Cartography, Revision
Review of National Animal by Derek Webster
By Izzi Holmes
National Animal, Derek Webster’s second poetry collection, found me at the exact right time. I first read the entire book in one sitting during the fall of 2024, just a few months after it was published by Véhicule Press. Before reading the collection cover to cover, I flipped to a seemingly random page near the middle, where I encountered the poem “Double Dream of Joni Mitchell.” The poem begins with an epigraph from “A Case of You,” which I had already listened to five times that morning. Once I started the collection from the beginning, I felt like it had also found me in the right place: Montreal, where the second poem begins before expanding to a broader Canadian context in the eponymous “National Animal.” Here Webster’s depiction of the North American beaver, Canada’s national animal, confronts existing accounts of Canadian history, “chews up the book / of what it was,” only to discover that this is a “story” that “keeps going,” through all seasons, by “gnawing / on itself, surviving on its wiles.” As the follow-up to Mockingbird, Webster’s 2015 debut collection, National Animal evokes a “story” of endurance, one that “keeps going,” though it is sustained by much more than “wiles” alone. Like the tinfoil rendering of a beaver on its cover, National Animal depicts light and shadow with equal care, all while staring straight ahead, unflinching, at the pages that are still yet to come.
Canadian symbols and figures, especially animals and poets, populate the landscape of National Animal. In “Ravens,” Webster writes, “I / like most poets / like Klein / a continuation / of lake and pine.” Here, with the arrival of A.M. Klein (especially in a collection that won the 2024 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry), Webster gestures towards Canadian poetic ancestors that exist within what we might call the literary landscape, made literal by way of “lake and pine.” Later, at the outset of “Night Thought,” a poem dedicated to Steven Heighton, this writerly landscape becomes even more material: “A fire burns itself across your field / and when it has passed, you remain a still thing / hairless in charred grass and earthen wind.” “Night Thought”is a testament to vision and revision. In the version that appears in a 2024 issue of Canadian Literature, the opening line is instead “A fire burns its path across your field / and when it’s done, you return to swirling winds / and a still thing, hairless in wet grass and earth.” Where, in the collection, the following phrase reads as “[o]utside, on the river, / a mirrored concept barely exists, / murky line of light waking in the saying,” the Canadian Literature iteration puts forth this line as “[i]nto blue evening I follow / a mirrored concept that barely exists, / murky line of light alive in the saying.” Both iterations offer perfect homages to Heighton, but the image-forward version that appears in the book fits the ethos of National Animal—where reflections percolate and persist—with even greater exactitude.
Webster’s embrace of form (especially meter) is further proof of his commitment to precision. In “Portrait with Stuffed Jackalope” and “Video of a Cougar, YouTube,” animals beget animals, and sonnets beget sonnets. Where the fourteen lines of “Portrait” trace the ekphrastic manifestation of “[s]omething like divine justice,” “Video” teases even more adherence to the sonnet form by opening with a rhyming couplet: “She swats the air in front of him, forepaws wide, / wants to lop off his head and lope off to hide.” Form tightens in “Ghost Bike,” a kind of Petrarchan sonnet about a bike accident where “love” rhymes with “glove,” and “dull length” with “found strength,” lays the foundation for “Burning Building,” which brings the suite to a close. Though not all of National Animal embraces form, rhythm remains prevalent. So does song. From listening to “Lionel Richie” (or “Whitney”) in “Homemade Blueberry Wine” and “Cruel Summer” in “Tannery Hill” to the “lark and starling” of “Fletcher’s Field,” place often emerges in relation to sound. In “Dresden,” which begins as “Mahler’s Fourth drones through the air,” music is as omnipresent in the atmosphere as war: “[e]ven the bomb-jaded must have known the tone was wrong.” With each musical allusion, Webster explores the resonances between national history and personal memory, both sonic and otherwise.
