Against the Hard Angle

The two sections that comprise matt robinson's fourth full-length volume of
poetry, Against the Hard Angle, though disparate in terms of form - the first
consisting primarily of a long poem; the other a collection of shorter lyrical
pieces - nonetheless share a common concern with ideas of relationship and its
examination. At their core, these are poems about where we stand in relation
to the rest of our various worlds. In the collection's opening section, the
eponymous (and 2009 Malahat Review Long Poem Award winning) "against the hard
angle" steadily develops a grudging momentum, all the while searching for a
way to articulate loss, in the end becoming a kind of meditative catalogue of
relationship breakdown and divorce. The second section takes as its immediate
subject matter a different sort of relationship altogether. Having returned
home after nearly a decade elsewhere, these are poems that reference
robinson's native Halifax, NS, more specifically and vividly than in his
previous work; these are lines with "the near / magical pull of some deep-
seeded magnet now spinning, / we'd guess, completely / and fully out of
control - a crazed, elemental / ballet." Part extended love song to and for a
city and part meditation on what a city can both say to and about us, Against
the Hard Angle uses some of Halifax's most and least famous places as jumping
off points for a stop-and-start lyrical tour of eastern Canada's largest urban
centre, a sometimes fraught journey that leaves us "all tendon-tensed, /
against impact, near white-knuckled to / breakage."