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Though the Muse may lead a poet where she will, with or without any large vision in mind, as a reader I tend to be glad if there is at least some semblance of unity or shape in a given poetry collection. At the same time, I like to be surprised: when a single principle dominates in a single-author volume, I sometimes find myself wishing that I were instead reading poetry in a journal or anthology. Two recent collections, R. D. Patrick's Histories and Amanda Lamarche's The Clichéist, exemplify enough cohesion to fully justify their existence, while at the same time providing enough variety to keep the reader fully engaged.

No doubt Patrick's Histories strikes the right balance in any number of senses, but I note two especially, one of which is simply in the types of poems he has chosen to include. As the title suggests, one of the author's main purposes is to tell stories - in this case, beginning (if we take them chronologically, which the sequencing doesn't always) with that of the author's childhood and its central event: the death of Harold Patrick. The author, at age twelve, was himself a member of the search party that found his father near death after he had been lost for four days in the Ontario wilderness north of Sault Ste. Marie in December of 1957. Other stories stem from this one, including those of the author's mother and brothers and, of course, that of the author himself, the latter rendered in more detail as he traces his life through his first marriage and into his second. The emphasis on story, then, implies narrative poetry, which we do certainly get: many of the poems in Histories could be termed "narrative" in whole or in part. Yet not all of the work is predominantly narrative, and the resulting variety sharpens its thrust. Take the following short poem from the third and final section, "Stonehaven," for example:

Woodpile

I can't go on like this
I'm getting too old

yesterday in a trance of fatigue
I started talking to the wood

because I like you I said
because I respect your character

I'll whack you again
you bastard

to which the wood cracked
something like a smile

Like quite a few of the other poems in Histories, this one does little to advance any of the stories being told yet performs an important function in the work by offering variety in the form of a poem that is something other than narrative.

I might note, though, that "Woodpile" and other lyric poems provide this type of variety without in any way violating the work's distinctive overall tone, the second aspect in which I feel Patrick strikes exactly the right balance. The balance is reflected to a degree in the three parts that constitute the work: "Shooting the Loons" can be seen as a journey into despair, "False Snow" as despair itself, and "Stonehaven" as the way out. However, when one considers the individual poems, one realizes that, as might be expected, a glossing over based on the work's structural divisions fails to do justice to the integrity of the poetry as a whole. There is undoubtedly more than a latent despair in "Shooting the Loons," as indicated by the concluding lines of its penultimate poem, "out": "I curse the ignorance and sloth of the world / and wonder how I will ever endure it alone." Yet the bleakness in this section is at least partially balanced by a forgiving insight into why humanity is the way it is, as in these lines of the character sketch of the poet's mother offered in "the garden":

and though some say
she is a hard woman
only her worst enemies
blame her for it
the others acknowledging
that any calluses on that heart
started at the hands
and grew inward

Moreover, even in "False Snow," the section of Histories that would appear to be most focussed on despair as such, the tone is not entirely despairing. The "snow" is false not only in the sense that the poet will eventually be seen getting another shot at life with a new relationship and new extended family in "Stonehaven," but also in the sense that despair is shown to be somewhat of a posture even when life is at its bleakest. True, the case for a late nineteenth or early twentieth-century style spiritual malaise is supported rather convincingly at various points, as in "encaenia" where the futility of human effort in the face of an indifferent universe is presented through images of photography:

I attempt the impossible
trying to hold you here
to freeze-frame the moment
even as our several lives pass
in the blink of a cold mechanical eye

Elsewhere, though, the stance is undercut - implicitly through the lightness of tone in poems such as "sick of love" and more explicitly in "ernest," where the figure of Hemingway himself is evoked as a finally humourous counterpoint to Patrick's own fictionalized thoughts of suicide ("blowing your head off doesn't sound / like a whole lot of fun"). "Stonehaven" continues to maintain the balance of tone, with the weight shifted slightly now toward the other-than-desperate: "I have a new woman / and a new haircut / I need a new car / and I'm broke" ("learning to breathe"). The wood takes a whacking, but in the end cracks a smile, or something like it.

