Joe Denham is one incensed and impassioned poet – a railing wordsmith trying to reconcile with a world that is madly self-destructive yet still teeming with grace and wonder.
The Halfmoon Bay-based writer, father and commercial fisherman read from his poetry collections and sang a few songs to an appreciative audience at the Arts Centre in Sechelt on Saturday, March 9, as part of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council’s monthly Reading Series.
Denham was introduced by University of British Columbia professor and writer Daniel Heath Justice, who said Denham’s “anger and anxiety come from love for the land and the ocean, for friends, family, for the past and the future and the struggle of the now.”
Denham has written four poetry collections and a novel, The Year of Broken Glass, all published by Nightwood Editions, of Gibsons. At the Sechelt event, he read from his 2009 book Windstorm and 2017’s Landfall.
“Windstorm is a book of water and wind and sadness,” he said. “Landfall is a book of land and fire and anger.”
Denham recounted that he began writing the latter works in the early 2000s, “after realizing the very real possibility that in my lifetime I would see the end of commercial fishing, if not the end of any sort of viable ecosystem in the ocean, period. Of course, I don’t know that that’s going to happen, but everything I’d seen to that point led me to the inevitable conclusion because of how humans behaved toward ocean life. Nothing’s changed that in the last 15 years, unfortunately.”
He writes in Landfall:
The golden calf the holy cow! All bets / are off the burning’s / inevitable: cast your gaze pull your nets / There’s nothing left to kill to dwindle to lose / anyhow.
Denham said he is working on what will be a third book in the series that began with Windstorm, to be titled Eyewall, as in the wall around the eye of a hurricane, which tentatively separates the roaming, calm centre from the roaring maelstrom.
As there were eight years between Denham’s last two collections, don’t expect the book soon. He writes with total focus, but in fits and starts, he explained: “I work on a stanza sometimes for weeks and then I won’t do anything for months. Then I’d come at it again. That’s how I write.”
After his reading, Denham was asked if he still had hope. He does. “All the war, all the violence, all the extinction of species, all the pollution, all the lies and corruption, all of the things that are going on and have always gone on will continue, but so will all the other, beautiful things,” he replied. “I’m in love with life and the world.”
