George Elliott Clarke

 

Poetry Reviews and Blurbs

On Bruce Meyer’s Unobtrusive Excellence

Anglo-Canadian poetry is, practically by definition, the work of the über-literate, the over-educated, the extraordinarily degreed and/or extra-doctorated, of the royally highest & most majestic I.Q.’d, those who are Mensa Super-Elite, those most tartly, archly post-Modernist and ironically avant-garde, and those whose cunning linguist pursuits are most punning, most recherché. English-Canadian poets tend to be highfalutin high-flyers, launched from the lightning rods of Ivory Towers, and winged with asterisks, end-notes, epigraphs, footnotes, glossaries, lexicons, and letters preceding and trailing their names. Woe unto the illiterate who may chance to open one of our so, so esoteric, mysterious texts, where jouissance—the joy of intersects—is hypens intercoursing with colons!

Truly, Bruce Meyer belongs in that number, that elect grouping of Anglo-Can poets, who are bluestockings (women) and men-o-letters; I mean, the intelligentsia of the literati. Such poets are also archaeologists, economists, historians, poli-sci talking-heads, and, fundamentally, polymaths—iconoclastically elastic in their vocabulary, forked-tongue with French, double-talkin in Latin, and sometimes tossin in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, just to show off their ambidexterity in classicist, tongue-twistin sayin. (Think of Bök, Bringhurst, Carson, W. Compton, Fetherling-as-a-redoubtable-archivist, Klein, MacEwen-as-a-linguistic-cabalist, NourbeSe Philip, Wah, Zolf—just for starters).

Yep, Meyer is one of the above: Erudite, a Mr. Know-It-All, a Dilton Doily / Hal 9000 / Brainiac, who’s read all the classics, the best books by the best writers, and felt perfectly able to write alongside the very best of the very best because he’s absorbed—digested—the International English canon (including central works in translation—Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Li Po, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, etc.). Indeed, sensibly, the poet’s home is a library—by design. (I do not exaggerate; Meyer does not have a “home library” or a study where he keeps his books: In radical stead, his house is a library; he and his family live with and among books in a home-made cathedral of literature.) So, Meyer’s authored more than 60 books—with aplomb, with swiftness plus accuracy (like an Olympic, gold-medal archer—able to hit the bull’s-eye, no matter how daunting the odds). A third of that number consists of poetry, the questionably best of the select poems collected herein.

I say “questionably” because I’m sure that this book could be at least twice its size without Meyer or any editor having to relax his most exacting standards. He’s a consummate poet, a poet’s poet, and his gift is evident in his unparalleled ability to ransack multiple, mental dictionaries for le mot juste and slot em in place to produce the precise image or indisputable proverb. These closing lines from “Cold Storage Beach” are one example:

Cold Storage Beach,

named, accidentally, for an old warehouse
which stood at the mouth of Sesuit Harbour

and vanished, timelessly, into nowhere but a word,
written down, part of a memory, but otherwise lost.

Like George Fetherling, a collector of facts, Did-you-know artifacts, and Believe-it-or-not odds-and-ends, Meyer is also an encyclopedic anthologist. He appreciates profoundly, as he writes in another poem herein, “One good story or we are lost.” Amen: No civilization can last without a store of commonly held stories, whether theological or historical/political. Thus, Canadians cannot be Canadian without the sagas of Riel, Secord, Tecumseh—or Tubman (first name: Harriet—in case you’re wondering).

But that sentence also refers us, I wager, to the English poet who is most like Meyer, in my estimation, namely, Robert Graves (1895-1985). Recall his signature opening to his signature poem, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”: “There is one story and one story only / That is worth your telling….” For Meyer, that “one good story” is, in his poetry, the result of dreams, of dreaming: All recurrent practices for this poet just as those two words themselves recur incessantly among his poems. For all of his intellectual gifts of explication, analysis, choice diction, and historical reconstruction, Meyer is also a poet of sensuality, of image: “dawn breaking is a phrase / for dew upon weeping fields.” He states his inheritance—and legacy—succinctly in these lines: “just being and dreaming — was there / any profession other poetry to place / a value on staring straight ahead[?]” Elsewhere he declares his commitment “to be part of dreams and poetry.”

