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Merrybegot Mary Dalton Véhicule Press, Signal Editions, 2003 |
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reviewed by Zach Wells, John MacKenzie, and Steven Laird
Steven Laird is an editor for lichen literary journal. His first poetry collection, Con's Hill, is due out by Spring 2005 from Ronsdale Press. John MacKenzie lives in Charlottetown. He has had two books published, both with Raincoast/Polestar: Sledgehammer and other poems; and Shaken by Physics, poems. Zach Wells, originally from PEI, lives in Halifax and until recently worked in Nunavut. His first book, Unsettled, will be published by Insomniac Press in 2004. ZACH: On the cover of Merrybegot is a blurb from George Elliott Clarke that reads as follows: “E.J. Pratt would be pleased. If he were still alive, the great poet would welcome with open arms sister Newfoundlander Mary Dalton into the ranks of Canadian bards.” After reading the book, I have to wonder what the hell he’s on about. It’s quite likely that old Neddy would be impressed with Dalton’s artistry—who could gainsay that?—but it seems to me that a marriage of Pratt and Dalton is a bit like the odd couples in “Not One Thin Dime” and “Yet.” I don’t think Pratt is someone with whom Dalton’s speakers would have much truck. There is a great deal of contempt and mistrust voiced in these poems for government (“Federal”) and, by extension, Canada itself; for shirkers of work, or “nunny-fudgers” (“If Whiskers Was Wisdom”); for people preoccupied with cerebral tasks (“My One Brother”); for eloquent fabricators in general; and for teachers in particular (“The School of Hard Knocks”). The terse concision and regional specificity of these little verses seem to argue against the epic sweep of Pratt’s poetic vision. Their insistence on the colloquial vernacular seems opposed to his choices of diction. One gets the feeling that Dalton’s speakers might call Pratt a “prate-box.” To this day, E.J. is almost as controversial a figure in Newfoundland as Joey Smallwood. He’s ill thought-of by many for snuggling up to Upper Canada, for his celebration of Confederation, for betraying his heritage. Steven, you’ve lived on The Rock. Any thoughts? JOHN: Zach, I thought this was to be a review of Merrybegot, not of a blurb on its cover. Blurbs are mostly white noise, and rarely have anything to do with a book’s actual content. Merrybegot came to me in the mail. The first thing I noticed was the front cover — the apple and the apple peel against that black background make it an attention-getter. My first read of the book was done in public, and the cover kept people interrupting me for a closer look. During that first reading—having gotten as far as “Elt”—I began to wonder if the “poems” were anything more than conglomerations of overheard phrases. So I went back to the beginning, and there in the acknowledgements was this: “These poems are not exercises in transcription, but they do take their life in important ways from living speech....” Well, I’m sorry to say that after a couple of readings it seems to me that many of the pieces are more transcriptions or conglomerations than poems. Having said that, I have to add the qualifier that there are only a few pieces which don’t seem to be worth the effort it takes to read them. Specifically, “Bull Arm Money,” “Clutch,” “The Jillicker,” “Like Something,” “On Gale Street,” “The Tangler,” and “To Get The Base In.” All of these seem to suffer variously from lack of cohesion, lack of vitality, lack of poetry, and the cardinal sin of sounding like something someone would say for the sake of hearing their own voice. Going back to that first reading, I found myself stopped for the first time by what felt like poetry to me when I came to the poem immediately following “Elt”. “Fairy-Struck” got me with ... He
swung me and spun me— Now there, boys, is a dance I’m sorry to have missed on my own. And a dance I’m damn glad Mary Dalton brung me to. There are a few other poems in this collection which hit me at least as strongly. I’ll get to those as the discussion goes round again. STEVEN: Yes Zach, I lived there for three years, which gets you some respect down there, but doesn’t get you in. As one straightforward bayman put it to me, “don’t fall for the line that we Newfoundlanders are friendly; we’re not friendly, we’re just nosey.” It’s nice that this nosiness, this “mile and a half of eyes behind curtains” as Ms Dalton puts it, is turned around in Merrybegot, where it’s we outsiders who get to peek through the curtains. I don’t know if the speakers in these poems would have truck with E.J. Pratt or not. But I’m glad you pointed out that these are in fact speakers. Every poem is a voice in direct speech, overheard in a bar, a kitchen or on the street. And I agree with you John that some of them are obvious, blunt, and pointless, existing to showcase some deft (daft?) turn of the lingo to say something in Newfunese just to let you know that Mary Dalton knows her stuff. Where