Beyond This Dark House – Poems by Guy Gavriel Kay

Years ago I was captivated by my discovery of the Fionavar Tapestry and read the trilogy with as much zeal and fervour as I had read the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. So a collection of poetry by Guy Gavriel Kay was both an intriguing surprise and a curious exploration. The collection divided into five parts is really an amalgam of personal memory and reminiscence with historical and mythological significance. The poems in Part 2 focus more on personal love as an analysis of loss and separation. Love is always at a distance. The male lover is often either writing a poem while his lover wishes him in bed with her or he is on the balcony searching for himself. The poems in Part 3 evoke the well-known myths of love and loss; Guinevere at Almesbury, Orpheus in the underworld trying to retrieve Eurydice, Medea struggling and tormented, Cain and his tormented soul, Hades or Kore and the annual capture of Persephone, The Lady of Shalott. Generally through these poetic constructions of mythological point of view, we arrive at the same themes of loss and separation which are found in the more personal poems.

Perhaps the title poem, “Beyond This Dark House” with its flowing cadence that carries the reader along as on a rhythmic journey, encapsulates what many of the poems in the collection are revealing.

“We’ve all had
dreams break,
fantasies we shaped.”

or

“shadows thrown two ways.”

There is a coming apart. “A train running away”. In Canadian literature so many trains are always leaving prairie places, such as Winnipeg, ; they are escape routes, destinations for dreams and fantasies. The shadows thrown both ways from the street lights are just that, but they also evoke a metaphor for separation, movement in two different directions.

“I will ask only that
we may each be whole
together or apart.”

These lines speak to a thread for the entire collection. This statement is what many of the poems about separated lovers , both personal and mythological, are asking for in their different ways – a sense of peace one has at being whole, and complete with oneself.

In “Other Women and You” the poet separates his love from all the rest who he could say goodbye to with lines like “Too deep the knife/you have become.” “I wanted you so much, / shaken by the tenderness in me / for you…” There is a wonderful cadence that carries the reader into this tenderness and the raw pain of the departure.

In the poem, “Following” about a lover far away, we get exquisite lines such as

“I wouldn’t follow.
And so I am entangled
in a promise I must break,

which evoke this painful separation that seems to pervade much of the work as if it is a separation of the real world with all its distractions and all its lovers, from the artist who must attend to his art. Certainly the allusion to this theme is present in the short poem, “Shalott”.

“I must ride past,
not at all myself,
you must look down, the mirror…”

This is a modern response to the dilemma presented in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot”; the dilemma that faces artists whether to create work about and celebrate life or enjoy the world by simply living in it. It is the choice between the reflection and the real thing. In “This Falling Tower” we can see the struggle of the artist in the world and the artist reflecting on the world. The poem evokes the cold distancing of other poems about separation, the writer contemplating on the balcony while his lover sleeps in “After the Ball” and the writer in “A Narrow Escape” who drives his lover away eventually by always being up scribbling lines late at night when she needs him in her bed.

“he scribbles fiercely
in a shaming infidelity, searching
for a word to give her eyes, a voice
for her voice, while she wakes
alone, and calls him to her, and
he does not come.”

In “Power Failure” a poem of short, short lines, winter’s cold creeps into a man’s lonely bed now his lover is off with someone else. The narrator asks, “so who will / now candle / me home?” We feel the sadness and the emptiness of his loss for “all winter / all (his) life.”

In “Reunion”, Kay captures the sense of awkwardness between lovers. “…we breathe / a brittleness into each other,”, “… fearing / the demands of silence, / unsure if we are safe.” This imagery too emphasizes each person's need to be at peace, to be whole, to be safe within oneself, safe with each other – a need not often met it seems in the pages of these narratives. In “Annotation”, the poet asks love for “a harbour / safe from time” and plays with a classic metaphor cum cliché of the rough and rocky route of love but makes it work with

“I can say, nonetheless,
that the      falls
rapids      rocks
aren’t just
scenic attractions.
Shake you pretty good,
They do.”

In the mythological poems we find a great dramatic monologue by Guinevere after the death of Arthur as she recounts her feelings for both her lovers. “Being Orpheus” approaches the sad tale of Orpheus leading Eurydice from the underworld through the eyes of the omniscient narrator. We find lines such as

“Light was so far ahead it was a prayer,”

“The silence was a weight upon his life.”

And stanzas such as

“And somewhere now there was a song.
With words of loss to gather even Sirens
Into stillness and the harrowing of grief
And a music that had never been before.”

These lines carry the poem along with such eloquent measured cadence that we are right there daring to look back, just to turn ourselves to see if she is there.

Kay says here in this poem what is so much a part of the entire collection, as a song of loss.

“Being Orpheus. A song of loss to break
the hearts of beasts, to break the grip
Of earth on stone, to bend the starlight
Streaming to the world.”

There are so many losses. The poignant raw outpouring of remembrance for his father and for growing up in Winnipeg expressed with so much raw honesty in the opening poem, “Night Drive: Elegy” is a type of loss created by time. Similarly “West Hanney, Churchyard” speaks in somber tones to the passage of time. “Rain begins to fall from a heavy sky / Touching a long world done in grey.” In “Tintagel” we see the sea pounding away at the castle. This relentless grinding continues to wear even monuments and perhaps their mythologies. Places aren’t the same when you go back to them. West Hanney in a poem dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien has a loss of meaning for the poet.

“I don’t think I’d stop for long.
Papers and books
Realized that place for me
And they aren’t there any more.”

It is not just the content of the poems that captivates the reader but it is Kay’s facility with the rhythm and the sound of words; some of them leave you breathless and yearning for more and more. Who cannot hear in “Crystals” that screen door bang across a lane or “a late car / on the street” in remembering the moment of a lover’s first touch, so heart piercing.

“I felt the bone and
cartilage that held
my heart.”

Or know in a visual way how “the sea’s sound might shape itself / into your name…”

or in “Re-Reading Over St. John’s Hill” hear the lilting flow of Dylan Thomas’ Welsh vowels, or in “A Few Leaves” appreciate the structural simplicity reminiscent of a William Carlos Williams.

Beyond This Dark House is a moving collection that is deeply honest that evokes both emotional and intellectual responses from the readers. Within the pages you hover in a mélange of rich modern and ancient longing.

David Fraser lives in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island. He is the founder and editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine, http:// www.ascentaspirations.ca, since 1997. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in over 50 journals including Three Candles, Regina Weese, Ardent, Quills and Ygdrasil. He has published a collection of his poetry, Going to the Well (2004), a collection of short fiction, The Dark Side of the Billboard (2006 ) and edited and published the five print issues of Ascent Aspirations Magazine http://www.ascentaspirations .ca/aapublishing.htm

A second collection of poetry, Running Down the Wind appeared in 2007 David is currently the Federation of BC Writers Regional Director for The Islands Region. His latest passion is developing Nanaimo’s newest spoken word series, WordStorm, http:// www.wordstorm.ca

David Fraser has a BA in English from University of Toronto, and an MEd in adult education from OISE. In Ontario he taught English, Creative Writing Writer’s Craft among other subjects at the secondary school level for 30 years. Currently he is a full time writer who also teaches skiing at Mt Washington in the winter.

Guy Gavriel Kay

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