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Scheier is a burgeoning voice in Canadian poetry
More to Keep Us Warm
by Jacob Scheier
ECW Press, 2007
Read by Adebe D.A.
Jacob Scheier's debut collection features poems that work out revelations of the everyday, which have the power to extend into the open field of the poet's -- as well as our own -- consciousness. Central to the work is a keen though understated awareness of ghosts, and the great presences of that which one deems absent. Scheier achieves this awareness with sophistication, and without the more furtive, willfully mysterious language one would associate with a text bearing a dark appeal. Instead, recurring notions of loss and failure are spoken of eloquently, and with the right amount of cynicism to draw readers in.
What is exceptional thematically in the collection is the way in which the poet so deftly maps the (human) attempt to find meaning through loss, and map the moments where freedom becomes both an open, but also swinging, door. Readers get the sense that More to Keep Us Warm works in tandem with Kierkegaard's famous phrase: "Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are." Walking towards this door, we see Scheier's disposition towards religious and cultural identity crystallize, but, like any prism, in a multi-dimensional way. The poet faces the religious real with concern, speaks of it with wit, and wrestles with its angels, as illustrated in stanzas like:
I think I like Jesus,
but I don't love him.
He seems like an alright guy,
someone to talk with in Yorkville,
pretending to have money
(from the poem "North America")
The poems move from the realms of religious and personal commitment to that of the overarching question of love. In the bluntly-titled poem "Women", Scheier asserts that "All the women [he] tried to save / have survived [his] attempts at rescuing. / They are with other men or God / or themselves". Even when love takes on the form of "sounds of perpetual departing", the expectation of a turning inwards against the self does not happen; there is a sense of moving forward. The grace of these poems lies within their ability to transcend loss at the same moment that they are borne from them. More to Keep Us Warm marks Scheier as a burgeoning voice in Canadian poetry, whose voice will ignite and incite new poets, old poets, and even certain ghosts, to read and give praise.
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