Middle age musings form the heart of Kevin Connolly’s return
Toronto poet’s first collection in nine years mixes comedy, pop culture and philosophy
It may sound like something out of Star Trek, but “xiphoid process” is actually a body part: the cartilagelike extension of the sternum, which becomes hard and bony as we age.
As such, it’s an apt title for a collection of poems musing on life, in all its existential confusion, banality and fleeting beauty, from the vantage point of middle age.
Xiphoid Process is Toronto poet Kevin Connolly’s fifth collection, and his first in nine years. His 2008 book, Revolver, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the collection prior to that, Drift (2005), won Ontario’s Trillium Poetry Prize.
He’s also respected not only for his own poetry, but his work as an editor for several literary presses, including Coach House Books, ECW Press and McClelland & Stewart.
Many of the poems in Xiphoid Process progress in unpredictable, tangential leaps, combining allusions to pop culture and celebrity, snippets of song lyrics, lines from other poets and wry philosophical observations.
In his notes, Connolly writes of including “lines, bits or concepts from stand-up comedy” in a section of the book, and in fact his epigrammatic style often lends itself to one-liners.
But also on display is an urge to distinguish between what is important and what’s not, at a stage in life where the speaker in the poems feels “the effect of things young on the suddenly aging.” (Though he jokes about it, too; “we’re all trending toward obsolete,” he writes elsewhere). Amid the comic shtick, there are flashes of tenderness and a cherishing of the world’s ephemeral beauty.
That beauty is made bittersweet by reminders of mortality and “the body’s ticking places.” In one poem, Connolly distils the rhythm of life’s inexorable cycle in two spare, imagistic lines: “Lungs emptied. Lungs refilled. Rings in a redwood,/small glove, pointing: ‘Here I was born. Here I died.’”
Connolly is known for his satirical wit, and some of the poems here fit that mould. But they are buttressed by poems in a more pensive, lyrical vein. These offer deep thought rather than easy laughs, and they are the backbone — or should that be breastbone? — of Xiphoid Process. Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer and the Star’s poetry columnist.