BY STEVEN W. BEATTIE
With a poem, you’re trying to say the unsayable.” As poetic manifestoes go, this one is fairly typical of Toronto’s Jeff Latosik: the language is straightforward, but the statement contains layers of meaning and ambiguity, and is conveyed in a concatenation of apparently opposed ideas. It’s an approach Latosik has been honing since his 2010 debut, Tiny, Frantic, Stronger (which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry), and extends through his third collection, Dreampad (McClelland & Stewart). His work has an ability to surprise, both in its depth of implication and surface oddness (those moments, in the poet’s own words, when a squid appears in a poem about baseball). Or, as in “Cats” from Dreampad, in the juxtaposition of “porcine diarrhea and condo developers, / two things that wouldn’t have otherwise / explained each other, but in this case they did.”
Unlike other media, Latosik contends, poetry is perfectly situated “to bring things that are strange into the realm of understanding.” It’s a heady project he’s set himself: a poetics predicated upon notions of ambiguity and complexity, yet with the ultimate goal of drawing his material in stark relief, while simultaneously communicating something essential about the human condition. For Latosik, the practice is the inverse of what philosophers do: “Philosophy is taking a step back and trying to get the more bird’s eye view of things. Poetry is taking a step forward, closer to things.”