Console by Colin Channer

Console
by Colin Channer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2023

Older readers (or younger ones who’ve spent too much time in used bookstores) will remember a particular series of spiral-bound picture books published back in the 1960s. Most of them were geared toward Italian tourism, compact illustrated works on popular archaeological sites like the Colosseum. But what made these books unique was the way they interspersed acetate pages with good old fashioned paper ones: flip a transparent sheet to the left and you saw an image of Pompeii as it stood; flip it to the right, overlaying the original, and the colored acetate jumped in to correct the ravages of Vesuvian brimstone, clapping roofs on homes and righting fallen statuary. It was persistently fascinating to be able to leap back and forth in time like this.

Colin Channer’s new book of poems, Console, operates along similar lines. On the one hand, there’s a clear confessional streak that firmly places some of the collection’s most violently memorable poems in the distant past of Channer’s middle-class Jamaican upbringing. (A couple of references to EMDR—a therapeutic treatment for psychological trauma—spell out another, darker type of time travel threading itself through these poems.) But for Channer, who immigrated to the United States more than forty years ago, there’s also the exile’s overt concern for geography. In one poem, a hike in hilly Jamaican coffee country reminds the poet of green ridges outside Portland, Oregon: “Seeing relations of what ought to be disparate / is my living, my burden, my habit, my gift. / I left this island early, never learned to love with value // in my language, my fishes, my birds, my trees / and as I do without my contacts, I see what’s there / but not apparent, sense essence, trace travels // overdubbing—map.” The book’s opening poem, titled “Spumante,” practically oozes with the poet’s sense of separation; in it, Channer sings of whales and winter in New England: “I know what it’s like to be mammal / filled with deepest ocean sounds: / oblivion, solitude, stillness.” Melville gets a mention, and though Channer doesn’t state it outright, a quick Google query is all you need to read up on the white sperm whale that was spotted off the coast of Jamaica in early winter of 2021.

In case you were wondering, the punning potential of the book’s title wasn’t lost on the author. Even the automotive sense of the word as a noun—the compartment between driver and passenger seats—finds expression in poems like “Shunting from Dakar to Casamance,” which encompasses Channer’s love of driving and may just contain the book’s most striking image: “I inhabit vehicles like a mollusk. // I don’t drive cars—I put them on. / Armored, I approach the world.” But the most compelling construal of the book’s title is as an electronic, lit-up, multi-buttoned technology. In the poem simply titled “Console”—not meaningfully longer than any of the other poems, but a lynchpin to the volume as a whole—the poet encounters such a machine, a “Gundig” digital audio mixing console in a “dealer’s window / screaming, the silent oval speaker like a Munch.” What’s that screaming? Dub, probably: the emphatically Jamaican music genre—a kind of electronic outgrowth of reggae—that was originally sketched out, manipulated, and created on such consoles. Indeed, the genre and the patois of its practitioners (which may just be the poet’s best bridges back through time and space) establish a powerful presence throughout the book. You may find at times that they cloud a poem’s content with a baffling mystique. But even a superficial familiarity with reggae kingpin Bob Marley shouldn’t be required for one to jump in and enjoy this book. In spite of loss, trauma, distance, and forgetting, Console shows how a turn toward something good is usually to return to a place we’ve been; we can always make a soundtrack out of our favorite music; we can, in fact, make music; and in doing so we can be consoled.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California