LATEST POETRY COLLECTION WORK OF A MATURE MASTER
Painful personal and political subjects treated without cloying sentimentality
However much it boosts the morale, political poetry, because usually directed at the converted, or at least the convertible, rarely succeeds as poetry.
In order to come alive, poems about public or communal events require individual insights, personal responses. Over a long and prolific poetic career, Gary Geddes has achieved just this, most notably perhaps in his poem Sandra Lee Scheuer, about the Kent State massacre.
He succeeds again in the beautifully constructed, almost stream-of-consciousness collage of the title sequence in The Resumption of Play. Focusing on the specific, he adopts the persona of a boy wrenched from his First Nations family and taken to a residential school. Although the incidents of physical and sexual abuse are recalled with unsparing directness, they are never sensationalized but reported in colloquial, sardonic tones, and interspersed with happier memories of earlier fishing trips.
With the “rage turned inward,” his subsequent life as a teacher is interspersed with alcoholism, Maoism, psychotherapy sessions, and deft historical allusion. Thus his students have “No thought of syntax, sentence structure,/ just words tossed out like worthless trade beads.” Like Geddes’ own in this poem, his quest is to discover “what to do with anger and with shame.”
Though he says “It’s not what I intended, this litany of abuse” and occasionally the anger becomes too overt, in general, the underlying symbolism of the clam is so well managed, the puns and wordplay, even Spoonerisms, so apposite, and the tone so controlled — “I tried to make myself invisible,/ mouthing, ad nauseam, foreign words/ the teachers repeated, pedagogy/ not their strongest suit” — that Geddes creates a totally believable persona, and a thoroughly convincing appropriation of voice.
Although the final sequence, Inshallah, evokes the Shidane Arone affair in Somalia, not all the poems are political. The sequence Not being dead in Venice, for instance, neatly resurrects Ezra Pound, Joseph Brodsky, Diaghilev and Stravinsky.
Poetically, however, the major counterpoint to the title sequence is the Intertidal section, which deals movingly with the early death of the poet’s mother from cancer when he was only seven. In Matricide, memories of his grandmother informing him that his birth, against medical advice not to get pregnant, caused his mother’s death leads to “I weigh the import/ of what she tells me, where/ to store it and how to conduct/ my new life as a criminal” while in The celebrity about his mother’s radiation treatment, he neatly links the personal and the global: “If uranium can take out/ two Japanese cities and end a long war, / it can surely handle, properly directed,/a few wayward cells. We’d call this /target practice.
“Except you don’t get/ a second chance.”
Here, as in the title poem, Geddes manipulates humour as a survival mechanism: his oblique, deceptively laconic tone, laced with self-deprecating irony, means that nothing cloying or sentimental attaches to even the most intimate and personal of his poems.
This book is the work of a mature master of his craft.