Review - The Silver Palace Restaurant by Mark Abley

The Silver Palace Restaurant
by Mark Abley
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005

Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston

These poems could be taken for a travelogue of far-ranging proportions as Abley moves from China, Italy, the Gaspé Peninsula, to the Rocky Mountains, Montreal, and places in between. Yet Abley looks beyond any straightforward view to focus on what the speaker experiences at an immediate and inward level, using spare, uncluttered language. His view of the world is clear and sharp.

The prose poem sequence ‘Food: A Traveling Quartet’ winds through Croatia, Grand Manan, and Hong Kong with an anchoring voice which retells the Innu story “How Wolverine got stuck in a bear’s skull”. The other three voices, all speaking in the present tense, are not always easy to distinguish one from the other. They twine round one another and separate like travelers swapping old stories, topping each other in terms of incident and view.

Hard to say when the ship passed The Wolves, rocky islets where
seabirds hatch their young. p.37

The grand hotel and restaurants are ready for customers again.
But who wants to nibble smoked salmon flavoured by war? p.41

Day after day, the same beggars wait in the tunnel. Between a
mass-transit station and the Star Ferry dock, a one-legged man
keeps crouching on the floor. His raw stump pushes out from his
shorts. p.43

With familiarity the voices separate: ‘Each of the units has plywood walls, but the sliding grid at the front is made of metal wire.’ (p.54) ‘The restaurant in the Hotel Vodice looks as big as a military dancefloor.’ (p.55) ‘On the east flank of the Bank of China is a trim hillside garden: rocks emerging from the water, a poised tree.’ (p.46) But the sense of competing voices remains: they want to outdo one another in the storytelling.

The images and words are evocative, crisp, and swift in their impact as Abley weaves impressions and insights through the poems. The Wolverine’s voice is the clearest, speaking in the focused tones of the oral tradition:

Wolverine was traveling and he was hungry. For a long time he
had eaten only lemmings and shrews. He craved fat, real fat,
with lots of grease. So when he noticed a big she-bear prowling
around, he formed a plan to get her into his stewpot. p.40

The telling of the legend, and its outcome, makes an impressive counterpoint to the other, less differentiated voices.

An unobstrusive theme runs through all the poems: the past. ‘So: how long// must we suffer the past?’ Abley writes in ‘To the Editors’, and

…. while you
still free to taste the wind and weather,
peering in at me as though I had the answer
to some query on the tip of your tongue
recede into the growing past. (A Labrador Duck p.83)

He writes of a man taking a photo, ‘I remember how I used to do the same// … with my first Instamatic’ (p.13) and we are drawn again into memory. He writes of Pinnochio, of extinct species, a hunting cat, with a sense that one is haunted by the past, it cannot be escaped.

His occasional look at the present and future are sharp and haunting, as in ‘Letter from the Rockies’ where the pauses bring the reader to the brink of danger:

… The warning signs are
all around us: DANGER, THIS PATH IS
UNSAFE. But I’m
if you are, to
risk the journey again

Abley leaves us hanging, ready for the next adventure, the next view from the peaks, but always with the knowledge that the past is with us.

Joanna M. Weston -- THE WILLOW-TREE GIRL for ages 7-11