Poetry can be thought of as a snare for thinking. Offering neither clear answers nor resolutions, its puzzle/riddle-like quality has the form or force of a question where the answer is contained within the question. It doesn’t provide directions, but rather presents predicaments the reader must alone encounter and interpret.

What a poem does is find itself from the inside out; its centres of thought draw together its periphery, giving birth to the force of reciprocal influences. The complex of words and syntax of a poem rearranges fixed ways of understanding what is happening by actively undermining and then re-building relationship and presence, time and perspective. You can’t understand or think about just one thing for long; your mind must wander endlessly in search of a way out.

One of the great joys of poetry is that much of the time it is made up of nothing at all. Like physics or good conversation, that which is most elegant, intelligent and entertaining in a poem depends as much on what is missing as what is actually there. The ambiguity of empty space defines what must occupy that space, while the silences embracing our words create questions and teach us the luxury and balance of knowing little while assuming much more.

Inside a poem, the illusion of space is created in the arrangement of the words. That syntactical arrangement is as important as the words, always bringing us either closer or further away from the satisfaction or disappointment of understanding.

Poetry emerges as a kind of practical optical illusion. Its words are laced with unintended interpretations, and, as a result, produce unintended consequences and directions for the poem as a whole.

At its heart, any poem is a reflection of the inherent structures and disruptive patterns of language, as well as the emergent nature and exploratory processes of thought itself.

The persuasive structural process of thinking in poetry involves variously, and in no particular order: proposal, description, contention, illumination, projection – with “projection” being defined not in terms of a simple conclusion, solution or resolution, but rather a complex emergence into a philosophic place beyond the poem’s limits, a departure as well as suspension invoking meditation, intuition, or belief. All parts of this process function as intricate, intimate and multifaceted sequences of sometimes unintended but integrated linkages.

Thinking like this, poetry is a conversation or explanation that gives a lot for a little, sometimes from nothing at all.

Brian Henderson and I have been friends since the 1960s, so in a way I have both a unique advantage as well as disadvantage when it comes to his poetry. But I have to say that with each of his ten books of poetry, he has always surprised me in ways I couldn’t have imagined or anticipated. From Paracelcus to The Alphamiricon, from The Expanding Room to Year Zero to The Viridical Book of the Silent Planet, he has consistently searched out new boundaries, combining an uncommon sense of innovation and invention with a surgeon’s or anatomist’s love of language.

In Henderson’s last book, Nerve Language, which also was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, he writes:

It occurs to me that I myself / am the writing-down-system / that wants to capture everything. . . the endless / limitation of words I am writing / on the other side of writing. (“The Writing-Down-System”)

His writing reaches out for what happens after writing, after reading . . . to an other-world, or the other side of writing to discover what he describes as “the landscape below landscape, the breath below the breath, time beneath time”.

It would appear that the word sharawadji is a corruption of the Japanese, filtered through Dutch, probably misheard by the C17 visitors to the Japanese gardens at Kyoto. It is both a word and a simulacrum of itself, a representation of representation whose parts are at once haphazard, irregular, disordered, and asymmetrical in structure, but also graceful and agreeable, revealing new forms of life beyond the disorder.

With Sharawadji the book, we arrive in a kind of perfect array of divergence, a series of conversations, narratives, word-paintings and memories that bridge the gaps between past and future. The visual and aural relationship between the parts and the whole is ingeniously uncovered as the presentation of one medium trying to realize itself through another.

There’s no doubt that “Twelve Imaginary Landscapes” and “Previews”, the opening and closing sections of the book, are at once the most difficult and intellectually the most rewarding; like the book’s title, they are not for the faint of heart. Their compact, dense format, as well as the word-stacking through these short narratives push at the boundaries of landscape and time. They are inspired by paintings that quickly become the skins we dive beneath, finding layers of cell and history, memory and DNA.

Those sometimes complicated, exotic words he plants like huge linguistic boulders in the middle of phrases are impossible to quickly walk around, verbally or intellectually, and nicely push against the “flow” of the poems.

The section “Night Music” comes as something of a relief to the reader. The poems have a kind of exquisite longing from which it’s hard to separate oneself, an intimacy of feeling compared to the sharp scalpel of “Landscapes”. The water and garden imagery, the flying birds and clouds sing throughout, but more than anything we can feel the presence of his mother, Ruth, helping even in death shake off the sense of anger/loss/pain and replacing it with a calmness and serenity. These are the known unknowns that we capture only momentarily, and always seem to be in the middle of.

Sharawadji is a brilliant achievement, tirelessly inventive, and a pleasure to read.