Garden, Monty Reid’s 2014 collection from Chaudiere Books, proffers 144 poems set into twelve cycles structured around the months of the year. Whether these cover twelve different years, or represent twelve ways of looking at the same year, is left ambiguous. The garden is timeless in its round.
If you’re thinking this may be an overly sentimental series of meditations, interspersed with overripe descriptions of foliage, don’t worry. When I say this book is philosophical, I mean that it poses questions like what is a thing? and what are ideas?
“If I think, must the turnip also be a concept?” asks Reid, and then proceeds to give a recipe for a garlicky butter glaze. Elsewhere, “… the turnips / think of transcendence. // Sometimes they think of the apparat, the tools / that are not their own. But it’s rare.” Still, “[t]here is more compassion in 10 yards of dirt / than in a spoonful of ideas.”
A garden is a site of life and death, where “… the dead / breathe // there / in the anonymous ground // waiting for us / to go away.” The poet turns a garden-plot into words, but “[w]hatever they say, language / isn’t alive. // It doesn’t matter. / The dead aren’t alive either.”
And of course life isn’t always the easiest thing to deal with: “Whatever is unavailable to the world / remains available to the bugs. // The garden has been unable to reduce the bugs / and has agreed to feed them instead. // Which is what all systems do when they discover / they cannot reduce the complexity of the world.”
Scarecrows fail at their jobs; garden gnomes enforce a bureaucracy but decline to do any work despite their reputation for industry. And there is always work to be done in the garden—the work of digging, of cutting, of imagining next year’s garden. The garden goes on all around the gardener, who tends, observes, adds signifiers, eats and speaks and is “some version of a mouth.” The garden is there, not listening.
Publication Details
Title: Garden
Author: Monty Reid
Publisher: Chaudiere Books (now kept available as a backlist item from Invisible Publishing)
Year: 2014