Folk
by Jacob McArthur Mooney
Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2011
112 pp. $19
The Hottest Summer in Recorded History
by Elizabeth Bachinsky
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2013
80 pp. $19
This past September 2nd marked the 15th anniversary of the tragic loss of Swissair 111 and its 229 lives, off of Peggy’s Cove, NS. The calamity fills voluminous reports. But Jacob McArthur Mooney’s second collection of poetry, Folk, is half about the Nova Scotian “folk” response to the Swissair crash and half about the “folk” who live near Pearson International Airport in Malton, a Greater Toronto Area suburb.
Published in 2011, Folk also answers to Nova Scotian Mooney’s ‘flight’ from his East Coast home to his ‘landing’ in Toronto, where he graduated from Creative Writing at the University of Guelph-Humber. Perhaps due to its birth in a classroom, Folk is acutely self-conscious, wry, sardonic, and knowing, but with a desire to parody media and bureaucrats. The beautifully titled poem, “The Ocean Speaks of Incendiary Things,” treats the splash-down crash as a matter of the aircraft becoming “soluble, smothered, / pulled apart and pummelled clean.” The poem asks us to “retrieve” the “beauty” of the disaster; next, the “ocean”—or the poet—comments, “I believe / in beauty, in the / wish-thin / packaging / and pander of the word.”
Mooney’s intellect and art are enviable. But his lyrics show little feeling for the perished. Like E.J. Pratt in his great 1935 poem on The Titanic disaster, Mooney is able to imagine the physical disintegration of the craft: “Down this insurrection, / the breaking gained momentum and surprised / the unbreakable—a bolt, its head / shorn free from the shaft, // a crumpled medal found inside / a crevice carved from bone.”
Unlike Pratt, Mooney fails to depict the trauma of wreckage—or carnage. He gives us the grotesque: a dog “tweezed free a human hand from the beach / and half-buried it out back.” What irks Mooney is the arrival of reporters—outsiders—to the South Shore and their perception that the “folk”—locals—represent “centuries / of stubborn / interbreeding.” Also irksome are the efforts of some mourners to offer their sorrow as transcendent. The poet comments, “Grief / is not composed of grief. Grief / is a compulsion. Walk up to the dead / and lay your body on their bodies / until you share a central chill.”
Thus, the poem in which a speaker is most permitted to feel—a bit, is that which tells of a car’s accidental killing of a doe: “We tracked her back / through the skid of fur and bowel failure, found / her head, upright, thinking thoughts / for the ditch.” When Mooney abandons the Swissair memorials, literally, and attends to the “folk” who live (and work) in the vicinity of Pearson Airport, the poems assume greater humanity.
Quibbles aside, Folk is a palpably split achievement—reminiscent of Cronenberg’s 1996 film, Crash.
Elizabeth Bachinsky’s fifth work of poetry, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, also reads as if it has been creative-writing workshopped to achieve the acme of smarty pants smirking at the dullards who “just don’t get” how meaningless and ridiculous language can be. So, Bachinsky reproduces her “poetic” e-mails with a pal (with his permission) and pens poems that exploit slang and nonchalant speech. Although these poses can seem (deliberately) irritating and/or off-putting, there is a method to Bachinsky’s Gertrude Stein-like playing around, and it is to reclaim usually non-poetic language.
See “Hobbled”: “a horse in hobbles ‘hops.’ 1500 pounds of horseflesh, / hopping. It’s unexpected!” The tone is of an unsophisticated cowpoke. But, soon, one reads, “even hobbled, it takes us hours / to track them through this burnt forest of alders / where green shoots and wildflowers bloom / from the charred ground already green.” Suddenly, what seemed banal becomes beautiful. But, just as frequently, the trivial remains trivial: “I’m looking for a place that’s just called NAILS. / There’s always some place that’s just called NAILS. / In every city and suburb, they’ll do your NAILS….” Sigh. Some poems—“Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Mountain,” “The Spider’s Alphabet,” and “Mere Anarchy, St. John’s Nfld”—make the effort to transcend the status of the word-game. To be more than farce and arty artifice… And one does want more. Precisely that: more effort.
