Songs from the
Shooting Gallery: Poems 1999-2006
by Tony O’Neill
Burning Shore Press, 2007
Reviewed by Matthew Firth
Tony O’Neill’s Songs from the
Shooting Gallery – Poems 1999-2006 is a landmark book. It is as
solid through and through as any poetry collection I can think of. But
forget comparisons to this or that past master of straight-shooting
writing: O’Neill is his own man.
The power of O’Neill’s writing is
in his unwavering gaze deep into his own guts – his guts, not his
cock. The problem with most poets is that they look past their guts to
their genitals, which are – as ever – ripe for rubbing. And from
that comes dreary self-satisfied, self-obsessed, forget-the-reader
poetry. Not so for O’Neill – it’s the stomach where his work is
centred, the guts being the home of honesty, the place where we relate
to each other the best. But more than peak into his guts, O’Neill
takes a knife and slices open his bowels, spilling them on the floor,
then examining what lies amidst the blood and bile and turning it into
art – simple, concrete poetry, in this case. It’s not easy. But when
a writer starts by being honest, the results can sing a searing, bleak
and beautiful tune. Songs from the Shooting Gallery is a
marvellous book and I don’t even like poetry.
Some background: O’Neill is a Brit
living in New York City. He used to be a musician. Like many working
class blokes, music was his out from the drudgery of grey English
council flat living. It eventually took him to Los Angeles, where the
young lad got into a spot of trouble – drug trouble, and all the shit
that comes with it: thievery, abuse, violence, detox, fucked up
relationships with other fucked up people, and quickie, doomed
marriages. Death danced around O’Neill but – miraculously – never
laid its cold hands directly upon him. He survived and fell out the
other end to write about it. O’Neill’s 2006 novel Digging the
Vein (Contemporary Press) lays it down in prose. Shooting Gallery
– though – may be a slightly better vehicle for relaying his
near-death experiences. Because his poems are so free of ornament and
anything approaching traditional poetic style or structure they are
truly liberated and ring clean, concise and clear. His song is this:
bear witness to the hell I have lived. Have a look. See yourself in it.
And take warning, for this hell is closer to each and every one of us
than you might think, including you, gentle reader.
As the title of the book indicates,
there is a chronology to the poems. The first lot centre on the O’Neill’s
drug mire in Los Angles. He writes of bleak moments, desperate to score,
abusing his body at any cost, so long as the temporary, sweet relief of
heroin, cocaine, crystal meth and others followed. It is not pretty
stuff but it is wonderful poetry:
last night
a hole opened up in my arm
a great, red, raw, yawning maw
and all of the dollars in the place
animated into hideous life
and wriggled, and squirmed
inside of it, never to be seen
again
I just lay there
the King of Purgatory
with all of his adornments:
blown shot, 6:30 am
from "Blown Shot: 6:30 AM"
Like many drug abusers, O’Neill
endured attempts at crackpot cures and those who told him some god other
than drugs could save him. None of it worked, of course. Those cures are
worse than the drugs.
The poems take the reader from drug
squalor in L.A. to drug squalor in London, after O’Neill returned to
his native land. Back in England, he starts to wrestle free of the
drugs, inspired, perhaps, by the destitution he sees looking upon his
homeland with somewhat fresh eyes. The poems express bitter revulsion.
"There’s No Place Like Home" is a caustic criticism of
England’s poverty – characterized by a cycle of marauding, teenaged
lager louts looking to abuse too-quick-to-fuck teenaged girls, with
predictable, pitiful results:
in the town centre
under chemical grey skies
packs of laughing teenagers
numb with sex and Smirnoff Ice
talk of fist fights, bottlings,
pregnancies, and blowjobs in car
parks
watching the same shell-shocked faces
drift by like ghosts."
And from the same poem, a couple of
stanzas on:
"in the hospital the baby
arrives
four pounds and one ounce
out of the cunt and into the
incubator
where it will remain
until it is evicted and ushered into
a Council flat with two screaming
siblings
and a drunken whore of a mother.
These poems show O’Neill learning
something, being roused from his stupor. But what fully saves him is a
woman – the right woman this time. The reader knows O’Neill is going
to make it when his fix switches from smack to sex and then love:
love is messy and physical like that:
love fucks for 48 hours
with the curtains drawn
reducing the outside world to a
sideshow
love gets high,
love slides its cock into your
asshole
love collapses into
breathless
exhausted heaps
on your bed.
from "Don’t Take It Away"
And:
all of the years
surviving myself,
America and ex-wives
do not make me worthy
of one second
of your laughter.
from "23-10-03"
At this point, O’Neill is far too
savvy to think he’s past it, that it’ll be wine and roses for the
rest of his days. As the collection ends, O’Neill concedes he has not
won the war – the battle perhaps – when he writes "my mind has
declared an uneasy ceasefire" in "After the Storm". He is
smart enough to know that a woman, a new daughter and his writing offer
shelter but not salvation. It is a relative calm. One misstep and hell
will return.
The honesty and clarity from word one
to the book’s final poem is powerful and poignant throughout this
excellent collection.
Matthew Firth’s most
recent book is Suburban
Pornography and Others Stories (Anvil Press, 2006). Born in
Hamilton, he has lived in Ottawa since 2000. |
