The title poem in David Zieroth's the bridge from day to night
follows the speaker across the Second Narrows Bridge to North Vancouver,
a well-worn moment in a daily commute that opens a window into the
sublime: "from the apex / of the bridge with traffic flying / I look
directly into / their deepest clefts." Such moments occur throughout the
collection, as Zieroth explores the resonance built from layers of such
ordinary moments as they accumulate throughout a lifetime--indistinct
and imperceptible as they occur, but creating unseen undercurrents
through memory and time.
In this temporal landscape, the natural world becomes a touchstone, both
entangled in and standing apart from the speaker's internal narrative:
"I brought from that forming hour a / precise smell of foliage: funeral
wreaths / bore an acid scent." Shifting fluidly through time, the
speaker grows from a child to understand, reflect and then outlive his
parents. Finally, the collection lights on the incongruities and
contradictions in death: "still later I kick his flattened corpse / to
the gutter, and it skids on concrete / a broken valise, weightless / on
this segment of the journey."
With his characteristic humour, subtlety and ability to find
transcendence in the everyday, Zieroth traces the delicate strands
connecting the most minute and familiar details to the most profound
mysteries, giving voice to the unknowable.
