Invisible Foreground
Invisible Foreground traces a journey from childhood into an adult world that is filled with tenderness, terror, and the wish for secure familial surroundings. Always on the verge of disappearing into a fractured memory the speaker is both sure and unsure of, these poems embroider lived reality with dreams of the imagination. Suburban houses, provincial terrain, furniture, feelings, physical desire (among other things) all serve, in the mind of the poet, as emotional set designs for a half century of life as performance.
Awards/Award Nominations
Nominated: Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Reviews
A glorious chameleon on page or stage, Bateman tries on as many styles and forms of poetry in his new Quartet collection as he does costumes. Invisible Foreground is as balanced as a practiced set of gams in high heels…. Poems move soft or strong like different types of lover’s touches for the mind: “Calgary airport” begins, “I like to go to the airport/check into Swiss Chalet…” and proceeds into a magic metamorphosis of the commonplace. In a poem like “Terrain”, however, Bateman reaches beneath the ribcage for startling observations on hard experiences…. Irony and synecdoche, or symbolism, are Bateman’s light and dark sinewy threads for sewing together narrative voice into a radiant living scarf, fabric as liable to choke you up as to feel you up. A poetry of extreme originality, it will linger on the skin of all your senses until it sinks in for good. ~Laurie Fuhr, Fast Forward
[G]o out and buy this book! Buy it for the language play, the wit, the humour, the stand-up timing; hell, buy it because it’s good for you: you’ll learn a lot about what Scottish poet W.S. Graham used to say the language is using us for. Your mother would approve: Bateman’s that damn good! ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
David Bateman’s poems crumble around you like the desperate, pitiful ruins of old buildings. And they touch you in the same way, taking you by surprise. They have the rambling illogic that life does, and they make me want to write. A bit profane, a bit philosophical, a bit of all sexes and sexualities – they conjure the image of the man (or woman) himself. I can hear David reading them in my head, or singing a song just a wee bit out of tune. ~Sky Gilbert
This series of poems traverses between the fraught and the beautiful, the violent and the tragic of suburban bodies, suburban desires. De-familiarizing these main-streamed spaces with tenderness and a sly humor Bateman’s seemingly simple language is layered and complex. Like a beautiful man stepping out of a gown…. Gorgeous. ~Hiromi Goto
Samples
Watching Grown Men Cry
1
over cappuccino with a warm shot of whiskey beside a thin young woman on a barstool in a lounge named “East of Never” under pressure in a late night board meeting when his son will be the eastern star by nine in a first grade play named “Heaven” after stand-up sex with his golfing buddy in a fully equipped RV while the wives are at the spa when the flirtatious lesbian economy of the straight women he works under excludes and excites him before undressing for dinner in full frontal perusal of twenty five years of living he will never get back beside the pane fused light of a sun razed moon on a surreal jigsaw on a commode in his den regardless of pomegranate salad sun dried children sent to camp she asks him to go down on her again with his shallow feet awakening in a sudden stream of light and some fragility in shadows
2
inside a posh new holding pen for new psychiatric patients interrogating $2000 red leather Barcelona knock-offs below a wreath of holiday wealth imagining belief in small paternalistic doses without regard for nothing less than fine wine praise for middle aged women sunglasses and scarves beyond question the faint vivacious tremor of her lower lips inside identity defined by birth certificates driver’s licences genital configurations and undotted sin above reproach for moody playoff seasons male menopausal breath beneath cribbage boards plastic pegs hedge clippings and the news of the world unless heaven allows foundational bliss and flood insurance
