Carbon Filter
by Seymour Mayne
Mosaic Press, 1999
Reviewed by Dan Reve
Breathing through
the detoxifying
carbon filter of
poetry
you move like a latter-day
Franciscan
from one station
to the next,
your devotions never
blocked by guns
or stones but by
further words.
Tomorrow you will
have the apocalypse
on your mind again,
and you will rise
with the Pharaonic
sun
and pray with every
one of your languages,
each interpreting
your face
by way of obedient
lips.
This, the title poem of Seymour Mayne's 15th collection of poetry
(counting translations), employs the essential moods and metaphors of
the book. Poetry clears the air, the poem contends, as does prayer; aesthetic
and spiritual uses of language - with the requisite humility and learning
- transcend our blunt world of guns.
Poetry is like prayer in that the addressee is absent, though at our
best and most imaginative we hope to prove that words make that absence
a presence. The legitimacy of the analogy between poetry and prayer is
most apparent and convincing in reference to an elegy. And if righteous
humility is the essence of imaginative and spiritual revelation, the elegy
is the poet's proving ground. It is a place where one is particularly
in need of a carbon filter - for the ego: one can have no secrets before
the dead (what, indeed, would be the point?); they know better, having
seen all of life, so to lie to the dead - to pontificate - is to fail
the insights of both the aesthetic and ethical uses of language.
Elegies can make us honest. Yet while there is insight in the analogy,
poetry is not prayer, nor are poets necessarily priests (or saints as
"Managing the Impossible" implies: "[A] full-fledged member/ of the writer's
tribe/... some will say in your profession/ that's the first station/
on the way to sainthood"): indeed, good poetry is often written by the
devil in us. One has to be careful with equating the aesthetic and the
spiritual, hubris being so likely an effect.
Containing 41 short poems, Mayne's book does a fair filtering job.
Besides the several elegies, there are exhortations for friends and mentors
and, one feels, disciples - while mourning and honouring dead writers,
Mayne champions and chides living ones. Every poem is written in memory
of or for someone, and while these subjects include Irving Layton, Leonard
Cohen, Adele Wiseman and Alden Nowlan, most will not be known except by
other friends. In this sense, Carbon Filter is a personal testimonial.
Just as Mayne complements his elegies with his exhortations, his prayers
with his poems, he balances strictly-metred, rhyming poems with works
of free verse (and the subtle experiments employing both forms, as in
"Carbon Filter"): the successes here suggesting that the heart of poetry
(and prayer) is more than mere formality - more than technique.
The poems are well-written, the language and metaphors clear and precise,
but they do not always allow the reader to assent to - to recognize emotionally
or intellectually - the poet's claims and implications. While predominantly
humble, humourous and wise, at times the tone grates with righteousness,
and the poems do not always convince us that either poetry or prayer is
an adequate response to the world of compromise, betrayal, disappointment
and death. Some pieces are too personal - that is, superficially personal,
since one could also say they are not personal enough; they do not risk
as much, do not require the individual soul to take on - let alone transcend
- the horrific perspective often demanded by a world of guns and that
of death.
Perhaps the disjunction in tone is an effect of combining addresses
to the living with addresses to the dead: it is as if the humility of
the elegies had to be compensated by the stridency of some of the exhortations.
The self-denial required of the elegy (for in the face of death - The
Absent and Infinite -, what mature person could not feel humbled?), resulted
in the self's melodramatic reappearence elsewhere: Mayne's authoritative
words of age, wisdom, conviction to his descendents (literal and metaphorical
- i.e., poets). A reader may want, at times, more discretion: a voice
'reeking of mortality' - with the perspective of the dead - would probably
not be so anxious as to exhort any poetaster's denial of death and pretence
at transcendence.
Carbon Filter is as honest and as spiritual a book as it can be -
and this is it's success. Note how many potential contradictions the poet
attempts to balance: the dead and the living; humility and righteousness;
rhyme and free verse. A mature poet praising, encouraging, exhorting,
remembering and memorializing the life and lives he has passed through,
Mayne's breath comes easier as his poetry filters the extraneous and noxious.
Dan
Reve was once a lumberjack, but he ain't no more. He's still okay.
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