Dennis Unrau, Melanie

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 17 | No. 1 Article 28-5-2018Tar Swan by David MartinMelanie Dennis UnrauUniversity of ManitobaPart of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Poetry CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeDennis Unrau, Melanie. "Tar Swan by David Martin." The Goose, vol. 17 , no. 1 , article 2, 2018,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/2.Tar Swan by DAVID MARTIN NeWest, 2018 $19.95  Reviewed by MELANIE DENNIS UNRAU  David Martin’s Tar Swan is a narrative in four voices. The first narrator is Robert C. Fitzsimmons, Fitz for short, founder of the International Bitumen Company and the Bitumount plant in the 1920s, a key figure in the history of the development of the Athabasca tar sands even though his company seemed at many points to be a failure. Fitzsimmons the historical figure is an object of fascination, speculation, and imagination in Tar Swan. Fitz’s voice is split or twinned, appearing as prose-poem letters to his wife Wilhelmina that reveal his more private thoughts and fears, shown at the bottom of the page, and as bombastic prose-poem speeches to the “Gentlemen” who work for him at the top of the page.  The first voice confesses,   I’ve never felt so naked as I do now. I  spend most days shivering in shirtsleeves, vowels   streaming from my mouth. (46)  And the second voice continues on the next page, “Gentlemen, we have arisen, our foes flee before us, and / our enemies scatter: Behold, the Plant is alive!” (47). Fitz’s speeches echo the language and style of the sales pitch, the sermon, the quack doctor, and Fitzsimmons’s 1953 pamphlet The Truth about Alberta Tar Sands: Why Were They Kept Out of Production?  Bitumount mechanic Frank Badura narrates verse poetry in short lines and short stanzas. Frank is recruited by Fitzsimmons from the tracking line where he first appears, tethered to other labourers, “towing a sin of cores / against th’Athabaska” (22) — that is, hauling a scow (flat-bottomed boat) loaded with core samples of tar sand upstream along the Athabasca River. Frank is a hard worker who drinks too much and sleeps where he works, so his dreams are filled with “machines aspiring / to murder me” (68).  Fitzsimmons later accuses Frank of sabotage at the Bitumount plant, an act Frank does and does not commit.  Fitzsimmons operated Bitumount in the 1930s and 40s, and both Fitz and Frank narrate from within this period, but Dr. Brian K. Wolsky is an archaeologist from the reader’s time. He reports in verse couplets on his excavation of the Bitumount site and the mixed bag of prehistoric and early-twentieth-century artifacts he unearths, including a letter from Wilhelmina, Frank’s glass eye, tools, arrowheads, dishes, pencils, and a tree trunk. According to the dramatis personae that begins the book, Wolsky “stratifies himself in a pit” (11), an action that may extend also to the poet, digging through archival documents and excavating long-buried stories and anxieties about the early days of tar sands extraction. In the “Summary and Recommendations” poem that ends Wolsky’s narration, he writes, “Fitzy demands much of me,” and warns the reader of his report (and the poetry collection?), “Don’t you dare ever come here, you’ll be / beholding yourself bound to yourself in the tar cage” (88). Reading Tar Swan while doing research on another early tar-sands innovator, I can relate to Wolsky’s mounting awareness of his own complicity.  Wolsky’s narration works with time in interesting ways, but the fourth character, the Swan, even more fully embodies the mixed temporality of the extraction, production, and combustion of 1Dennis Unrau: Tar Swan by David MartinPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018fossil fuels. An ambivalently Indigenous and classical figure, the Swan is a time-travelling, shape-shifting, mythological trickster who is simultaneously a prehistoric life form turned into tar (“My feathers and feces drive your cars” [15]) and an ignored contemporary of each of the other speakers. The Swan’s zombie tar-eggs break open and wreak havoc at Bitumount. Able both to contain and to take over other bodies, the Swan (the tar) controls the behaviour of the other characters and drives them insane. The Swan narrates in the centres of the pages, in Jackpine Sonnets — thirteen lines long, with lines nearly always short of ten syllables and favouring internal rhyme and alliteration over end rhyme. The Swan’s final song, however, is a culmination in content and form. It is sung from the moment of climate change and perhaps the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, when “last laughs are keyed from the locks” (89) and the Swan seemingly burns up. The poem’s fourteen lines and Shakespearean rhyme scheme ponder the structures of life in the tar cage, and the poem ends — “Ah, but I know skin and bones are far / from their mad embrace without my tar” (89) — with the poetic justice, if not the last laugh, of entanglement.  Tar Swan’s mix of lyric and innovative poetics is a challenging read. Like the stubborn and charismatic tar sands innovator he is fascinated with, Martin’s poetry is at turns charming and repulsive. He blends archaic, historical, and contemporary language and intertexts, and if you read poetry the way I do, you will need a dictionary. Martin’s blurring of fact and fiction produces what Hito Steyerl calls a productive “documentary uncertainty” about what really happened (and why we care). My uncertainty extends, too, to the politics of suggesting that the so-called “fathers” of the tar sands (and this is indeed a masculinist and colonial history) didn’t know, or didn’t intend, or couldn’t handle the consequences of their actions. Is this just another version of denial, where we ignore the junctures at which they and we have knowingly chosen industrialization, modernization, appropriation, and ecological damage? I worry about this in my own work. I see the “reckoning” described on the back cover of Tar Swan as part of a larger cultural project of understanding and dismantling the “tar cage.” Martin’s troubling of the history of the tar sands in this impressive first poetry collection invites more historical and creative work in this vein.   WORKS CITED  Fitzsimmons, R.C. The Truth about Alberta Tar Sands: Why Were They Kept Out of Production? Fitzsimmons, 1953.   Steyerl, Hito. “Documentary Uncertainty.” 2007. Re-Visiones, no. 1, 2011, http://revisiones.net/anteriores/spip.php%3Farticle37.html.  MELANIE DENNIS UNRAU is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Manitoba and co-editor of The Goose. Her dissertation focuses on petropoetics, especially on poetry written by oil workers. She is currently writing about the poetry of S.C. Ells, another originator of the tar sands industry. Melanie is poetry editor of Geez magazine. She is a Sir Gordon Wu Scholar and a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholar.   2The Goose, Vol. 17, No. 1 [2018], Art. 2https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/2