Perhaps it’s due to dream and dreaming that this poet, for all of his introvert introspection and individualist walkabouts, solitary in the dictionary or solo on the road, and that, for all his schoolin, he is not obscure. Take note of his nouns: They’re so elemental—rain, sun, bread, wine—that they do not become ornamental (as is often the case in Dylan Thomas and Thomas Merton), but, instead, open up to the sentimental:

I shall spend an evening drinking whisky
by fire beneath the crumbling stars,
and in that moment retrieve what echoingly
once was human and should still be ours.

(Also note that Meyer goes easy on the adjectives: He likes to let nouns be nakedly and patently themselves, without a whole lot of fine-tuning or detailing.) And so the new humanist—the classicist—is most satisfyingly human, humane, humanitarian, the lover as house-husband:

Let us remember the mercy of fresh bread,
how it called to us in our imaginations
even after it ceased to be and lived on inside.

I should not belabour any Meyer echoes or mirrorings of Graves, save that our poet’s phrase, about “language / voweling with a joy” (in “Dandelion Wine”), may remind one of Graves’s “cool web of language” (in “The Cool Web”). There’s that, but, also like Graves, Meyer is a poet accomplished in meeting the constraints of formalism (couplets, epigrams, ghazals, glosas, quatrains, sestinas, sonnets, vers libre), relishing the game playing and chance taking that rhyme, metre, and/or stanza form dictate.

Meyer is also skilled at rhetoric (“lying” is how Irving Layton defines this craft):

Ours shall be a story of misgivings and belief,
a moment in the lives of strangers where one look,
one gesture of reassurance would have meant forever….

But that linguistic facility, the reverence for etymology (the DNA of words, the soul of literature), Meyer’s Poundian pursuit of cheng ming (righteous terminology) adds to, does not detract from, the passion of the adoration.

This foreword was supposed to be brief; and it is—if held in comparison with the longevity of Meyer’s art. He is not a flashy poet; but he is also no flash-in-the-pan. His poetry is the fulfillment of his keeping “the record of small things still possible / because they exist and are stronger than time.” I believe that these poems hold such permanent strength.

I end on a personal memory. Living in Toronto in the winter of 1983, completing what would become my first book of poetry, I made the rounds of various poets’ circles and readings series. The one gathering where I was welcomed, heartily, was the one headed up by Bruce Meyer. I have to say this: He is an excellent poet, an exceptional poet, and an unstintingly generous, fraternal maker.

Hear Now Alyssa Flint!

An alphabet is letters held in control—ranked and ordered, as if set in stone—or wooden blocks. But not this Alphabet! Alyssa Flint smashes open the alphabet to let the individual letters kick off anxious blues, confessions, catalogues, denunciations, elucidations, fatalist guffaws, groans, hallucinations, indignant jokes, kerfuffles, lawyerly mumbles, nit-picking opinions, pontifications, querulous raps, sassy tantrums, unhappy valentines, woeful xxx, yapping zingers. Amen, eh?

She’s talkin at ya, philosophizin, tellin it like it is, tellin someone off, like a righteous tattle-tale. She’s bearin witness about everything she can’t bear anymore. And she don’t care if you’s offended!

Her art? Spoke Word? Yessum. I mean the art of the non-stop revelation, the unfurlin Truth.

She come at ya with raw news, the flow that’s volcanic, the spew that’s blazing as fire and brimstone. Cos her heart hurts.

These poems be the fact of heartbreak, of nervous breakdown, of broken promises, of broken bones, outta broken home. The lines are lacerations, scratches, gashes, wounds. The words are blood drops—straight outta the weak flesh of the heart, the lumpy folds of the brain.

Here be a woman’s witness of troubled girlhood, of lousy fatherhood, of a flawed mother, of evil lovers. There are allegations of abuse, insinuations of sins. The horrid facts of torturous life.

You can’t just read this book! No! The poems are hammer-and-chisel, cutting into your heart, carving into your brain.

Alphabet’s gonna either change you—or derange you, Africadian—or would-be Africadian! Word up, y’all!

Richard Atkinson [with Joe Fiorito]. The Life Crimes and Hard Times of Ricky Atkinson: Leader of the Dirty Tricks Gang, A True Story. Exile Editions.

