Giscome Road - C.S. Giscombe

Almost Apparitional:
An Unrequited Attempt at Giscome Road

Note: The forum posts referenced can be accessed here.

As much pleasure as I took in the sometimes torrential, sometimes melodic nature of the text, I found C.S. Giscombe’s collection Giscome Road grueling – almost intolerably so! – in its ambiguity. I spent many cups of coffee, many hours of much-needed sleep attempting to understand exactly what is being communicated. I eventually questioned whether the text was communicating at all. And for all of my floundering, for all of my frustration, I realized that I would remain unclear about the specific meaning of the “long song” and the spiraling, surfacing ancestries which haunt Giscome Road. Last night, seconds before scrapping altogether my attempts at analysis, I found the beginning of an answer: this frustration and uncertainty is part of the message.

My classmates had this realization long before I did. For instance, in his post entitled “Identity”, Juan Garza began, “I’m not really sure of what’s going on in this poem. It’s a little confusing. It seems to me that maybe there is a good deal of history that one should know in order to better understand the context of this poem.” And he’s right. Giscombe traveled to western Canada to seek out this history in an attempt to better understand the context of his soon-to-be poems. At the end of the post, Juan states, “So I’m not really sure what all this is about, but identity and the loss of it seems to be important. Again, I think some historical context would probably make the message of this poem clearer.” At this point, let me say that we had a remarkable class; every student had a unique and thoughtful approach to the texts we covered. Juan was not alone in his uncertainty. He was surrounded by students who were also struggling to discover “what all this is about”.

I interpret Juan’s choice of the word “identity” as something closer to ancestry, or the possibility of reaching a firm understanding of one’s ancestry. And, in this way, I agree with his point. Even at the beginning of Giscome Road, Giscombe (I feel it’s safe to identify him as the speaker) recognizes the convoluted nature of identity as it relates to ancestry; his greatest challenge throughout the text is in the recapturing of a vague ancestral identity. For instance:

the rootless surname up on the river names rocks & water up there, the beauty

of apparitions is broken down & inflected both, the old Islands name,

the name that came & comes from the Islands,

the arrival, w/ John R. Giscome, of the blackest name’s edge
(& its variations & the effaced speaker’s own name & parentage (17)

The surname “Giscome” (however one spells it) carries, beyond any individual’s identity, a complicated history of movement and reinvention. The speaker seems to identify John R. Giscome as a type of floating origin – the man who delivered “the blackest name’s edge”, or transplanted the surname farther than anyone had before. And while the speaker sets out to mine this sparse, unincorporated slice of Canadian wilderness for “surfacings” of Giscome’s legacy, he is already aware that this lineage, by virtue of both human nature and encroaching wilderness, is now reduced to traces, whispers, has been, in a sense, consumed. The dated commentary from “Dr Rogers” regarding the dissemination and disappearance of “Negroid strain” – the quote’s simultaneous exposure of racial unease and slow, inevitable change – provides a foreboding ellipsis for the introduction of these concepts.


The musical aspects of the collection eluded me entirely; I would have remained ignorant of this central motif if I’d attempted an unassisted reading. I first became aware of the musicality of the text when I read Sable Woods’s post, “Northernmost Road”. At the end of her thoughts on “a sense of place” in the poem, Sable wrote, “I know there is some comparison to music in the poem but I haven’t quite figured it out yet.” I had noticed the music as well, but had pushed it aside as the vehicle to a metaphor that I wasn’t ready to unpack. Part of this stems from the fact that I am tragically unfamiliar with jazz. Thankfully, Myles Simcock is not:

The overall point of my post is that this book of poetry makes a great deal more sense if you approach it as if it were all one extended very intricate jazz composition like "Concierto de Aranjuez" by Miles Davis or "The Way Up" by Pat Metheny. There is improvisation, there is free association, but there is also a great deal of order- the work is meant to be an experience, not merely the vehicle for some simple message. Thus, to understand "Giscome Road", you must bring a great deal of patience and energy to it, because there is a lot more going on here than anything that a few quick readings could reveal.

Taking Myles’s sound advice, I prepared to devote an even greater amount of my near-depleted “patience and energy” toward my understanding of Giscome Road. And, just as he’d pointed out, the music existed beyond word choice – the phrase “long song” was, upon further reading, less musical than the way the song manifests itself in the stresses of the syllables, in the enjambment, and in the typeset of the poems.


In reaching the last lines of the text with my new ear, I was proud of my increased comprehension of a fixture in Giscombe’s poesy. But if I’d identified a central message in the song, it was still just beyond my articulation. I would like to use a quote here. That would be ideal. And there are plenty that I could pull from the text and parade around as representative of this central message. But it’s too hard to separate one from the next, to separate crescendo from its climax. That’s not the way this song works. There is no chorus, only the occasional return to a vaguely familiar riff. There is structure, but it is so fluid and evolving that its inconsistency – what I identify as the most important aspect of the poetic structure of Giscome Road – is impossible to capture in a short excerpt. So, instead, I’ll just state as plainly as possible what the song meant to me. It is the knowledge that there are many factors beyond your immediate control. It is the sense that the language of change cannot be transcribed with human language – no matter how talented the poet. It is loss and it is current and movement and it is impossible to surmount because we are always tossed around in its waters. It existed long before the “road in” was dreamt of, and will persist as the “road out” decays. And, at the end of the day, it gives a sense of life through its disregard for humanity: we, the class, understand the “long song” only slightly less than Giscombe did when he lost himself in it. And I’m proud to say that, as much as I’ve learned throughout the course, as many ideas and perspectives as I’ve encountered, my understanding of place, song, movement, violence, and time as they relate to race will always be incomplete; we could always use more “historical context”, a closer ear, more patience, more energy. And while these improvements will never be enough to reach an entire understanding of the innumerable factors which shape human lives, human races, the important thing is that we stop when we can, listen closely to “the long song” and squint hard to make out its apparitions.