Tar Swan by David Martin

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 17 | No. 1 Article 2
8-5-2018
Tar Swan by David Martin
Melanie Dennis Unrau
University of Manitoba
Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Poetry Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Dennis Unrau, Melanie. "Tar Swan by David Martin." The Goose, vol. 17 , no. 1 , article 2, 2018,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/2.
Tar Swan by DAVID MARTIN 
NeWest, 2018 $19.95 
 
Reviewed by MELANIE DENNIS UNRAU 
 
David Martin’s Tar Swan is a narrative in 
four voices. The first narrator is Robert C. 
Fitzsimmons, Fitz for short, founder of the 
International Bitumen Company and the 
Bitumount plant in the 1920s, a key figure 
in the history of the development of the 
Athabasca tar sands even though his 
company seemed at many points to be a 
failure. Fitzsimmons the historical figure is 
an object of fascination, speculation, and 
imagination in Tar Swan. Fitz’s voice is split 
or twinned, appearing as prose-poem 
letters to his wife Wilhelmina that reveal his 
more private thoughts and fears, shown at 
the bottom of the page, and as bombastic 
prose-poem speeches to the “Gentlemen” 
who work for him at the top of the page.  
The first voice confesses,  
 
I’ve never felt so naked as I do now. I  
spend most days 
shivering in shirtsleeves, vowels   
streaming from my 
mouth. (46) 
 
