Writings / Reviews: E. Martin Nolan

Poetry Review: Fifty Shades of Evil

Doom: Love Poems for Supervillains
by Natalie Zina Walschots
London, ON: Insomniac, 2012
112pp. $12.24

The first thing you need to know about Natalie Zina Walschots’ Doom: Love Poems for Supervillains is that it is actually a collection of love poems for supervillains; it’s not a misleading title. But these aren’t your grandmother’s love poems, unless your grandmother was way out there and well ahead of her time, or, perhaps, if she was herself a supervillain. No, Doom is filled with the sadomasochism, domination and general violence you might expect to emerge from poems about the people, creatures or strongholds we need to threaten our fantasy worlds so that the virtuous can save it. The virtuous superheroes, meanwhile, are will loved but they mostly lack the depth and variety of their nemeses. Evil is more interesting.

Walschots takes full advantage of that fact. At 116 pages, Doom is a longish collection, and its density makes it feel longer. 52 different supervillains and supervillain hideouts appear in this collection, with 15 receiving short sequences with which to tilt their fancies. That’s a lot to take in, and this reviewer must admit to being a casual pursuer of comic books, so there must be subtleties, references and the like that were lost on me. But such relative unfamiliarity isn’t punitive to the reader. Walschots might know more about supervillains than you do, but enough of them (The Joker, Doom, Scarecrow, Green Goblin) are familiar to most people and not knowing those rarer ones (for me: Beef, Scylla, Black Heart, Darkseid, etc.) do not render those poems addressed to them inaccessible. (Suggestion: you should gift this to that person you know who loves comic books but hasn’t ever read a collection of poems.)

The second essential thing to note about Doom is its lyricism. These poems are dense, like 12-words-in-a-poem-that-still-tries-to-say-a-lot dense. At her best, Walschots has succeeded in squeezing these poems into crazy thick webs that mix fear, sensuality a dark and violent kinkiness, all overseen by that familiar sense of humour and nerdiness that usually accompanies an encyclopedic knowledge of deep but still somewhat specialized pop culture phenomena (I’m thinking of professional Wrestling, sports in general,  certain musical genres, etc., all of which are known to the general public, but are known intimately by a chosen few devoted followers).

Let’s get to how she fits all that in. Take “Ore” from the “Magneto” sequence, quoted in full:

The speaker is asking for a devastation Magneto is particularly suited to provide as if devastation were a thing to long for, because in Doom it is. Note the efficiency here: in just 23 words we get a range of tones: the fear and consequences of an impending loss (of protective head plates and fillings), the ecstasy of submitting to great power (Christian Gray’s got nothin’), and the insider humour of one who has thought about Magneto a lot. And then there’s the verbal density. As in most of this book, you get the feeling not that no unnecessary word is used, but that no unnecessary words were used, and then she cut more words out. “Ore” shifts from description in line one to the imperative in the last three; this is accomplished silently in the stanza break. The poem also leaves everything but its core out. We know nothing of context here, nothing of motivation; all we know is the speaker’s desire, with the white space surrounding this tiny poem  the only extrapolation of the surrounding scene.

That’s the basic template of the poems in Doom: short lyrics or lyric sequences directly addressing or describing the subject. There’s no narrative, no connection between the subjects, no development in the lone speaker who guides us throughout. As a result, this book does resemble a static “Rogue Gallery”—the term used to describe the villain-centred sections in Doom—with the villains’ mug shots replaced with erotic fantasies described with a ruthless brevity that restricts the language from going anywhere near the conversational. On an intellectual level, this works: how better to mimic the “dominance,” “bondage,” and “destruction” suggested in the section titles and borne out in the lines than to dominate the line itself, to force the line into an unnaturally restrained posture? Here are a few examples of this word-bondage at work:

From “Wrought,” found in the “Magneto” sequence:

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