‘The Book of Frog’ by Jan Zwicky

Reviewed by Jessica Michalofsky

What do hanging folders have to do with Schubert? A broken kettle switch with the Prajñāpāramitā sutras? Rustic Italian arugula and 24-7 Internet cafés with minor league baseball and The Golden Ratio? If you ask Frog— who’s made of granite with four tiny barnacles for feet, and the most plain-talking character in Jan Zwicky’s latest adventure in prose, The Book of Frog—he’d probably tell you that “everything is always about everything.” After all, he’s from the Jurassic period: being 200 million years old gives a guy some perspective on things.

Frog is one of a cast of unlikely characters in Zwicky’s polyphonic gambol through the Anthropocene, or as Frog (lover of Internet cafés, martinis, flies, green onion pancake, and motorcycles) might say, the time since humans have been running the show on Earth. There’s also Al, an imaginary albatross with a twelve-foot wingspan and an interest in baseball and politics, and their human companions, Liv and Hugh.  Minor characters include two feathers called Feather and a shell named Fly.

To quote Frog, this is a book about everything —it has art, music, and philosophy; technology, geometry, and ecology; diagrams, photographs, and mathematic notation; omniscient narration, mind-to-mind conversations, and emails from the ether.

On the one hand, it is a book of correspondence. The humans spend a lot of their time travelling around the globe, Liv with her music and Hugh with research.  But Frog, Al, Liv, and Hugh keep in contact with each other through email (Frog thinks Twitter allows “insufficient scope”), though Frog and Al can speak mind-to-mind.

Sometimes what they talk about is banal, the quotidian.  Al says to Frog, “Tell her, from Hugh, that there’s a bottle of Pelikan ink in his right desk drawer. She should help herself. If she wants a different colour, he says they’ll have it at Type&Write on Hillside.”

And much of the day-to-day communication is what you might expect from people separated by distance—emails, for example, between the separated lovers, the heart-to-heart, or what Frog calls “mushy chick-stuff.”

But on the other hand, it is a book of theory. The intellect-to-intellect.  Those who know and have read Zwicky will be alerted to the poet’s lyric sensibilities, her passionate engagement with music, philosophy, and ecology, and her philosophical acumen.  They will have perhaps read one of her eight collections of poetry, like Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1996), winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, in which music, philosophy, and the natural world are intertwined.

Maybe they have also read her work in philosophy: like Wisdom & Metaphor (2003), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and makes claims for the employment of metaphor in truth-seeking.  Or Lyric Philosophy (1992), in which Zwicky argues for the role of the lyric in rigorous analytical thought.

Such readers will connect to Zwicky’s acknowledgment of intellectual debts and appreciate the historical context for her claims. And they will delight in her forays into the esoteric via the quotidian, and see them as casual and playful.

For example, careful readers will cotton-on to the metaphysical language games that are scattered lightly throughout the text. When Liv waxes fatalistic about technology’s deleterious effect on aesthetic and reflective thought, Al pronounces Liv’s grumbling as “the grand philosophical conundrum of the Anthropocene.” Al’s subsequent question is tongue-in-cheek— “Why is there nothing rather than something?”—and makes an elliptical allusion to Heideggerian thought on dasein, or “being there,” the fundamental uncertainty brought about by humans’ mortality. Zwicky, according to my reading, turns the question on its head, however, and postulates that death may not be the end—that silence itself is a voice.

Or, in a chapter titled The Golden Ratio, they may revel in the working out of ratios within the Fibonacci sequence:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …

1/1  = 1.000000
2/1  = 2.000000
3/2  = 1.500000
5/3  = 1.666666
8/5  = 1.600000
13/8  = 1.625000
21/13 = 1.615385
34/21 = 1.619048  …

987/610 = 1.618033…

^fn+1 /^fn = φ

Likewise, in a chapter titled the Diamond Sutra, an erudite reader may interpret a series of emails between the separated couple via Frog and Al—in which nothing much in particular is discussed other than the banalities of travel (carry-on luggage, 24-hour Internet cafés, hotel phone calls)— as gently riffing on the Mahāyāna Buddhist practice of non-attachment.  They may enjoy the mystery of ambiguity between the title and the content of the chapter.

However, someone new to Zwicky’s work might feel left out of the conversation.

The Book of Frog is an invitation to an ongoing discussion with a multiplicity of voices— the inner, the historic, the electronic, the acoustic, the terrestrial, the universal— where the more you know, the more you investigate, the more you listen, the more you join in the conversation.

At eighty-nine handsomely printed pages, The Book of Frog can be consumed in an evening; however, it will take much longer to digest.

Which brings me back to my initial question:  What do hanging folders have to do with Schubert?  I’ll let Frog answer that question.  He’s older (and smarter) than he looks.  And besides, it’s his book.

‘You should learn to play the sackbut,’ Frog said to Liv.

‘Why?’ said Liv. ‘The piano is a great instrument. And it’s very versatile. There’s not a lot of call for sackbut players.’

‘Because then you could sound more like me,’ said Frog.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Liv. ‘You don’t sound anything like a sackbut. You don’t even sound like a crumhorn. And why does everything always have to be about you?’  She remembered they needed laundry soap and turned to jot it on the grocery list, then went back to drying the dishes.

Pedlar | 112 pages |  $20.00 | paper | ISBN #978-1897141496