I find the poetry, though, is in the sweep of these tiny pieces taken together. When I first went to St. John’s, I had the devil of a time trying to understand what people were saying. After awhile, though, it started to come clearer, and that’s what I found in these poems. I don’t get all the words—whippy sculpin, mauzy, punt’s piggin don’t mean a thing to me and never will—but by the end I don’t need to, because I have come to learn something of the rhythm of the speech and the real lives behind it. It’s kind of amazing that these little pieces (the longest one is about 20 lines) can so often draw out character so well, and that has less to do with the curious words than with the cadence of the voices themselves. ZW: What I was obliquely getting at with my Pratt prate is the tradition to which this verse belongs. It’s descended from the Anglo-Scots-Irish line of vernacular verse (Clare, Kavanagh, MacDiarmid, Harrison et al), as opposed to poetries that speak ‘properly’ or with the flattened affect of mass media. And it’s not just a matter of difference from, but a political defiance of, normative standards. These are poems that pry out the last spike and chuck it back at Ottawa. This is evident in the literal content of the poems as well as the dialect of the speakers. There hasn’t been a whole lot of this sort of thing in (English) Canada. But, it’s something that Dalton is also too self-conscious about. In her previous book, she makes overt reference to Clare and Kavanagh. Clare crops up again in the notes of Merrybegot, and Harrison, Les Murray and The Triads of Ireland (in translation) are mined for epigraphs. While I admire Dr. Dalton’s restraint in not including a glossary, the academic scaffolds and catwalks ain’t all been dismantled, and I wonder if that doesn’t compromise the book in some way. I agree with Steven that the real accomplishment of this collection is in its cumulative effect. On my first read, I was charmed by the voices and the language, but what really impressed me on returning to it for this review was the complexity of the communal picture Dalton paints with so few brushstrokes. It’s no matter of simple nostalgia for a bygone era of communal unity. These people aren’t merely nosey, like the young “dogger” who “topple[s] arse-over-teakettle/Smack into the boughs” of his sister’s “hot little tilt” with a beau in “Conkerbells”; they’re often viciously judgmental, and not just of those “from away.” That said, yes, “Fairy-Struck” is indeed a fine piece of poetry that could hold its own anywhere. I’d add “Bachelor Brothers,” “The Cross-Handed Bed,” “First Boat,” “Jesus and His Gashes,” “Maiden Vein,” “Salt,” “The Water Man,” and “Winter Coal.” Not bad for sixty pages, and the worst stuff here still has something to say and at least has the virtue of brevity. JM: Well, boys, I do agree that the book’s effect is cumulative. And that the pieces do generally attempt to be character sketches. But since I seem to be playing the heavy or the bad cop in this discussion, I’ll say that those characters are mostly drawn with very broad strokes, which makes them seem to me more like caricatures than may have been intended by Dalton. I see the vernacular verse connections of which Zach speaks. But the book also reminds me strongly of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, which is set in a cemetery in Illinois around the end of the nineteenth century. Now the comparison may not be fair (but what does fair have to do with anything?)—different country, different time—but both Merrybegot and SPA touch on some of the same subjects and themes: daily life, death, work, sex, crooked business men, and governmental and legal injustice. Hmmm, if the two books were musical compositions I’d call SPA a symphony and Merrybegot a prelude. So, to answer my own parenthetical question about fairness, it’s obvious that a prelude and a symphony are different critters and that each should be judged according (excuse the weak pun) to the merits of their own species. Both books are more than adequate in the separate things they attempt to be. Looked at in this light, I can finally take off the bad cop’s steel-toed shit-kickers and talk about what I like about Dalton’s book. I love the language, its sound and its sideways bluntness, as in “...I dare say she’d been running /Round all day like a blue-arsed fly—.” I think a few of the poems are as good as any I’ve read in a long while. A couple of those have been mentioned: “Jesus and His Gashes”, “The Water Man,” and “Fairy-Struck”. To those I’d add: “She” which Dalton tells us comes “almost verbatim from speech recorded in the DNE [Dictionary of Newfoundland English]”—and I applaud her ear for picking it out of the clamour—; “Rosella And Bride”; and “Mad Moll And Crazy Betty.” Merrybegot is well worth buying. SL: You both seem to be damning with faint praise - "the virtue of brevity" and "more than adequate in the things [it attempts] to be." It's
