Writings / Reviews: George Elliott Clarke

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Intimacy 101: Rooms & Suites
by Robert Sandiford
The Independent Press, 2012
88 pp, $15

The Loneliness Machine
by Aaron Giovannone
London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2013
96 pp, $17

 

Montreal native, Barbados-based Robert Edison Sandiford is a prize-winning writer, boasting laurels such as the Barbadian Governor-General’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Lionel Shapiro Award, plus due critical esteem for his exquisite stories.

But Sandiford explores a—let us say—playful genre, scripting adult comics, and short fiction that indulges the fleshy pleasures of relationships. One could be tempted to dismiss such works as exploitive “entertainment.” But they possess the amply redemptive virtue of simply being good writing.

Sandiford’s story set, Intimacy 101: Rooms & Suites, assembles the postcard-sized pieces upon which his graphic (in both senses) texts/”novels” are based, but includes longer stories too. Couples’ encounters score blushing prose, but their feelings find poetry.

The first story admits this inspiration: “The physical is a way to the spiritual, I think—a means of transcending.” That insight applies to carnal love, but also to food and clothing and weather.

So, a man wakes “to the smell of fresh bread and fish spiced with wine”; another man invents a “Gastronomic Theory” for interpreting lovers, believing that diet informs passion; he terms an actual poetess “an Omnivore Woman,” with “grouper green eyes and a sibilant smile,” who is “Hot with Vincy Carib blood, sensual as sea moss, so poet-like in her lounging beach pose.”

A poignant story opens, “What is love now that he lies dying?” An older woman, visiting her dying husband in a hospital, both fears their separation, and lovingly recalls their nuptials, the sense that their honeymoon never waned.

She says as much: “The loving never stopped, did it, Ernesto? … Each night was like that very first night, only better?”

At story’s end, the wife-almost-a-widow crawls onto her husband “like a child.” She rests her head on his chest, listening “to a sound like thunder, his still beating heart.”

In another tale, a playboy beds a siren: “Her hair and neck smelled of oranges and icing sugar.” But she’s demonic. Soon, he feels, “a hot flash in his gut, … hot liquid pain buzzing in his blood like bees on fire, fraying his nerves like flesh-eating termites.”

One argues for these stories as fine writing because one must: “You were rare … a hard knot of human nature wound tightly in a loose, little body—and maybe an ounce of love.”

This book is one for Valentine’s Day—and night—and the other holidays too.

Aaron Giovannone’s debut collection, The Loneliness Machine, arrives with a blurb from Pop-Epic, TV-Lyric poet David McGimpsey, admitted influence from working-class poet Tom Wayman, experimental poet Christian Bök, and Italo-modernist poet Sandro Penna, as well as editing by the inventive Sachiko Murakami.

But this combo of avant-garde approaches reminds one of the deadpan, anti-poetry style of the U.S. Hippy poet Richard Brautigan, who might be both the most underrated poet of his generation and, curiously, the most influential.

Following Brautigan (if quite innocently), Giovannone inks insouciant poems that emphasize irony and absurdity: “Hey, did you hear that Iran / is designing its own internet? // This poem is our own internet, / and one of the rules of our internet is: / You must take a shot of (alcohol) / when you read the word ‘poem’ in this poem.” The poem ends with “poem” repeated thrice.

Addressing a “Facebook Friend,” the speaker says, “In my memories, there are always / lots of people, / and you are one of them.”

Giovannone scribes sitcom verses: “The quote, unquote real world / isn’t funny, it’s horrible. / There’s capitalism out there.” It’s not comical; it’s wry.

His metaphors seem bland, and then, on second-thought, insightful: “A night in early summer. / The window brims / with a family’s image. / My silence on the sidewalk.”

Some lines could easily suit a greeting card: “My heart pounds harder, / and I’m not doing anything. / I’m just leaning against you.”

Or try: “A poem is a way of being alone. / But I’d rather / have my hand on your thigh.”

It’s strange how some “experimental” verse ends up being surprisingly sentimental. Still, these are nice, likeable poems. Just like Brautigan’s.

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