In order to read Lisa Robertson’s Boat, I began by reading two of her previous collections, the chapbook Rousseau’s Boat (2004) and the full-length R’s Boat (2010). Maybe it was the art historian in me, who is used to art existing as part of a sequence whether literally or thematically, that felt compelled to do so. It could also have been the pragmatist, who saw the title and instantly felt like it was familiar.

In this regard, Boat may be considered part of a sequence or, as I grew to think of it, what in printmaking is called a “stage,” a version of a print before it has reached its final, intended form. The title of Robertson’s latest collection suggests that Boat is a later stage, a scene reduced to a single, defining element; do not be fooled. In fact, Boat is a later stage that, like the printmaking process, contains palpable traces of its previous forms, as Robertson herself points out in the concluding “Notes” section. Only two sections—“The Hut” and “The Tiny Notebooks of Night”—are new, a recombination of older notebook materials, as she puts it.

“The Hut,” which independently takes up just over a third of Boat, reads like an epistemological epic. The quality of a morning, of slow realization, invoked by the opening lines give way to midday, to a discussion of culture and gender, of touch as a form of communication in a philosophical, linguistic, and physical sense, all of which coalesce in the speaker’s appreciation for art in its broadest form, for the way “[t]he weight of the book on my reclining pelvis/ holds me to earth.” Equally haunting is Rimbaud, a mysterious “she,” who I could not help but think of as the fraternal twin to the Baudelairian speaker of Robertson’s recent novel.

In many ways, Robertson’s repeated references to landscape and nature in “The Tiny Notebooks of Night” recalls historical painting in their slow unfolding of details. Knowing the vital role landscape played in contexts ranging from colonialism to the British estate to Romanticism, Robertson’s declaration that “perhaps my great love / will be this shitty landscape / sprayed over with fungicide at night” elicited a conspiratorial chuckle from me. The poem later veers into alternate places, like “exercise rooms in condos / too close to the freeway,” yet something organic remains, morphing but refusing to vanish, like the concluding image of a boat going out to “the beginning of utopia.”

Some authors talk about the practical element of reprinting their work, especially if a book has gone out of print or a press has closed. Ending with a section that concluded Rousseau’s Boat, Boat reads more like a continued glimpse into Robertson’s creative process, an artist’s notebook that is never truly complete because it is always a work in progress. These lines serve as a mantra: “Like the negligent fall of a scarf / Now I occupy the design.”