Crime is terrible, traumatizing, terrifying. But True Crime is mesmerizing. That’s likely why the wily straight-shooter Joe Firoto has teamed up with the Africadian/Afro-Métis once-upon-a-time, bank-robbing, risk-and-reward trickster Ricky Atkinson. This life story is irresistible; it’s as sprightly as a slot-machine coin cascade and as irrepressible as a dude sprung from Sing-Sing or Kingston Pen. This book gives you the low-down on the High Life, the up-and-up on the low-lifes, the poop on the high muckamucks, and the scoop about the down-and-dirty, but never down-and-out. Canada’s most successful bank-robber (though he’s spent half his life behind bars), Atkinson is a charming rogue—and the inventor of the “spike-belt,” which he used to hobble police pursuit. But is now used by police forces everywhere to blow the tires of speeding, suspect vehicles. Atkinson was also a Black Panther Party acolyte, as well as a pugilist. His life story runs along lines similar to That of Malcolm X….

Harriet Bernstein. Irving Layton: Our Years Together. Inanna Publications.

Harriet Bernstein’s memoir of her impetuous and tempestuous love affair with dynamic and deathless poet Irving Layton (1912-2006) is not only the record of a December-May romance (he was 62 and she only 26 when their amour began). It’s also mythic: Venus wooed by Vesuvius
in-the-flesh. After an ephemeral marriage to Stephen Shuster (son of the TV actor and comedian Frank Shuster), Bernstein became the lover of and inspiration to Spanish Flamenco master Antonio Vargas and to Italian “spaghetti western,” screenwriting legend Luciano Vincenzoni. But when “destiny”denied these passions, Bernstein developed what turned out to be a 7-year-long yen for Layton, 1974-81, which saw her serve as erotic Muse, publicity impresario, homemaking helpmate, and then, lastly, mother to their daughter, Samantha, herself a a writer and poet. Bernstein portrays Layton as a volcanic figure, spewing ink, spunk, and piss-and- vinegar, all to defend vigorous affections and militant opinions. He appears in these vivid pages as an irascible, cantankerous, lusty, would-be Ubermensch, all Mediterranean chutzpah and cojones, a sun-besotted, Byron, Hebraic, and as shameless as light. For her part, Bernstein loved that Nietzsche-spouting Apollo too well, not wisely, and finds herself grieving, endlessly, Layton’s endless preoccupation with his supposed ex, Aviva. In their sojourns about the Mediterranean—Italy and Israel—and the Americas—St. Lucia and Mexico, Bernstein recalls, via colourful diary jottings, the births of Layton’s poems and books—usually on a balcony overlooking a beach, and records also his frenetic pursuit of Nobel Prize laurels. Bernstein writes compellingly this page-turner of a memoir, conjuring up her flower-power, ban-the-bomb, and burn-the-bra young womanhood in Toronto and Boston, but also those idyllic Greek islands where Leonard Cohen would drop by, all wry and ironic and sipping retsina. Not only is Bernstein a vital witness to that most vital poet, Layton, his gusto and genius, she is also the chronicler of that era—the 1970s—when women were becoming feminists and English-Canadians were beginning to believe that they could truly be Nobel-global poets and filmmakers of Oscar-award consequence. For me, she herself becomes a kind of reverse-Elizabeth Smart, that Canuck woman writer who gave seemingly all of herself to the British poet George Barker. No, Harriet Bernstein always maintained a core independence from Layton, despite loving him indelibly, and this remains her own radiant, intellectual beauty, everywhere enlightening this sometimes tearful, and always wistful saga.

Laurie Anne Fuhr. Night Flying. Frontenac House Poetry.

This lyric collection scrutinizes the automatic surrealism of everyday life where “dads turn into each other / trying to be Eastwood in civvies.” The weirdness of the diurnal isn’t expressed via whimsy, but is the result of acute perception: “carbon-copy suns sink through identical stormdoor windows.” The attitude of the persona? She’s a kind of gimlet-eyed ee cummings, chronicling and pinpointing painful absurdities and excruciating pleasures.

Chantal Gibson. How She Read. Caitlin Press.

How She Read is no subsidiary diary, but the output of an insurrectionist, a Black (Canadian/Africadian) Woman who taketh the alphabet apart, who breaketh Imperialists into wimps, whimpering. Gibson is also a critical reader of visual art, and she reproduces full-colour canvasses of Black women—by European “masters” (get the pun)—to tease out the insidious narratives of sexism and racism. But she also includes black-and-white photos of relatives and of Harriet Tubman—General Moses—to hail their resistive identities and purposes. Gibson’s experimentalism recalls M. NourbeSe Philip.

Erwan Larher. The Book I Didn’t Want to Write. Locarno Press.

