Under My Skin
by Orville Douglas
Montreal, ON: Guernica, 2014
80 pp, $15
What Does a House Want?
by Gary Geddes
Pasadena, CA: Red Hen, 2014
240 pp, $2o
Two male poets: One black, raw, insurgent; one white, senior, established.
Both iconoclasts.
Ontarian Orville Lloyd Douglas’s second collection, Under My Skin, is raging, visceral, ejaculatory (yes), and rightly so.
The fiery, African-American, political poet Amiri Baraka is dead? No. His spirit could drive Douglas’s howls against the glib appeal of multiculturalism, so silent about anti-black and anti-native racism. But Douglas is also sick of hypocritical cries for “racial unity” that exclude gay black men.
Recently, Douglas triggered a transatlantic spasm of nausea when, in an op-ed piece for the London Guardian (Teddy Snowden’s favourite paper), he admitted he wishes he weren’t black, for he’s tired of his looks being rejected or feared or loathed.
That same fierce, passionate honesty powers Under My Skin. See Africville: “Cleared, uprooted, shipped off/Bulldozed for a pittance/Less than a —king grand. …//Soil once so rich you could eat it/Now buried six feet/But not forgotten.”
Douglas’s poetry can be undercut by his indulgence of mixed metaphor: “Yet the sewer system of red tape plowed through/Gouging out destruction.” Is this what happened to Africville? Douglas’s imagery is confusing.
In Canada Is (Flushable), the speaker is constipated by “Newspapers littered with (white) supremacy and lies” and “The rich prestige of diversity and the sewage of contempt.”
“Cockroaches, rodents and ants receive better treatment/than us (black Canadians),” opines the poet, protesting the nation’s “deleterious filth.”
The scatological is logical for Douglas: “I am so beautiful, so shallow and superficial/So pretty my soul is filth.”
Douglas’s shock effects are non-stop. I Kissed Adolf Hitler on the Lips compares genocidal Nazism to Canuck abuse of First Nations’ peoples.
Douglas is an “essential” poet — just as his publisher’s logo exclaims, for he’s able to wrangle pure anger into pure poetry: “I won’t wait another moment to be politically correct/My thoughts will be a sledgehammer to smash the doctrines of my oppressors/I would murder millions if my words could kill…”
Whew.
Gary Geddes is also proudly a political poet, though one whose honed lyrics ask for introspection and contemplation, rather than j’accuse-style denunciation. He doesn’t point fingers; he makes points.
The B.C. poet’s new Selected Poems, What Does a House Want? is a handsomely designed collection of the humane, insightful musings of a writer who has won a dozen national and international literary prizes.
(Geddes also edits the successful anthology series, 15 Canadian Poets, begun in 1971; the new edition includes 70 Canadian poets.)
Reading Geddes, one is aware of the subtle impress of celebrated politico-poets like Pablo Neruda and (despite himself) W.H. Auden, but there is also a meditative tone, akin to the plangent stoicism of Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost.
The poems are fine as stained glass, but cut sharp as broken glass. In Tower, a sniper gunning down students, recalls, “I never lost my cool, but took them/one by one, like a cat collecting kittens.”
In another poem, conquistadors, adrift at sea, drown 50 horses. The imagery is Yeatsian —much terrible beauty: “(The horses) drink long draughts,/muzzles submerged/to the eyes, set out like spokes/in all directions./The salt does its work./First scream, proud head/thrown back, nostrils flared,/flesh tight/over teeth/and gums/(yellow teeth,/bloody gums).”
An elegy for the impolitic, crypto-fascist Ezra Pound stresses the poet’s (alleged) contrition at his end: “I have spoken too much of usury,/or not enough./Even the air we breathe/is rented for a price.” Generous is his thought, “I have found poems/to be wiser and more honest/than poets.”
Maybe Geddes’ most spectacular achievement is his sequence, The Terracotta Army (from 1984): It’s so fine, it regularly accompanies the actual exhibition of the Chinese antiquity. He imagines beautifully the lives of the original models of the now “potted” soldiers.
This short review is unjust to Geddes’s sheer, understated mastery. He is superb. Read Geddes for wisdom, Douglas for wrath.
