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Yes it is both river and sea / yes they mingle together here / yes one empties for the other / yes it tastes like tears
In a powerful interplay of striking descriptions with tender intimations, Empties, Neil Surkan’s third poetry collection, reckons with fatherhood in a depleted and collapsing environment: Is it possible to nurture new shoots while the fires close in?
Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan’s speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone’s ancestor. Arrays of drained and discarded entities – empty bottles, broken pots and cups – summon a world, husked and untenably extracted, that teeters toward collapse, but even those empty spaces are receptacles for fleeting moments of vulnerability and tenderness. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope.
These are poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while still finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.” In direness, there is also awe: one mustn’t forget, Surkan reminds us, that only empty bottles can sing.
"To read Surkan’s meticulously crafted new collection is to feel yourself drawn through his language like seawater drawn gleaming through stones, exposing a world of hidden treasures, surprising connections, and deep channels of loss – and what music it makes!" Patrick James Errington, author of the swailing
"Taut with music, Neil Surkan’s Empties is a book of ‘precarious harmonies’ in a time of climate collapse. Through its wondrous attention, Empties inhabits the intimacy between strophe and catastrophe, tracing the overlapping experiences of song and destruction. ‘And who / isn’t my neighbour / now?’ Surkan asks, articulating awe’s relation to grief. Empties invites us to inhabit the relations that ruin reveals and gently insists we stay there, teaching us that the opposite of empty is not full but rather ‘connected.’ By consciously caring for these connections, Surkan suggests, we can ‘inspirit broken places.'" Julie Joosten, author of Nought
“With the care of, say, an analogue watchmaker, or a musical arranger, [Surkan] places his pinions, his notes – in this case, words – with a sharp and focussed eye, ear, and mind, into tight, efficient, poetic mechanisms.” The British Columbia Review