The Poetry of Meditation: Meditation on a Tooth by Ken Sherman

A Review by Michael Greenstein

In The Poetry of Meditation Louis Martz analyzes contemplative modes in seventeenth-century Metaphysical Poetry, specifically the poems of John Donne and George Herbert. Whereas Donne imagines a “bracelet of bright hair about the bone,” Kenneth Sherman yokes together disparate elements in the nine sections of his Meditation on a Tooth.

Sherman’s relic begins with “My tooth is gone” — on an odyssey of contemplation where n sounds hint at the numbness of the experience: “the enamel the pulp / the nerve and dentine // little niblet of ivory.” After this naming of parts, the poet’s nimble wit expands from short e’s and clicked t’s to the long vowels in “ivory,” which further the journey to tusks and whiteness of blank page filled with sounds, scratched by nibs. Spaces between lines indicate the condition of “white plank / torn from my mouth’s picket fence.” This tooth picket strikes the right note of resistance, resignation, and resonance.

As the poet tongues “through the shocking socket / digesting the nuance of space,” his electric sibilance conducts the reader through the body’s space-time continuum and the page’s spacing that imitates the mouth’s vacancy. He contemplates “sharpness / and absence,” “being / and nothingness.” The implicit rhyme of tooth and truth results in “toothfulness / and the abyss.” Em dash and period further underscore the spaces between writing, mouth, and meditation. Suffixes of past participles sound another gap: chipped, cracked, filled, vanished, knocked, and yanked surround the tooth. The bittersweet loss creates an awareness of age, “and my departure / from this loving star.” Section 1 ends without a period, as the poet drifts elegiacally towards cosmic significance.

The second section returns to earth and the mundane pulling of the tooth by the poet’s cousin, Dr. Larry Grossman, whose name points to the dichotomy between large and small, synecdoche and entirety, tooth and star. Indeed, meditation is a measuring, and this poem measures distances and disturbances. Rhymes and near rhymes attest to the state of mind and mouth: cousin, Grossman, waiting, freezing, in. There follows a catalogue of dental instruments: cheek retractors, chisels, gouges, clamps, bone files, scalers, tweezers, excavators, explorers, root elevators, and holloware. Larry’s words contrast with his patient’s: “Only a tooth … Not a limb or eye. / Replaceable.” His speech is interrupted by the pliers in his hand, and followed by a sardonic comment: “The cost / to be determined.” The extraction is costly in more than one sense.

The third section launches into memories of childhood when the dentist was nine years old, sprawled on the living room floor, “disassembling our stalled antique clock.” Dexterous Larry repairs time as well as teeth — “examining up-close the delicate intricacy / of gears.” He carefully reassembles the clock with his proficient hands: “a ginger-haired metaphysician / questioning Time,” as the poet invokes earlier Metaphysical poets to question “the evaporation / of dreams?” The third section ends with another question that combines meditation and maintenance, lyrical and narrative modes:

But isn’t the maintenance of molars
and incisors
essential for grinding
everyday facts
so that we have the courage to swallow
digest and endure?

The moral of molars: maintenance and endurance for life and the long poem, with a reminder that molar derives from millstone, which grinds and grounds that life.

Part 4 further explores memories from childhood, “the toothless of my youth,” who rise up risibly with their “sink-hole grins.” Grinners and grinders include Gabby Hayes, hockey goalies, and a grandmother whose “dentures drowned / in a tumbler of water.” Also, a homeless Wild Bill on College Street who closes the section in parentheses. The speaker’s father gave him odd jobs and let him sleep on the cutting table of his tailor shop “blanketed under warm yards / of English cloth.)” From Gabby Hayes to gabardine, and from the warmth of the cutting table that contrasts with the cold metal tray in the dentist’s office, Sherman measures and meditates.

The fifth section studies Franz Kafka’s dental experience. Kafka kept two of his milk teeth in a small Chinese box and feared the open mouths of adults — “their teeth flecked with particles of meat — a world overrun / with Menchen Fressers.” A vegetarian, he carefully fletchered or masticated his own food, and “suffered from troubled lungs / as well as from Gewissensbisse — / the bite / of conscience.” Kafka’s relic enters the world of maintenance, memory, and meditation:

He knew that a trip to the dentist
is never mere maintenance

it is a reckoning
with poor flesh

and existential crisis
trembling with memory.

After the writing instrument in The Penal Colony, it becomes necessary to create a carapace for Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis and the art of molar maintenance.

Section 6 broadens to the cosmic and expands upon the earlier star in a long sentence: “For how many know / that our teeth originate in stars.” The question ends with “iron to colour our blood / a river of red?” to return to the first section’s “sweet with blood,” as part of “the radiant / continuum” and spectrum of sky.

