Long Division

Gil McElroy

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781773851310
• eBook ISBN: 9781773851334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Long Division is a book of poetic commentary that plots a steady course of disillusion. Working in explicit dialogue with Dada, the surrealist poets, spiritual writing, and drawing on midrash as a wellspring, Gil McElroy captures in poetry the process of a mind in thought. Written in asides and afterwords, comments and commentaries, and interruptions and insertions, these poems challenge and disrupt meaning and intention.

Carefully planned and written with an easy confidence, these poems ruminate on time and chance, astronomy and biology, intertextuality and the interplay of the author's and reader's voice. They interrogate and are, themselves, an internal interrogation through which division wends, splitting words into new units of meaning or reassembling them into new shapes unencumbered by the halos of meaning, reference, and allusion they have accrued.

This is contemporary experimental poetry at its finest, at once abstract and distinct, celestial and personal, a drama of the mind as it engages with and responds to the world and time. Long Division takes what is complex and explores its simplicity before taking what is expected to be simple and showing it instead to be musical and strange.

4
The Doxologies

(Some Julian Days)

Some sort

of afternoon. The heat

will soon be

at home

in its touches. There will be

balanced ones, & other ones

resolved in flames, & then

the sky we will be awaiting like this

will become

really rather

dear.

Do not go

away. Do not go

heavy, tired

of something in

this moment that’s going one mile west

of somewhere one mile east. Simple

attentions call, you know, a

garden of days here

in the long now.

2456629

I’ve got

vertigo, & am

seven hours

out of miles but

for a foot.

All overlaps

all, doubt

filling in the simplest ways

of hard horizontals time

sorrowed. There’s

one law of rule – one

basic law – for the vast collection

of day.

I can

feel sturdy. I can

assign with my eye. I can

dissolve between one place

out of necessity

to the other.

Dust, more or less.

2456631

Oh, the,

the oxygen

of the thin, plastic

future. I feel

the from above

silence. I feel

heat. I feel

rising where wanting is an intervening

small construction of a sun

on the longest but for one

day. The,

the thickness of it

papers the whereby seconds

because the stars fable with

more democratic stuff.

Seriously, though, we

need this anatomy of

sweet little nothings, &

all the balsa-wood nights we can

possibly get.

Put

your thumb out

into the wind.

Waaay out.

2456632

What

a fall. Its

almost ignored atoms

left me tired,

mired in dismay with mawkish threats

to my throat. But

it’s over & gone – done, kaput –

& another world grown up in my ...

Table of contents

• Twentieth
• I/O: A Colborne Psalter (01 – 23)
• Ordinary Time: The Merton Lake Propers
• The Doxologies
• Long Division
• Standard Candles
• Acknowlegements