In his first collection since the GG-nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour, sharpening the landscape of 80s and 90s northern Alberta with a controlled, imagist eye.
In Who Else in the Dark Headed There, we meet someone right up against the loss of his mother in a place where the feeling of the darkheaded there and the person who is moving toward it, or who is in it, can be set. As in a scene in a play. As in a dream. There is, from the difficulty of childhood, which can''t be changed, an understanding that time is not fixed and that distance is fluctuating. Here, in many registers, the language of memory is disturbed, syntax and point of view are disturbed. It is a self looking back at an earlier self as if it is possible to be objective, when we know it’s not possible, and therein is the grief and the searching and the resonance of the machinery of time.
Grappling with familial inheritances, and charged with undercurrents of violence, alcoholism, and isolation, Garth Martens writes with a language that is both clear-cut and surreal, evoking a rural, unstable portrait of childhood.