Nature is red in tooth and claw in section 7’s ekphrastic study of Francis Bacon who “viewed the oral cavity / as a galaxy of hard stars.” His mouths are filled with screams and teeth, Pope Innocent in a dentist’s chair with eyes and mouth of a hysterical horse. After the irony of the pope’s “innocent” anti-semitism and electric chair, section 8 turns to a grimmer meditation: “And I consider / how my Jew-tooth / would be of zero use / to the SS / hunting gold / in the jaws of the dead.” The tooth is Jewish because of the jaws of Kafka and Russian journalist Vassily Grossman, who is not related to cousin Larry even though they belong to the same family within the poem. The relic tooth takes over in negatives — “not dissolving in the hastily erected / pyres of Treblinka,” nor hidden in the camp’s covered pit. The meditation becomes increasingly macabre in this section with the tooth’s testament. It rises slowly to the earth’s surface with bone fragments in a grim collage, which is discovered by Vassily Grossman travelling with the Red Army in August of 1944. In the journalist’s words, “the skulls keep silent / but the sockets speak.” In this death fugue Grossman’s sockets speak to the earlier “shocking socket” across history’s silent scream.

The final section returns to Larry’s office: “Larry had finished the twisting / and pulling,” even as the poet has twisted history and pulled meaning, mincing words and rinsing with saltwater across the Atlantic. The dentist measures the gap, in turn measured by the poet’s space-time continuum and his father’s tailoring of houndstooth suits. The poem ends on negative notes of wistful thinking, the largo of longing, and adagio of loss: “not flying / to Jerusalem // not mourned in any liturgy.” The tooth is preserved in verse, its roots deeper than the surface, its molar shape as tenacious as pliers. The final rhyme denies apotheosis: “Not rising bright. // Not / starlight.” And yet it is polished like a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, as Sherman reconsiders James Joyce’s agenbite of inwit.

Many of the shorter poems in this collection focus on birds and trees. “Black-Backed Woodpecker” combines bird and tree through onomatopoeia: “From deep inside the charred forest / you hear his rat-a-tat-tat.” If poetry is the quarrel within the poet’s self (W.B. Yeats), then Sherman’s use of “you” highlights this lyrical quarrel where his second-person pronoun oscillates between poet and reader. Further in flight the pronoun lands on the bird itself — “unless your feathers are undertaker black” — within a scorched ecosystem and death rattle where charred forests appear in the preceding, prescient poem, “Fire.” In turn, “Fire” relies on the pronoun to connect to the titular poem: “with the taste of Apocalypse between your teeth.”

“Dirt Country” begins with “You never notice” and ends with “crows overhead, the heavy beat / of their wings.” The poet always notices, while “crows never sing,” heavy birds beginning and ending song and noticing. Crows alight in “Saint Scarecrow” and enter the formal and structural quarrel between sentence and stanza. The static flight of the poem appears in one sentence that skips a line to create a second stanza to reinforce rhyme, action, and ways of looking at a blackbird: “and start // to take him apart.” Crows fly into “Concession Road A” where “I make my way / towards the brooding / congregation of trees.” Sherman’s bird’s return to Kafka whose Czech surname means crow. A word watcher, he marks the page, traces sand, and arcs the air to remind us that the etymology of pedigree is a crane’s foot.

The brooding poet of tooth and trees appears in “To My Musa Basjoo Tree in Time of War” where the personified tree assumes the you: “Now I can say what you mean / with your six-foot paddle-shaped leaves.” Similarly, “Sound Check” ends “through an orchard of dying trees, as Sherman forests his ginkgos and Norway maples. In “Norway Maple” the speaker climbs the tree where birds are “winged words,” while he is “balancing / and cutting back on Norway / to let light in.” The same illumination and balancing act reappear at the end of “Kelly’s Tree Service” where the sun sets “balancing / between the branches / of the tree.” Yeats’s poetic quarrel plays out formally in the rhythmic balance at the end of lines where birds and trees work with and against time in the flow of flora and fauna.

The indented tercets in “Tailor” match form and content seamlessly:

  He unravels a bolt of cloth
           urging you to feel
                  the texture of worsted

Text and texture unfold as the lines cross hatch with “you” at the centre of the stanza caught in the web of experience. Samples and patterns extend from the local to the exotic rhyming mills. The interplay of pronouns (he and you) further extends the experience in these fitted stanzas and bespoke verse. Between God and thimble the garment finishes in a stanza without a period, but with a mirror for mimetic effect, measuring gaps and revisions of you:

then cut, resew, close the gap
           between pattern and flesh, between ideal and real,
                   with the mirror as your witness

The roots of indent and dental are connected in Kafka’s remark that a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. From tailor’s swatch to dentist’s office, Sherman shape-shifts line, voice, and texture, mending and minding the gap in deserted rag and bone shops along College Street and country roads.

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About the Author

Kenneth Sherman is a Canadian poet and essayist. He has written ten books of poetry. His 2017 memoir, Wait Time, was nominated for the RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction. He is a three-time winner of the Canadian-Jewish Book Awards. His newest collection Meditation on a Tooth is coming out in 2025 with Guernica Editions.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Guernica Editions (May 1 2025)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771839589

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771839587