2010), winner of the BC Book Prize, and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018) – all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, and in 2019 Collis was the recipient of the Writers' Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. The Middle is the second volume of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.