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Books in Canada - March 2004: |
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| Messages Sent From Spirit to Matter House Built of Rain The Vicinity by Tim Bowling Here’s how Russell Thornton prefaces House Built of Rain, his powerful new gathering of lyric and narrative poems:
All the impressive qualities of Thornton’s work are evident here: the fluid rhythm, the skilled use of repetition, the charged atmosphere of mystery and awe, the intriguing use of metaphor, the transcendent vision, the unsettling yet somehow consoling tone of melancholy, and, most importantly, the salmon-sensitive knowledge of his place, the shimmering, mist-haunted, ravine-cut city of North Vancouver. No other contemporary Canadian poet so successfully combines a powerful sense of geographic and spiritual belonging with an equally convincing sense of alienation. In poems such as “Heron,” “The Gesture in the Creek,” “Solstice Mist,” and the deeply affecting sequence of elegies to his maternal grandparents, Thornton lovingly captures that shifting, at-once-Eden-and-lost-Eden quality of North Vancouver, bringing its creeks, ravines, weather and creatures vividly alive. Here, for example, is the opening to “Heron”:
But then, as if in the very act of isolating the ephemeral nature of his home, Thornton transfers that nature to his travels, creating poems in which displacement is the keynote. “In the Sonora Hills,” “Magdalena Dawn,” and, especially, “Nogales Prostitutes,” strikingly reveal the poet in the guise of a lost traveller always in search of something impossible to name, let alone grasp. In the latter poem, the speaker contemplates a trio of teenaged prostitutes in a Mexican brothel. Then, choosing to buy a bottle of brandy, take one drink, and walk outside into “the afternoon/the light glassy-red like a candy heart,” he concludes:
These four lines are as perfectly crafted, intense, and metaphorically startling as any I’ve read in years. The whole poem, in fact, is a triumph of condensed storytelling and imagistic exactness (the “kittenish, cute” prostitutes mentioned early on combine wonderfully with the innocent, “candy heart” description of the light near the end, just as the girls’ pupils turn into the skull’s eyeholes of the dirt). “Nogales Prostitutes,” like so many of the poems in House Built of Rain, trembles with essentialness – one reads it at once comfortable and uncomfortable in the knowledge that the writing of it was no trivial enterprise, no last-minute workshop assignment polished up to meet the requirements of a creative writing degree. In fact, Thornton stands as far outside the institutionalized world (with its anti-lyrical and anti-narrative theorizing) as it’s possible to stand. His work is refreshingly old-fashioned in the most honourable sense of the term – that is, it’s fashioned from the old, built on a bone-deep sense of poetic tradition, unapologetic about its metrical borrowings from the King James Bible and its vatic indebtedness to a wide range of writers captivated by poetry as a form of prayer/worship/incantation (Blake, Yeats, Amichai, Layton, Lawrence, to name a few). Intensity shimmers in line after line. Here are a few of his immediately engaging openers:
These are perfectly weighted lines that get right down to the business of the poem’s core attempt to sort something out. One feels their authority and is drawn in as if on one of the poet’s cherished ocean tides. But what exactly is Thornton trying to sort out? Quite simply, he’s seeking to place himself in direct relation to the fundamental mysteries, trying to work his way back to some purer origin: “I must still go down the inside of my spine, following/the fire back beyond its origin to where I am altar and prayer” is how he describes the journey in “House in the Rain.” The language is often religious because the search is – what other name do we give to our attraction to solitude, romantic love, nature, if we don’t call it God? Thornton’s not afraid of that loaded word. Rather, he embraces it, turns it outward. People and animals regularly appear in his poems as either fellow pilgrims or those who possess the mysterious, sacred wisdom he’s pursuing: a handicapped busker singing karaoke in the Seabus terminal, a disfigured Dublin fruit-seller who had “opened her mouth/as a prophetess might/to reveal divine will,” gulls who are “messages sent from spirit to matter and back to spirit again”: all life is bound to us, Thornton is saying, through this rapt immersion in creation and re-creation. But if all this seems overly mystical, don’t be misled. Exactly what gives Thornton’s search for spiritual affirmation its absolute integrity is his clear-eyed honesty about poverty, violence, loneliness, and other forms of the dark. Lesser poets equate tragedy easily with Truth, and exploit the dark for cheap effects, wearing misery like a badge of honour. Thornton is far beyond all that tawdry hipness of mainstream culture. When he writes out of remembered pain, he does so with the gratitude of having come through. As he writes in “The Day of My Beginning,” a moving consideration of his parents’ doomed marriage:
