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Nothing Fell Today But Rain
by Evan Jones
Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2003
A Further Exile
by Tom Henihan
Ekstasis Editions, 2002
This Flesh These Words
by Sharon H. Nelson
Ekstasis Editions, 2002
Reviewed by Zach Wells
 Nothing Fell Today But Rain
is a difficult book
to get through. Tedious, in fact, is the word for it. These poems are
high on concept, but shy on execution. They are cluttered with allusive
bric-a-brac, giving the book a pretentious air of postmodern
preciousness, which was never a good thing, and is now not even in
fashion. Evan Jones’ references showcase his erudition, but do little
for the poems themselves, which do not traffic in ideas so much as
present the poet/speaker as an avid consumer and regurgitator of
half-digested thought. With few exceptions, they lack emotional
intensity, intellectual alacrity, humour and verbal audacity, and are
therefore unlikely to satisfy the tastes of many readers outside of
Jones’ circle of acquaintance.
It is clear that Jones’ ambitions are surrealist—but
the poems are more often about surrealism than surreal
themselves. He mucks about with imagery and syntax, but in a very
self-conscious manner, so that the poems’ oddities are rarely
startling. Often, he abjures the attempt to write a poem in favour of
the obsessively mindless enumeration of random objects. One poem
shamelessly announces itself as an "Inventory" and goes on for
three pages like so: "Many symbolic drawings of fish/Mark Rothko’s
Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red) 1949/Marble-shoed
Tiresias"; another is a sort of mock dictionary and another a mock
guide book. If the intent of these pieces is to numb, the author
succeeds admirably.
The one glimmer in the ashbox is Jones’
translations of Greek poet Andréas Embiricos. Unfortunately, there are
but seven of these arresting poems presented here. A full-length
collection of such translations would make a significant contribution to
both Greek and Canadian poetry.
My suspicion, upon reading
A Further Exile, is
that Tom Henihan is not a person, but the name of a computer programme
set to generate random metaphors. Henihan’s typical method, in other
words, is to heap metaphor upon metaphor, with little to no connective
tissue joining them. He draws his tropes almost exclusively from a set
of elemental stocks-in-trade (light, fire, water, stone, earth, etc.),
presented in a manner that is repetitive and commonplace to the point of
bathos. Because of the aforementioned lack of connective tissue, he is
often unable to keep his metaphors separate, and they melt into each
other like so: "The yellow wax of her memory/exhales a flame/that
holds a blue sabre."("Asylum")
Occasionally, Henihan turns a nifty phrase, as when
he speaks of the "feral hand of the river,"
("Absence") but these isolated nuggets of ore are sunk so deep
in the impenetrable bedrock of his verse that they’re not worth
digging for. Henihan does have a certain facility for verse technique,
particularly in the use of rhythm, assonance and occasional rhyme. These
poems might be convincing to a reader devoid of critical and analytical
perception, as they boom along in the bardic voice of a poor man’s
Yeats. However, this skill, in combination with the banality of his
modifiers and the clumsiness of his metaphorical method, succeeds in
being only vaguely tragic.
One poem, "The Night," is much better than
the standard fare of indistinguishable sameness, as it is far tighter in
its structure and more original in its presentation of the standard
Henihanian archetypes. It is nonetheless plagued by such unfortunate
constructions as "a solemn orchard of water and flesh," which
negate the poem’s strengths.
On the editorial side, this book contains an
atrocious number of typos and ungrammatical solecisms.
Sharon H. Nelson’s This Flesh These Words is
not so much poetry as it is armchair philosophy, social commentary,
comparative religion and feminist theory presented in lines that don’t
make it to the right margin of the page. Nelson’s verse is at best
arrhythmic doggerel, and at worst (far more often the case) didactic
prose chopped into short lines:
Now we are told
to play safe
and that there is no such thing
as completely safe sex;
condoms break or overflow
latex dams slip or split; we know,
as everyone has always known:
life entails risk,
and loving life
entails risk;
playing it completely safe,
separate and celibate,
courts death:
life is not lived
in chronic, acute
alienation.
(from "The Best Minds of My Generation")
Nelson samples from a wide array of secondary
sources. The italicized lines in the sample above, for instance, she
tells us "are a composite of some of the common content of AIDS
prevention/education materials printed and broadcast during the early
1990s." (Note to "The Best Minds of My Generation) Common is
the word alright. Other sources she quotes include the Bible, both OT
and NT (Revised Standard Version, another proof of her deaf ear); texts
on Buddhism, and book reviews, to name a few. She appends eight pages of
her own pedantic notes to seventy pages of already pedantic text.
This book is the work of a well-meaning liberal with
all the correct ideas and an artistic soul. It bears no resemblance,
however, to poetry.
Zach Wells lives in Halifax. His first full-length
collection, Unsettled, will be published by Insomniac Press in
the fall of 2004. |
