Whereas Stephen Noyes' previous collection Ghost Country (Brick 2006), was set entirely in China, about one-third of the new poems in Morbidity and Ornament are China-based. His other locales include a Vancouver mosque, a festival on Hainan Island, Esquimalt, the Prairies, the Philippines and North Africa.

A Mandarin scholar and traveler, Noyes avoids the pitfall of so much contemporary travel: the more we do it, the more shallow our experiences. So how to avoid consuming the world like a product, the Disneyfication of cultures?

Now everybody is from
everywhere;
they climb in tee shirts,
jeans and sunglasses
from their dusty jeeps,
and troop past
the rows of concrete shells,
the junked cars
and satellite dishes to the
one hotel.

By staying in one place, by living in Beijing, Noyes goes deeper. Knowing and loving the language helps, as does his respect for Buddhism and Islam.
At 120 pages, his Morbidity is a hefty book by current poetry publishing standards. Divided into eight sections, each prefaced by a short poem in Mandarin ideograms, the poems are mostly longish.

Noyes captures the intense contradictions of China as well as his regard for it. Labourers work in totally unsafe worksites; bland puppet bureaucrats dream of a condo in Richmond. Simplicities of peasant life (washing the pig) are contrasted by delirious spring festivals.

Back in Victoria, where Noyes works in the provincial bureaucracy, he recalls the blossoms of Chang'an and his own dream of himself there as a successful scholar. A nightmare about the accidental death of a sewage worker contrasts with a quiet poem about an empty temple.

These highly accomplished poems, varied in form and richly textured, include pieces on sheep and slugs, basketball, Chaucer (in Chaucer-ese), addictions and his teenage gymnast daughter.
Sometimes inscrutable but always interesting, Noyes captures the quirky grammar of transliterations from Mandarin into English, "the terrorists in swiftest coruscation incensed two erections.";

Any reader, who still holds the notion that it's a good idea to erase Islam and insert secular prosperity, please read the final poem 'As Was.' A brass beater in a tiny, dusty town observes the foreign travelers. He knows he has traveled further because he travels in narratives.

Without complaints about the constraints of his life, he ends with praise,

"At least, at last, the clouds and darkening hills are sweet instances of how He, insinuator, penetrator, sole divisor, has lent shape from shadow from His generosity, makes stones swim underground and falcons plummet, made the shifting gift of water, and against the formless void will have sketched the constellations.";
978-0-88982-260-3

[BCBW 2009]