By Benny Sip
Fishing and poetry – it’s a 1964 dream combo! Benny Sip’s spare collection A River Runs is named, presumably, for American author Norman Maclean’s classic novella A River Runs Through It, which tapped into a youth spent in Montana surrounded by family for whom there was “no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”
In Sip’s work there is no clear line between life and fishing, and a river serves many purposes. “You know what I love most about the river? / In all the years we have known each other / It has never said a thing to me / Yet / I am still listening.”
The poems are often aphoristic – there’s a lot here you might scroll past in a Word Porn post in your Instagram feed, which is either a good thing or not a good thing, depending how your day’s going. But how can lines like “Bees buzz / Grouse drum / Hummingbirds hum / And the river runs” not make you smile? And the way the poems don’t have titles, but instead title-ish afterthoughts at the end of some of the works, like a key to what you have just read (‘On learning to protect one’s time’, ‘Guilt and shame’, ‘The great river said’), leaves you thinking.
This is a collection to dip into, a bit like a river. Sometimes you’ll be in the mood, sometimes you will not be. That’s OK. As Sip writes: “There are no big things / in this life.” Available from bennysip.com.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
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