Books Nova Scotia poet Brian Bartlett shares latest collection at Friday reading in Saint John

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In his new book The Watchmaker's Table, Nova Scotia poet Brian Bartlett proves that time is not, in fact, linear, that it is a malleable construct that he examines from a number of different angles.

The collection, which is published by Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton and edited by Anne Compton, a Governor General's Award-winning poet and professor at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, is divided into four sections that meditate on time through different poetic forms - haiku, sonnets, found poems - and themes.

At times Bartlett takes a literal approach to the collection's title, describing the "noiseless blur of parts" of the cogs of a watch as flying "in the face of Fate."

The tools and instruments that measure the passage of minutes and days are here: watches, clocks, daily desktop calendars, the "digital race of red numbers," even the rhythmic beat of one's heart.

But more important than counting time is how human lives play out against its passage.

The book opens with All the Train Trips, a lonely sort of poem that establishes many of the themes that appear in the works that follow: reading, travel, solitude.

The stark atmosphere of the collection's first poem is balanced by others that deal with people in communities, whether a family or a group of new immigrants arriving at Halifax's Pier 21.

During a recent phone interview from his home in Halifax, where he teaches literature and creative writing at St. Mary's University, Bartlett called the book his most historical collection.

While the first section, entitled The Sideways 8, deals with "the infinity thing," the second section, Given Words, is comprised entirely of found poems, works created from passages and phrases of books and other publications.

This is a new form for the poet. Bartlett said his friend, the poet Sue MacLeod, was experimenting with found poems, and he decided to try his hand at it. He never expected to write an entire section of them. And, he said, he's not done with the form yet.

Bartlett quoted Cape Breton poet Don Domanski at the beginning of Given Words: "Each of us stands on the shoulders of thousands of men and women who have gone before us....The poem has only a bit of myself in it and far more of the world."

Indeed, many of the publications he used as source material for this section of works were books or letters from old relatives.

There is even a found poem created from a story that was published in this newspaper on Nov. 17, 1925, the day the poet's father was born.

"It's both an act of reading, but also an act of creating a collage," Bartlett said, pointing to other art forms that "use that raw material to create something new," such as quilting or collage, that reassemble the "flotsam and jetsam" of the material world.

Brian Bartlett will read at Inprint Bookstore, 16 King St., Saint John, at 7 p.m. on Friday. Free, all welcome. For details, call 648-2315 or e-mail sjbooks@unbsj.ca.