The Goldberg Variations

The Goldberg Variations takes as its organizing principle the idea of contingency – the world thrown into Being that the poet encounters – and variation, or Bach’s looping, recombinant system, as a way to turn into verse what shows up in the Notes app – with all the affordances of certain line lengths, the overheard, pop culture, jargon, slang and invective, tree talk, the political and the beautiful, and organizes that raw material, that “language”, into the building blocks of the poem – sonnets and columns, words big and small, short and long, the clusterfuck of 2020 and before and since, desire and lack and maybe luck, good or bad.

‘The feeling I get when reading The Goldberg Variations is like looking out the window of a high speed train, except we don’t have those here. Also, the ear doesn’t look, even if we "do the mask discard for the gram.” Still, everything is moving faster and faster, so I can’t re-cognize until it’s passed (past). Resistance gets “levelled up” into whatever stage of madness this is, I’ve lost track. But Burnham keeps up while refusing to not remember, which is funny in time’s almost. Absurd the ways language spins out in societies of control. That is to say, even as its (t)errors are splicing things up in the feedback loops, this poetry is my listening’s hearing getting better.’
-- Laura Elrick, author of What This Breathing


The Goldberg Variations pays attention to everything at the same time, from Mariupol to Attawapiskat, marshalling observation, slogan, idiom, and heard speech into the tyrannical counterpoint of typed text. Its preoccupations are degenerate and internationalist, weighing in on tactics of resistance, 80s conceptualism, and the efficacy of the cockroach traps around Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s childhood bed. This writing is an ethic of rampant engagement, “of voting with your feet”, of being there (everywhere).’
— Hamish Ballantyne, author of Tomorrow is a Holiday

Tomorrow is a Holiday

In Tomorrow is a Holiday, Hamish Ballantyne resists the urge of revelation in favour of idiomatic observations.
Divided in four parts, the last of which draws on translations of San Juan de la Cruz, these poems sit by the ocean or by the felled spruce, from within the tent on the mountain or on city streets, and Ballantyne serves as a narrator at the margins of it all. The curious restlessness of a poet's eye settling on the world, but there is much in the field of view and these deceptively simple scenes give way to exquisite sensitivity.

‘List of poets I like who have written about Machu Picchu: Hamish Ballantyne. Hamish’s poems are written in tents, they find language rooted under trees - not the mother tree but the mother of all class wars. Don’t confuse the Rosy Brittlegill with other russulas: these poems are edible but they will poison you. The war of the woods. Now you’re logrolling!’
-- Clint Burnham, author of The Goldberg Variations

‘Shivers of mood—now blunt, now gleaming—pierce and puzzle Tomorrow is a Holiday. Set in a landscape of community centres and encampments, canneries and processing plants, A&Ws and Tim Hortons, under “billboards advertising billboard space,” or as a transposition of St. John of the Cross into the precarious noir of the now, these crystalline sequences give way to affinities that resist what the “imagination a parasite swimming in memory / makes / of the past.” ’
— Roberto Tejada, author of Why the Assembly Disbanded

With clairvoyant energy, the serial poems in Tomorrow is a Holiday expand rapidly to indicate individual lives inside the paranormal pressures of language. The lyric momentum of this four-poem sequence channels daily events in Vancouver, where lyric subjectivities expand by a reception of voices at ground level. Here, people sleep for a “month in the pub parking lot,” and in dreamlike privation are “always short of revelatory / but a constant stream thereof.” Hamish Ballantyne’s sympathy for a public world and his sensitivity to the phantom exigencies of language help us come awake to poetry’s disclosure of spiritual realities, “deserted first by reason then / the sandstorm of experience.” This book is on the street, in the heart and ear. It’s beautiful.
— Dale Smith, author of Slow Poetry in America