And the second voice continues on the next 
page, “Gentlemen, we have arisen, our foes 
flee before us, and / our enemies scatter: 
Behold, the Plant is alive!” (47). Fitz’s 
speeches echo the language and style of the 
sales pitch, the sermon, the quack doctor, 
and Fitzsimmons’s 1953 pamphlet The Truth 
about Alberta Tar Sands: Why Were They 
Kept Out of Production? 
 Bitumount mechanic Frank Badura 
narrates verse poetry in short lines and 
short stanzas. Frank is recruited by 
Fitzsimmons from the tracking line where 
he first appears, tethered to other 
labourers, “towing a sin of cores / against 
th’Athabaska” (22) — that is, hauling a scow 
(flat-bottomed boat) loaded with core 
samples of tar sand upstream along the 
Athabasca River. Frank is a hard worker 
who drinks too much and sleeps where he 
works, so his dreams are filled with 
“machines aspiring / to murder me” (68).  
Fitzsimmons later accuses Frank of 
sabotage at the Bitumount plant, an act 
Frank does and does not commit. 
 Fitzsimmons operated Bitumount in 
the 1930s and 40s, and both Fitz and Frank 
narrate from within this period, but Dr. 
Brian K. Wolsky is an archaeologist from the 
reader’s time. He reports in verse couplets 
on his excavation of the Bitumount site and 
the mixed bag of prehistoric and early-
twentieth-century artifacts he unearths, 
including a letter from Wilhelmina, Frank’s 
glass eye, tools, arrowheads, dishes, 
pencils, and a tree trunk. According to the 
dramatis personae that begins the book, 
Wolsky “stratifies himself in a pit” (11), an 
action that may extend also to the poet, 
digging through archival documents and 
excavating long-buried stories and anxieties 
about the early days of tar sands extraction. 
In the “Summary and Recommendations” 
poem that ends Wolsky’s narration, he 
writes, “Fitzy demands much of me,” and 
warns the reader of his report (and the 
poetry collection?), “Don’t you dare ever 
come here, you’ll be / beholding yourself 
bound to yourself in the tar cage” (88). 
Reading Tar Swan while doing research on 
another early tar-sands innovator, I can 
relate to Wolsky’s mounting awareness of 
his own complicity. 
 Wolsky’s narration works with time 
in interesting ways, but the fourth 
character, the Swan, even more fully 
embodies the mixed temporality of the 
extraction, production, and combustion of 
1
Dennis Unrau: Tar Swan by David Martin
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018
fossil fuels. An ambivalently Indigenous and 
classical figure, the Swan is a time-
travelling, shape-shifting, mythological 
trickster who is simultaneously a prehistoric 
life form turned into tar (“My feathers and 
feces drive your cars” [15]) and an ignored 
contemporary of each of the other 
speakers. The Swan’s zombie tar-eggs break 
open and wreak havoc at Bitumount. Able 
both to contain and to take over other 
bodies, the Swan (the tar) controls the 
behaviour of the other characters and 
drives them insane. The Swan narrates in 
the centres of the pages, in Jackpine 
Sonnets — thirteen lines long, with lines 
nearly always short of ten syllables and 
favouring internal rhyme and alliteration 
over end rhyme. The Swan’s final song, 
however, is a culmination in content and 
form. It is sung from the moment of climate 
change and perhaps the 2016 Fort 
McMurray wildfire, when “last laughs are 
keyed from the locks” (89) and the Swan 
seemingly burns up. The poem’s fourteen 
lines and Shakespearean rhyme scheme 
ponder the structures of life in the tar cage, 
and the poem ends — “Ah, but I know skin 
and bones are far / from their mad embrace 
without my tar” (89) — with the poetic 
justice, if not the last laugh, of 
entanglement. 
 Tar Swan’s mix of lyric and 
innovative poetics is a challenging read. Like 
the stubborn and charismatic tar sands 
innovator he is fascinated with, Martin’s 
poetry is at turns charming and repulsive. 
He blends archaic, historical, and 
contemporary language and intertexts, and 
if you read poetry the way I do, you will 
need a dictionary. Martin’s blurring of fact 
and fiction produces what Hito Steyerl calls 
a productive “documentary uncertainty” 
about what really happened (and why we 
care). My uncertainty extends, too, to the 
politics of suggesting that the so-called 
“fathers” of the tar sands (and this is indeed 
a masculinist and colonial history) didn’t 
know, or didn’t intend, or couldn’t handle 
the consequences of their actions. Is this 
just another version of denial, where we 
ignore the junctures at which they and we 
have knowingly chosen industrialization, 
modernization, appropriation, and 
ecological damage? I worry about this in my 
own work. I see the “reckoning” described 
on the back cover of Tar Swan as part of a 
larger cultural project of understanding and 
dismantling the “tar cage.” Martin’s 
troubling of the history of the tar sands in 
this impressive first poetry collection invites 
more historical and creative work in this 
vein.  
 
WORKS CITED 
 
Fitzsimmons, R.C. The Truth about Alberta 
Tar Sands: Why Were They Kept Out 
of Production? Fitzsimmons, 1953.  
 
Steyerl, Hito. “Documentary Uncertainty.” 
2007. Re-Visiones, no. 1, 2011, 
http://revisiones.net/anteriores/spip.
php%3Farticle37.html. 
 
MELANIE DENNIS UNRAU is a PhD 
candidate in English at the University of 
Manitoba and co-editor of The Goose. Her 
dissertation focuses on petropoetics, 
especially on poetry written by oil workers. 
She is currently writing about the poetry of 
S.C. Ells, another originator of the tar sands 
industry. Melanie is poetry editor of Geez 
magazine. She is a Sir Gordon Wu Scholar 
and a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholar.  
 
2
The Goose, Vol. 17, No. 1 [2018], Art. 2
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/2


https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&amp;context=thegoose

Tar Swan by David Martin

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