|
Antigonish Review
# 127
| Rob
McLennan |
|
 |
|
Ricky Ricardo Suites by Robert Allen. (DC Books,
2000, $14.95, 84 pp.).
Beauties on Mad River, Selected and New Poems by Jan
Conn. (Vehicule Press, Signal Editions, 2000, ISBN 1-55065-140-4,
174 pp.)
|
The unlucky thirteenth, as he calls it, from
Montreal poet and fiction writer Robert Allen is the poetry collection
Ricky Ricardo Suites. In his first poetry collection since Magellan's
Clouds, New and Selected Poems (1990, Vehicule Press, Signal Editions),
Allen writes clear and provocative poems on a range of subjects, casually
observing Errol Flynn's cock, getting cable, conversations of what Al
Purdy could get away with, Ricky Ricardo, and on the birth of western
music. "If music be the proof of love / play Prince. Tom Waits on
vinyl, on / something anyway." (p. 24, "The History of Western
Music from Mozart to Biggie Smalls"). In this new collection, Allen
ranges from observation to philosophy, moving around pop culture references
and awarenesses, as on Paul Bowles, hero of the beats, and more - "If
you live long, the fear / of becoming something else is still." (p.
30, "Paul Bowles").
Even in the years surrounding this new collection
and the last, Allen continues many of the same threads and themes, refining,
as he moves through the universe, pop references going back decades, Doug
Jones riffs in North Hatley, or his rural Quebec of Ayer's Cliff, a poem
on a fraying relationship - "Your suitcase, slid beneath the bed,
fills with unspendable / desire. I am drunk, and you are sorrowed and
sat on the stairs. This day / drains into time, with our days gone before.
We are locked in this play of a / single hour, while the dog star watches
through a parting cloud." (p. 78, "What was there").
The strongest and weakest parts of the book are
in the continuing poem, "The Encantadas," sections 55 to 100,
as Allen gets into a story to be sung, not acted. The first, Voyage To
The Encantadas, 1 to 54, appeared in the earlier Magellan's Clouds.
This new continuation of the piece, written in one long exclamation, focusing
as three short three line stanzas per section, are much tighter than the
earlier incarnation, and hard to excerpt, with thick lines that sweep
across the page: "remember, so much has been removed, leaving just
the bare form, / like blackened timbers tracing a half-burned house. The
thing about now / is we know too much, so much it makes us sick..."
(p. 53, "96"). In Ricky Ricardo Suites, Allen is a much
better, and tighter poet than he was previously, acting as odd witness
to the world inside and outside the thoughts in his head.
|
do you remember when talk was everything? poems pretend to be
everything, more than us, perhaps.
they are a sweet lie, but better than lying generally is.
(p. 72, "January Suite")
|
The way Jan Conn has selected her Beauties
on Mad River: Selected and New Poems (Vehicule), collecting the work
of her three previous collections (all published by Vehicule Press through
the Signal Editions series) - The fabulous Disguise of Ourselves, South
of the Tudo Bem Cafe, and What Dante Did With Loss - is quite intriguing.
Unlike most, she didn't order the book chronologically, but thematically,
with indications in the table of contents to tell which book each piece
is from, or if they're new pieces. As she writes of the new poems in her
eloquent introduction, "I drew on an analogy from both architecture
and biology - the keystone. In architecture, a keystone is the uppermost
and last stone set in an arch, completing it and locking its members together.
In community ecology, a fascinating branch of biology, a keystone species
is central or integral to the existence of the other species in that particular
community. Each keystone poem is in a style inspired by the spirit of
the eastern lyric form, the ghazal. Each is preceeded by poems that felt
antecedent to me, or that share a recurring image." (p. 13). The
keystone poems, then, hold each section together in place, in five grouped
sections - Argentina, Namesake, Euclid, Lament and The Land of the Kingfisher.
One half of the poems in this volume are new,
and this is a large book by poetry standards, making it quite a meaty
collection (and wonderful for long plane or bus trips). "The railway
// tracks watched him with their grey antiparallel eyes. / Triangles entered
his house through // the closed windows, leaving him breathless. The
lilacs will tell you everything, they said." (p. 88, "Euclid").
Jan Conn has always been one of my favorite Vehicule published poets,
for the use of more narrative forms in un-narrative, thoughtful and emotional
ways, and in the strength of her clarity, even while writing around and
through ideas and certain stories, clear in what is still hidden. "Where
a woman stares her own death / in the face. At the suddenly stilled and
knotted winter light, the yellow // intensity. Date palms are noted in
the distance; the sky is gorgeous, / ordinary, heart-breaking." (p.
74, "Yellow Rooms").
|
