A Difficult Beauty
By David Groulx
Hamilton, ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2011
100 pp. $17
What’s the Score: 99 Poems
By David McFadden
Toronto, ON: Mansfield Press, 2012
146 pp. $20
Poetry can be complicated and intricate, but also plain. David Groulx and David W. McFadden, in their different collections, remind us of the power of everyday words and succinct expression.
David Groulx hails from Ontario’s Elliot Lake (site of the recent deadly shopping mall collapse), but is also proud of his Native (Metis) identity, being the son of an Ojibwe mother and a French-Canadian father. A prize-winning poet, A Difficult Beauty, is Groulx’s latest collection.
Perhaps Groulx’s title refers to lines in Ezra Pound’s epic poem, The Cantos, in which artist Aubrey Beardsley tells poet William Butler Yeats, “Beauty is difficult.” But the allusion is not essential, for Groulx depics hardscrabble lives in which beauty occurs amid violent, suicidal, and even genocidal circumstances.
This stark perception is made bleaker by the simplicity with which it is uttered. See “I Am Still”: “Frozen were / these veins / in my throat / the blood / like chains // My bones dropping / into these rivers // I am being made / into memory.”
The American poet Charles Bukowski could write with strict, unflinching notice of the down-and-outers about him in Los Angeles, could write lines like Groulx’s about “hookers wander(ing) home / their wallets full / as their mouths were” and about all-night-revellers heading home, “scurrying”—“like cockroaches”—“before the sun.”
But what makes Groulx more meaningful—more satisfyingly disturbing—than the slumming barfly that Bukowski voices, is the fact that Groulx has a social conscience:
“and the cops / are shooting unarmed Indians / in ipperwash // and shooting armour-piercing bullets at them in bc,” and “another Indian died in a cell in kenora / from diabetes / cops figured he was drunk.”
See also his poem, “Elliot Lake”: “Does anyone remember this place / before the Tories moved in / planted flower gardens and picked up dog (mess) / and kept the money on Bay Street….”
But Groulx is not only interested in objective socio-political critique. He also explores his own tensions and contradictions. In “Half,” his persona tells his mother, “half of me is white / half of me is brown,” and goes on to state, powerfully, “Jesus is a half-breed too / half God / half human / he’s mixed up inside / like me.”
This Metis—mixed-race—heritage informs his most awful insights. Thus, he can pair “Himmler and Columbus,” and force us to consider the connection; or he can recall “half-hungry children / and urine breath”; or have an “Urban Indian” declare, “I’m gonna kill and I’m gonna (rape) // just like you did / that little piece of real estate….”
There is tenderness is Groulx; there is beauty alongside difficulty. But he has thunderbolts to throw—to illuminate consciousness and rock consciences—and he throws them, to overthrow complacency.
David McFadden has been significant to Canadian poetry for fifty years. Severally nominated for awards, his poetry has earned admiration due to its commitment to a plain, singing tone that looks back to the Beats, the Black Mountain boys, Beatles-style surrealism, and The University of British Columbia’s TISH movement.
One could easily connect McFadden’s anything-goes tone to George Bowering (TISH-plainness), Richard Brautigan (Beatles-like playfulness), and even—yes—Charles Bukowski (as a deadpan, deadbeat Beat).
More importantly, What’s the Score: 99 Poems, is an enjoyably eclectic set of poems, with no aim but to discover, as the poet writes and we read, what it is that McFadden will think of next. This is writing that insists on humour, on joking. Some poems—or poem parts—read like gags.
McFadden’s persona tells us, “It’s wrong to dismiss an artist on moral grounds. / Those with spotless records in that regard / simply have not disclosed the total story.” One has to smile: point taken.
Poem 55, “Hailstones,” reports, “A hailstorm. It’s too lonely here. / I had no one to watch the hailstones with. / Come home, my darling. Life is sad and serious.”
McFadden could easily have scripted the Seinfeld sitcom: “Everyone talks about free will / but I hate it when I slip on horse manure.”
For McFadden, reality is whatever one contemplates. Amen.