The unifying forces in Amanda Lamarche's The Clichéist, though tonal as well, are more noticeably structural - and, just as unity is achieved through structure, variety is the result of the number of ways in which the given structure can be employed. In the opening section, "Book of Fears," each of fourteen poems nominally explores a different fear as is announced in titles each of which follows the same pattern. Some titles, such as "Fear of Scaffolding," "Fear of Being Asked to Dance," "Fear of Teeth," and "Fear of Bridges," suggest that the poems that follow will deal with fears that a person might actually have, whereas others such as "Fear of Buttons," "Fear of Doorknobs," and "Fear of the Figure 8" are less likely to evoke any immediate sense of identification - and are compellingly mysterious for that reason. The irony that may victimize the reader, though, at least until he or she gets the hang of reading these poems, is that the poems almost never deal with the first emotional response suggested by the title, even where that response is likely to be a quick and familiar one. Lamarche fears scaffolding not because one might fall off it or because it, or the adjacent building, might fall on one, but rather because it is "a close relative of the crutch or cane" - in other words, a reminder of mortality rather than an inducer of it. Lamarche fears being asked to dance, apparently not because she is unsure of her prowess on the dance floor, but for ostensibly less usual reasons.

      ... You are singularly
aware of the measures between yourself
and every person in the room. You are
convinced that you will never dance
with any man in the indelible way,
his foot following where yours just was
and so forth, on the dark hollow sticks
of a field floor, tangled hands appetent
in your hair, your cotton dress pressed.

Note that while the concluding three lines suggest that Lamarche, "the clichéist," is reversing a cliché, in this case the fear of the proverbial Christian fundamentalist that dancing will inevitably lead to sex, the previous six possibly hint at something else as well - perhaps that the beauty of human relationships as represented by dance is an illusion best left to the onlooker. In other words, Lamarche's poems are not so much about the fears listed in the titles as they are about fears that can be expressed using the images that the titles introduce. Hence the predictable emotional response one may have to a given title is bound to be of little help in reading the poem that follows, and the repetition of this pattern, built as it is into the structure in "Book of Fears," also constitutes a subversion of cliché in harmony with the work as a whole.

Or at least this pattern is in harmony with the last of the book's four sections, from which the work as a whole derives its title. In between the first and last section are a seemingly random assortment of poems collectively titled "Tracks from the Mouth" and a number of pages of poetry evidently sharing a common first-person narrator and brought together under the title "A Tree Falls in the Forest." Though "Tracks from the Mouth" contains some strong poems ("Drawing the Ear," for example), "A Tree Falls in the Forest" seems the better of the two sections if only because it does not violate what I perceive to be the basic nature of the book, which is to present identifiable groups of poems. Apparently written as a series of tips and reflections from an expert woodsman, the poems function perfectly well on a literal ("tree-chopping") level though other levels are, I believe, suggested - as on the page that contains only the following:

If by chance, your tree does get caught in a second tree,
back off of them.

Let them tangle together.

Try not to get too worked up. Walk the perimeter.

Prepare. If you mess up, two trees means two things to run from.

The seamless consistency of this rugged voice, and its uniqueness in poetry, will no doubt make most readers want to devote the attention that this section deserves.

However, while the narrative voice in "A Tree Falls in the Forest" is seemingly vernacular, it does not appear to be notably "clichéd." The strongest congruity, then, remains that found between the first and last sections - "Book of Fears" and "The Clichéist" - for it is in "The Clichéist" that we see a return to the device of titles used to create reader expectations which the poems that follow tend to subvert. In this case, the expectations are not elicited by "fears of" but by clichés themselves, and, once again, unity is present in the adherence to the device, variety in the number of creative ways it is employed. Lamarche can prove the accuracy of a cliché in an original way ("'No Man is an Island' she cannot visit..."), but more often shows how the cliché can be irrelevant ("'The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth' she herself can never know ..."), or uses it as a point of departure to explore a case it doesn't fit ("'A Face Only a Mother Could Love' just didn't apply to her").

The preceding parenthetical material gives titles followed by first lines. To get an idea of how development continues in such cases, consider a few of the lines that follow from one title, "Sleep the Sleep of the Just."

Sometimes, as in the above, the cliché is undercut, but Lamarche's larger target appears to be clichéd expression whether it is accurate or not, and the expectations of an audience exposed to it - both of which she continually transcends by using stale bits of language to generate new poems with fresh ideas.

Finally it is, perhaps more than anything, a well-focused freshness in the application of poetic talent, a unity that never degenerates into predictability, that characterizes both Histories and The Clichéist. In the case of Patrick's work, the narrative element helps to keep the work together but without becoming overly dominant; the tone is consistent without being monochromatic in poems that choose neither the route of hollow optimism nor that of easy despair. For Lamarche, while the variety of ideas she can generate within a given structure is impressive, the decision to place her two more structurally unified and "cliche-oriented" series of poems at the beginning and end of her collection respectively may give the book the appearance of being more unified than it actually is. If this was her intention, the tactic seems to be working, for I find myself more than willing to settle for appearances.