Nicholas Bradley
Alt text: Bradley is posing in a black shirt. He is standing against a textured, two-tone gray wall. He has short, brown hair and looks directly at the camera with a neutral expression.
Biography
Nicholas Bradley is the author of two books of poetry: Rain Shadow (University of Alberta Press, 2018) and Before Combustion (Gaspereau Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Among his scholarly publications are the edited volumes An Echo in the Mountains: Al Purdy after a Century (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) and We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 (Harbour Publishing, 2014). He lives in Victoria, BC – in lək̓wəŋən territory – and teaches Canadian literature and environmental writing at the University of Victoria.
https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/english/people/regularfaculty/bradley-nicholas.php
Poetics Statement
“I want to believe that art can change the world, especially in a time of environmental crisis, but the audience for poetry is relatively small, and its effects are probably more local than global. On the other hand, everything helps. If a poem nudges a reader to think differently, to see something in a new way, then it’s doing its job. The effects of climate change are hard to absorb, but poetry helps us understand the changing world by humanizing the abstract nature of a global crisis. We need to have practical ways of managing wildfires, but it’s also important to express how it feels when the air is suddenly unbreathable, or when the sky is yellow for days on end. Poetry reminds us of the human and non-human reasons we should protect the places we call home. Poems say “Look at that Douglas-fir,” “Remember that time the basement flooded and laugh about it now,” “Listen to this turn of phrase”—and that precision grounds us in lives and places. And poetry looks ahead to the future: the months and years over which books find readers. This is a kind of hopefulness, a faith that what books have to say now will still be important later. Poets are climate optimists, even if they might not admit it. We trust in a future where poetry still matters.
I’m as distracted and distractible as the next person. I live in a city with too much traffic. Work is endless. My phone is always ready to waste an hour of my time. But paying closer attention—to language, to our surroundings, to each other—could only be good for us. Poems invite readers to notice. Why does a line break where it breaks? Why does a rhyme deviate from the pattern? Reading poetry is good practice for a more attentive life, though I don’t pretend to be perfectly mindful when I’m putting out the recycling. I’m not that enlightened.”
(Adapted from Yet Another Plague Year Reader, Gaspereau Press, 2023.)
Sample of Poet's Work
Self-Portrait in Lycra Skinsuit
Riding against time, I am the future
incarnate. My metronome feet are wrapped
in polyurethane and polyamide, their
unyielding soles cleated to the carbon
machine. My polystyrene head catches no
wind, and my limbs, clad in copolymers,
are as dragless as money will buy.
Last century’s chemistry dresses me
in Day-Glo from prescription sunglasses
to baby toes. I am a testament
to Progress and Industry. But when
I pedal my clunker virtuously
to the supermarket, the 1800s
toss and turn and blink. Although I’m ready
for life on Mars, some part of me pines
for horses, the world before combustion.
(from Before Combustion, 2023)
Song of the Notch
In the Queets Basin there is no nature
but the nature of things. No time but time
of loam, the clock that peals from moment
to moment to end, from age to epoch
to end. On the scrabbly ridge that divides
one valley from the other—a gravel
circus, a festival of chipped teeth—hands
pass six and twelve. There is no middle
but the middle of things, no midpoint, no
path. What rises in the morning? No sun.
At night? No moon. As headwalls watch, no egg
hatches in another bird’s heather nest
except the oval naught (a moulin, a mirror)
through which door springs elfin hoarfrost singing
Cuckoo, cuckoo, the faces are forming.
(from Rain Shadow, 2018)
Ascent
Our house was built in 1953
when Everest was still unscaled, as Cal
wrote in a line I’ll take as free
for the taking. Until it wasn’t. All
of a sudden in the coronation
year, it was un-unscaled. Here, I gather, life
went on, lilacs and carnations planted
in raised beds to ward off autumn’s spate
of expired leaves. Tanked and hosed, they landed
on the summit, flags anxious to be flown,
while on our street a green couple moved in.
When we took over, frazzled, we pulled up
their roses and dumped them on the lawn
for keener gardeners to collect. Stone-
crop on protruding blooms of bedrock:
our flinty contribution. But airless
mountains, belated climbers joined in wedlock
to an enchantment, a brambled backyard pathway,
a queen in her nineties, ruined poets,
oaks well into their second century,
ornamental species in sundown glow:
on this slab of fascinations I raise my house
of wonder, lugging brown boxes inside.
(from Before Combustion, 2023)
