Unbecoming

Neil Surkan
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021
112 pages
ISBN: 9780228008910
$20.00
Reviewed by Emily Brandstaetter

 

Unbecoming by Neil Surkan is a transformative, melodic, and inquisitive collection of poems devoted to investigating a world deteriorating moment by miniscule moment in shifts rarely seen by the naked eye.

The book is dedicated to his son Edi — “Edi, whenever you start reading, this is for you” — and the author includes a Notes section at the back of the book to reference works featured throughout.

Surkan’s imagery offers fresh takes on complex concepts as his lines dance on the page. There’s a  simple elegance to his musings as in “Span,” where Surkan….

The collection is intense yet graceful, articulating mundane details in daily scenes as in “Mole” and “Anxiety of Influence”…

The line in the last and title poem “Unbecoming” speaks to Surkan’s themes: “the quarry, headlights glowing between / shale piles like a skull / placed on a candle. We’re due / for some luminous thinking” and highlights the fragility of life lived in rugged spaces.

Unbecoming unravels and confronts the natural world, considering its wounded with compassion and delicacy: “the world appears, exceeds, and un- / becomes too quickly for certainty, / just enough for love.”

Neil Surkan is the author of the poetry collection On High and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness and Super, Natural. Some of the poems in this collection have previously been published in Canadian Literature, Cypress, The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, PRISM International, Riddle Fence, THIS Magazine, and Untethered. Neil Surkan currently lives in Nanaimo, BC and teaches English and Creative Writing at VIU.