But Thornton harbours no illusions either. He well knows the insistence of the dark, how it rears up from the past or suddenly breaks in anew. House Built of Rain closes, for instance, with these unconsoling lines:
House Built of Rain is so compelling precisely because of how it uncannily balances despair and ecstasy. When Thornton writes, “We are broken from a no one/and remade over and over again/into a no one,” we believe him, just as we believe him when, in a burst of love for his failing grandfather, he promises “As long as I can I will keep you warm.” But then, it is easy to believe a poet of such metaphorical power. People getting on and off a bus are “an in and out breathing,” seals appear as “living mineral,” a creek is alive with “sounds of birth-spanks and shrieking,” a wave uproots itself “out of its own moonlit entrails.” Every page of House Built of Rain turns up at least one such gem of insight, description, connection. Poems such as “The Day of My Beginning,” “The St. Alice,” “Night Bus,” “Harbour Seals,” “Nogales Prostitutes,” “The Shop,” “Solstice Mist,” “Lanes” and a half-dozen others brilliantly confirm Thornton’s growing reputation as our finest lyric poet. The Vicinity, David O’Meara’s second collection, advances the impressive aesthetic confidence and purpose exhibited in his fine debut, Storm still (Carleton University Press, 1999). To be more grandiose––which goes against the grain of O’Meara’s even-tempered, carefully wrought conversational style––this volume firmly establishes him as one of the warmest and most inviting intellects in our poetry. His voice, best described as urbane, worldly, perfectly at ease with contemporary life even as it highlights its shallowness and very real soul-destroying dangers, is a welcome antidote to the formless narcissism that plagues contemporary culture. The Vicinity will come as a revelation to those who, recognizing that the vast majority of Canadians live urban lives, bemoan the rarity of city poems in our literature. Right from the neon streetscape of the book’s cover to the title of the opening section (“A Civic Gesture”), it’s obvious that O’Meara’s out to map the steel, glass and concrete world most of us inhabit. Of course, poetic excellence has nothing to do with subject matter and everything to do with its treatment through language. Happily, O’Meara’s inventive use of form and his sensitive insights into finding one’s way amidst the turbulence and chaff of history’s onrushing tide give his urban poems a winning human foundation. Just consider this lovely moment from “Brickwork”:
O’Meara possesses a keen awareness of the past which colours everything he observes with a faint melancholic hue, and which explains both why words such as “history” and “memory” occur so often in his poems and why he’s so concerned with rhyme, metre and other formal devices (“Time, time, time” is the whisper back of every good poet’s lines). Little wonder, then, that one of The Vicinity’s most interesting and ambitious experiments is an expertly rhymed poem in 26 nine-line stanzas that attempts to describe post-millennial western civilization to one of the twentieth century’s most politically and historically engaged poets. “Letter to Auden” showcases many of O’Meara’s finest qualities: his technical control, his sense of humour (seeking a rhyme for stanzas, he writes, “There is no rhyme but Kansas”), his engagement with contemporary society, and his respect for history. It’s no small compliment to say that, in such a poem, and in another long piece, “Walking Around,” O’Meara successfully mines a rift of ore that few poets have even located. And, it must be emphasized, he’s doing so with a wonderful humility that might just be his greatest gift of all. Few poets exhibit such a winning curiosity about life combined with such an obvious delight in linguistic creation. O’Meara’s having a great deal of fun while he unblinkingly looks at the mess of our lives (check out the rapid beat and cultural evisceration of “Day Planner,” or this delicious closure to “Rooftop”: “In the future, everyone should be unheard of/for a quarter of an hour”). It’s a rare talent that can shift gears so effectively, treating large historical themes in “Photograph of the Funeral of Pol Pot,” “The Unhappy Condition,” and “The Valley Temples,” then penning a surprisingly lovely elegy to an old-time hockey photographer in “The Turofsky Collection” and a delightfully inspired piece of falling rhyme in “At the Aching Heart Diner,” which ends:
With more space, I’d expound on O’Meara’s traditional poetic fascination with the subject of walking (easy to imagine him traipsing about with Thomas and Frost) and highlight his unique kind of gregarious loneliness (he writes much of friendship, but can also admit, “I like the slippery moments of a dark and tiny hour”). But perhaps it’s enough to point out, again, how refreshing it is to read a highly skilled poet whose healthy, unbroken joie de vivre confronts the darkness of the times in which we live without succumbing to trendy middle-class angst.
Tim Bowling's The Witness Ghost was a 2003 nominee for the Governor General's Award in Poetry.
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