In the notes which follow the poems, Weaver writes of The Loom: “My previous work hadn’t really been about anything, and certainly not about anyone. I grew to like the idea [of writing about my sons], but I didn’t know how to write a love poem anymore, mostly because I had been trying to write myself out of my writing as much as possible” (131). Unlike Weaver’s past writing, The Loom is a vivid dedication to family—“Kelly,” to whom the book is dedicated, and whose presence ebbs and flows throughout the text, and the speaker’s two sons. The book, published with University of Calgary Press in November of 2024, is an honest and intimate portrayal of fatherhood.
Though Weaver speaks about writing himself out of his writing, the work is imbued with the first person. The book begins with the speaker painting an image of himself for the reader:
When I had journeyed half my life’s way,
I found I’d lost sight of love—just the sort
of line that mediocre, middle-aged men
have been using since the evolution
of male pattern baldness. But I did not
buy a convertible to follow the sun
nor an illicit houseboat on which to
float secretly away from my age
-appropriate wife and towards a
spectacular toupee. (1)
These lines set the stage for a vulnerable and inward portrayal of choosing to have children at life’s midpoint. Directly addressing both the reader— “Dear Reader,/ I’m exhausted already” (2)—, and his children: “So, in / my stippled ways, I love you, I pour what / I can of you into me, what I can / of me into you” (4), the speaker explains the “me” in this work as formed through its “you”s. When describing himself, the speaker is telling the reader in his own way how he has been changed by family and love.
As a textile artist and weaver, I was particularly interested in how the titular loom would play into the text. Aside from being a clever pun on the author’s name, the loom in this text is the work and energy that goes into love: not the spurt which comes from the arrow, but the blood which rushes to the surface to heal the wound:
Love never was
the arrow, it was the red blood rushing
to the wound, working from the instant
its instant pull together, a tapestry of cleaved,
of the asunder, of the parted. It’s that under
which we lulled and weaved, it’s the warp
and the weft, the balm of the reft, the uncleft. (16)
While I struggled to understand blood as a fiber which could be weaved together to create a tapestry, I enjoyed this conceptualizing of love as an object which can be formed and hung on the wall, or presented to another as a gift, or used as a table setting or potholder or doormat. In The Loom, love is not abstract, but a tangible and multi-faceted instrument. The Loom ends with love creating a wall of opacity which the reader cannot see through enough to continue the work: “But there is a point in every event / that we cannot see through, and another we / cannot see at all. Love’s opacity, then, is its essence” (130). The final poem, “X.v,” ends:
And I’ve written
myself into a corner, a full stop, an unproductive
bafflement that freezes my hands over the keyboard,
trying to parse out the difference between hiding
and lying in wait—until there you are, stamping
into my room trailing giggles of glory, grabbing
my hand and pulling me from my seat and this
cerebral dead end, my lovely gosling, my godling,
my Hugh ex machina. (130)
Though it feels like a perfect close to the work –the speaker putting down their pen as his children pull him from the writing—a final, untitled poem appears after the acknowledgements:
—and now I jump from the bathtub
finally understanding the volume
of love, the irregular shape that leaves
each of us running naked through the streets
for all to see, yelling I have it! I have it!
Perhaps this is not all we know on earth,
or all we need to know of love or its strange,
estranged alchemies, but it is how the song,
at least for the moment, extends
attends
amends (139-140)
Like the loom which conceals and reveals the warp and weft as it’s turned, there is no true end to the poetry. The weft builds upon and fills out the weft of the tapestry, and the final moment of The Loom grows and fills as the cogs turn the loom.