Sometimes, these memories are more imagined than remembered, as in “Photograph of My Parents,” where the speaker (ostensibly Webster) locates mother and father in the middle of a lake, frozen in time, “paddle / raised mid-air.” This moment becomes a point of origin for the speaker, pulled by “green darkness,” wrapped in the weight of “scant stories.” Here I am reminded of lines from both Margaret Atwood and Dionne Brand. “I am in the lake, in the center / of the picture, just under the surface,” Atwood writes in “This Is a Photograph of Me.” “If you look long enough, / eventually / you will be able to see me.” Looking long enough to find the self submerged just below the surface of the lake is exactly Webster’s project in this poem. Also, for Brand, “to look again” is to identify “how one is made” both “through and by literature,” a call to “examine a photograph as vestige and see how it generated, in the end, a novel, a poem, a set of thinking,” which emerges from encountering the self in a family image. As Webster’s speaker “look[s] again” at this memory (by writing it), he likewise locates the self behind the “rainbow-strapped camera,” and comes to a realization: “I understand their medium. What began as distance / finally arrives. The quiet splash that travels.” And travel it does.
National Animal embraces Adrienne Rich’s definition of writing as “re-vision,” the practice of seeing things anew. Where “Piggery Road,” “Tannery Hill,” “Fletcher’s Field,” and “Oakville Revisited” traverse an Ontario childhood, “Meditation on a Puzzle” and “Naught” (written in in terza rima, which Webster deems the “pinot noir” of poetic meter) take up more universal rites. Both poems imagine the return to old contexts with new interpretive tools hardened by time and experience: in “Meditation,” an object “remember[ed] as a brandy bottle” is “actually a beating heart,” and in “Naught,” both waiting and saving are at the fore—waiting “till God’s will cools,” and saving “pity for worlds to come.” Yet National Animal is directed towards a world that is already here. As Martin Breul writes, the book “contains a panoramic meditation on the spell of nationhood.” History remains prescient all the way through. In the second section of the last series of poems, “The Thinker,” the natural world springs into action as “[f]lagella spin their seeds into webs and ferns” and an “Australopithecus afarensis hop-walks by” (perhaps a poetic descendant of Medrie Purdham’s imagined australopithecus afarensis ancestor, Lucy), preceding a “crying child.” Through brief utterances, “story begins,” “energy flows,” and the evolutionary cycle continues. Experience precedes interpretation.
In National Animal, now a beloved anchor in my own “map of Canada,” Derek Webster captures with photographic accuracy that which just “keeps going” and going. The collection offers tools to “skirt the green darkness” that pulls us all. Already a mainstay in contemporary Canadian letters, the story of National Animal will continue to unfold.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. “This Is a Photograph of Me.” Academy of American Poets,
http://poets.org/poem/photograph-me.
Brand, Dionne. “Vestiges: To Look Again.” BOMB Magazine, 16 Sept. 2024,
http://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/09/16/vestiges-to-look-again-dionne-brand/.
Breul, Martin. “National Animal.” Montreal Review of Books, 2024,
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/national-animal-derek-webster/
Purdham, Medrie. “In Front of Lucy, Our First Mother, My Son Has a Lavish Nosebleed.”
Montreal International Poetry Prize,http://montrealpoetryprize.com/poems/in-front-of-lucy-our-first-mother-my-son-has-a-lavish-nosebleed.
Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English, vol. 34, no.
1, 1972, pp. 18-30. JSTOR, www.jstor.ord/stable/375215.
Webster, Derek. National Animal. Véhicule Press, 2024.
––– “Night Thought.” Canadian Literature, 12 July 2024, http://canlit.ca/article/night-thought/.
Wickham, John. “Six Questions for Derek Webster.” Quebec Writers' Federation, 2024,
http://qwf.org/five-questions-for-derek-webster/.
Izzi Holmes is a Montreal-based student, editor, and sometimes writer from New York City. She is currently pursuing an FRQSC-funded MA in English at McGill University, where she also completed an Honours BA in English literature and Psychology (www.izziholmes.com).
1 June 2026