The Book I Didn’t Want to Write is the book that you must read, to better comprehend the epochal horror that unfolded at the Bataclan nightclub, Paris, when more than 120 rock-concert revelers were massacred by ISIS terrorists on November 13, 2015. A survivor of the attack, Erwan Larher uses his talent as a novelist to present a non-fiction account of the awful; to narrate fear, courage, chance, and fate; to take up the prose style of Don DeLillo and the poetic of Charles Baudelaire; and to note that “reality” balks at news-cycle analyses, which are always on the outside looking in, always superficial. Larher is relentlessly soul-baring and truth-excavating in exploring how terrorism is both “individual ordeal” and “collective shock,” but also in discovering that surviving such a trauma challenged him to bear authentic witness. Larher balances his own probing thoughts with the responses of others-friends and family who share a social tragedy that has scarred all of their lives and liberties, just as it has injured all ours.

Thomas Leduc. Slagflower: Poems Unearthed from a Mining Town. Latitude 46 Publishing.

This debut collection of poetry from Thomas Leduc, the former Poet Laureate of the City of Greater Sudbury (Ontario), and who is himself the 4th-generation member of a mining family. This poetry ain’t strip-mined, but is rooted in earth, hearth, and heart. In Slagflower, the poet retrieves true grit, the honest nugget (no fool’s gold), and diamonds that are actually squeezed out of coal. Leduc is so skilled at heavy lifting, his touch is deft. You almost don’t notice the toil—the hard work of making—that’s produced this art, this sculpted masterpiece.

Giovanna Riccio. Plastic’s Republic: Featuring the Barbie Suite. Guernica Editions.

In her third collection of poetry, Giovanna Riccio has written a tour-de-force of undeniable genius. Exploring—interrogating—the everywhere-at-once presence and everything-possible nature of plastic, Riccio riffs on Plato’s Republic to examine, in “The Barbie Suite,” the iconic “i-doll” whose global name-recognition is second only to God. If Mattel masterminded, in 1959, a bitch-goddess of a doll, with breasts that are accoutrements for, and arched feet that are no impediment to, High Fashion, so now does Riccio apply her own unconditional critique-in-verse, to break Barbie out of the mummification of her marketing, but also out of the stagnant, feminist pontificating that sees her standing as fallible as a pawn. Riccio answers the “plastication” of femininity with her own sardonic feminism, her own Platonic panache, to remind us that Barbie is so central a symbol that some human beings play dress up—via plastic surgery—to become as “perfect” as is the doll. Quirky, philosophical, and adventurous in form, Plastic’s Republic is as avant-garde as an haute-couture runway and as cutting-edge as a surgeon’s scalpel. Riccio deals effortlessly and yet forensically with subjects ranging from sexualization (“dollification”) of girls and subsequent (sexual) assault; body-image issues; plastic surgery; the mania for sex dolls; and plastic contamination of the oceans. This collection is one of the go-to must-reads of this century.

E. Russell Smith. Bring Me My Arrows: Poems tracing the spectrum between doubt and certainty. E. Russell Smith.

E. Russell Smith Anglo-Canadianizes—domesticates—audaciously the queries and quandaries of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, updating and relocating its metaphysical and theological concerns for our era and locales. From his Ottawa abode to ventures abroad and about, Smith reveals resonances between Scripture and the world, and expresses rapture in The Word, words, bird-watching, and other pastimes. Thus, a Good Friday visit to Peggy’s Cove (NS), site of the September 1998 Swissair 111 crash, occasions this witness: “The whole Atlantic heaves and breaks / against this treeless Golgotha, / rooted in that relentless sea. / Centuries of ice and baptism / gloss old faults to minor hazards / crisscrossed like cracked porcelain.” Smith’s verse is quiet-toned, introspective, and confident in Art—even when Doubt is admitted. And the collection is self-published, which is also a statement of faith.

Eleni Zisimatos. Nearly Terminal. DC Books.

Eleni Zisimatos opens Nearly Terminal with a Dantean warning: “The death of human consciousness is white.” Yes, to venture onto these imposing white pages is to navigate a blinding snowscape where words are the sparse objects that poke out of the drifts, like inukshuks, suggesting directions and meanings that are impossible to pinpoint, to pin down, because they are jests of gestures, as revealing in their amplitude as are “Cut up clouds.” Nearly Terminal recalls Dame Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie, but also John Thompson’s barely there ghazals, all that blank space Blitzkrieg’d by incandescent inklings, those dark flashes of insight amid the vacant, Arctic desert of “Such white,” “much despair,” where winter means erasure, “a white eclipse.”