All the Live-Long Day

J.V. Brummels’s newest collection, All the Live-Long Day, continues the legacy of a strong-voiced, strong-armed poetry. As the title suggests in a mocking, self-effacement, these are the poems of a man who has been working, perhaps not on the railroad, but in the classroom, in the fields, with his horses and his cattle. Brummels’s poetry is simultaneously poised on humour and drop-dead seriousness, where ‘an education’s learning / how much to let slip / and when to let go’. The ‘punchline’ for a long working life is ‘I’ve made a life flirting with regret / For all my bitching I’m the man / I want to be’. Who is that, then? The man who admits that he’s a smart ass, a ‘whiskerless schoolmarm / trying to be / a thirty-foot hard-twist snake / of an arena rope’, ‘a black cat in a back alley / behind a bar’ before he tends to the business of branding. And yet, for all that hard word and all that hard self-appraisal, the persona is able to ‘think machine and horsepower / and horse / I smell cow on the breeze’.