so barren down there Pretty much the state of poetry out there, and yet along comes this book, weird, uneven, more than a touch of the academic—the poems are in alphabetical order, for the love of Mike!—that for its flaws ("When the moon was newing and the night burnt black") and its perfections (the lines John quoted from "Fairy Struck" as well as the simple carnality of lines like these, from "First Boat": Ours
the highest woodstack. is still one of the liveliest collections I've read in awhile. It’s funny, “academic” is what I first expected when I opened the book. That expectation was shot down with the first poem—“But in the kitchen with her nose in a book/She’d burn water in a pot”—and though it surfaced here and there in some of the more uneasy, self-conscious and overdone poems ("That One"—"Now the minute he gets in the door/That one jumps aboard him/And she's queen of the streels" and "My One Brother"—"My one brother, maundering on—/The king of pishogues,/The pod auger days" and "Skerrity"—I don't even know where to begin with this one!) most of them do build that “communal” feel Zach talked about. Though Newfoundland’s culture and quirks seem to be an Irish strain, I found myself thinking about the Hebridean community evoked by George Mackay Brown in poems like the Seal Island Anthology. Brown and Dalton work in different streams of course—Brown pans simple standard English for the power of incredible and exact imagery (“bread/a small sun”) where Dalton plunges into the very throat of this “living speech” (“First light of sun, off we’d head home/Bellies rumbling and we ready/To eat the leg of the Lamb of God”). In the flat prairie of Canadian poetry where you can write about how you watched your dog run away all day long, Merrybegot is a welcome antidote. And you know, about that alphabetical order shit? If you ignore that, and look at what's happening, there's a real narrative arc across the book—introducing people who were either made for each other (“After All That”) or at each others’ throats (the narrator in “Gall”), moving them through marriage, birth, gossip, catastrophe, the “Curling of apple peels,” and on into the W section where spooks (“The Water Man”) and drownings (“Winter Coal”) and the simple face of mortality (“Water Pups”) round out a rough life with meaning, mystery, and dignity. Um, in other words, flaws and all, I think I like it. ZW: Steven, I know I like it, very much so, and it ain’t my wont to damn with faint praise. Just wearing my critical hat, and even with it on, I can’t find much seriously wrong with this book, even its weakest pieces. And I’m a picky blood of a bitch, as a friend of mine from Hare Bay would say. I recommend this book without hesitation. John, the SPA comparison’s a valid point. I don’t know about the character sketch thing, though. I think there is broadstroke caricaturization happening in these pieces, but because they’re monologues, it’s the characters, and not the poet, who are indulging in it. And this rings true to me, this kind of distorting gossip, having grown up in my own special slice of Nowhere, East Coast and spent much time in the furthest reaches of Nowhere, North Coast. This happens in SPA, too. The juxtaposition of a whole lot of skewed individual perspectives tally to a sum clearer than its parts. Because of that gestalt effect, I like the fact that the poems are arranged alphabetically; it’s impressive that you could order these pieces just about any which way and get the same overall narrative. So, in sum, I think this a fine book that has a damn good chance of sticking around. And it is definitely the crowning glory of Mary Dalton’s writing career. Gentlemen, final thoughts? JM: I've said all I have to say about Merrybegot—at least until I can track down some non-academic, non-poet Newfoundlanders to suss out their reactions (I was hoping to do that before we ran out of time here, but no such luck). Because in the end, I think, if the book is liked by those of whom it speaks, if it speaks to them of the salt and rock, of the salt meat, and of the hardbread they grew up with, and if they'd be seen with the book in Harbour Grace or Bay Roberts, then we'll have a truer read on it. In my opinion. Until then, for all our yapping, it's as broad as it is long. SL: The editor of Merrybegot has referred to this as an “important” book. He didn't explain what he meant, and it might just have been his inner salesman speaking. Personally, I don't know where Mary Dalton can go next. Still, I think what she's done here is quite an achievement both for her and for poetry's ability to stand with a tough grace against the blandness of most offerings out there. It's an important collection for those of us left who want something more, who are "after filling up on / a feed of tongues." ZW: Thanks for this fellahs, it’s been fun tradin’ cuffers. I’m planning a motorcycle trip to Newfoundland next summer to visit some buddies from work. I’ll take Merrybegot along for the ride, see how it holds up in Hare Bay. Proper t’ing, b’y.
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