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The Flat Third Dimension: Matthew Olzmann’s Contradictions in the Design — Patrick O’Reilly

Oct 032016

Olzmann relies on a prosaic first-person style, rhyme-less, rhythm-less, too indifferent to metre to even be properly considered free verse. Many, many poets today employ a similar style. —Patrick O’Reilly

Contradictions in the Design
Matthew Olzmann
Alice James Books, 2016
100 pages, $15.95

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Early in Matthew Olzmann’s latest collection of poetry, Contradictions in the Design, we are introduced to a young boy. For his birthday, the boy has been given a box of hand-me-down tools. “Immediately, he sets out to discover / how the world was made / by unmaking everything the world has made” (“Consider All The Things You’ve Known But Now Know Differently”, 9). The boy may serve as a stand-in for Olzmann himself, who excels at finding connections between the broken, the incomplete, and the obsolete, and who eyes every artificial thing with skepticism. As he claims in one interview, he is “the type of writer who understands the dark only by flicking the lights on and off a couple dozen times. I understand the deep end of the pool by splashing through the shallow side.”

With his award-winning debut Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), the Michigan-born poet earned a reputation for his humour and accessibility, and his talent for juxtaposing seemingly incongruous images. Now residing in North Carolina, and armed with the confidence a well-received debut brings, Olzmann continues to explore his sometimes-jarring narrative style in Contradictions in the Design.

One stand-out poem is “The Millihelen”, named for “the amount of beauty that will launch exactly one ship.” Olzmann discovers such overlooked poetic sources with ease, and elaborates them masterfully. “The Millihelen” revisits the Trojan War, and considers a single ship leaving the entire fleet. Is this a ship carrying a disillusioned soldier away from the beachhead of Troy to a love he left behind? That’s not entirely clear, though it certainly seems that way. In any case, this ship is given more importance than the thousand Greek frigates sailing towards battle, a part bigger than the sum.

In “The Millihelen,” beauty is a destination. But that raises a possibility: perhaps this ship is the one which carries Paris and Helen away to Troy. That would be more consistent with the rest of the collection, where beauty and art are positioned as false virtues, traps which an audience could fall prey to. Certainly Paris’s own overly-enthusiastic pursuit of beauty had disastrous consequences.

The idea of beauty presents challenges for the artist as well. “Femur by mandible, I know what it means / to watch your good fortune change its mind,” Olzmann writes in “The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur”. That’s every poet’s pain, no doubt. But the poem itself depicts a dinosaur skeleton made up of mislabeled and mismanaged parts, the product of misguided creative labour, and exposes the blind faith and false assumptions required to not only appreciate, but to create art.

How Olzmann himself struggles for or against this artificial beauty is not always clear. There is little to suggest the kind of painstaking editing necessary to more intricate or experimental verse. Throughout, Olzmann relies on a prosaic first-person style, rhyme-less, rhythm-less, too indifferent to metre to even be properly considered free verse. Many, many poets today employ a similar style. What recommends Olzmann above them is the sense of cohesion in these poems: while most poets of a similar style still go in fear of literalness and overstatement, often to the point that their poems devolve into non-sequitur, Olzmann spares no effort to ensure that the reader follows every step of his associative process.

Olzmann’s talent lies not in his simple situational observations, but his observation of the whole metaphor, his observation of actors in a metaphor. He pursues the metaphor from its superficial meaning down to its pulp, showing the reader just where and why that metaphor is so poetically resonant. Think of him as a miner with a silver hammer, tapping the vein all the way to the motherlode. Oddly, Olzmann’s gift for drawing connections does not extend to other forms of comparative language. His similes, for instance, are usually duds: houses go “dark / like condemned buildings”, hair unfurls “like a flag”. These suit Olzmann’s unfussy, conversational style, but add nothing.

Olzmann is a noticer, rather than a craftsman. Coincidences and contradictions occur to him, and he draws them into the right perspective, but he never shapes them. This usually works. While not “formal poetry” in any traditional sense, nearly every poem in Contradictions in the Design operates under a particular formal apparatus wherein the poem is set up as a meditation on some single object or situation, then veers off in a completely unforeseeable direction, before returning to its thesis. This strategy, which I’m calling the “Olzmannian diversion,” makes it nearly impossible to quote from one of these poems and do justice to the whole poem, but it allows Olzmann to consider his subject from every angle, as though walking around a statue rather than merely looking at one face-on. As such, most poems in Contradictions in the Design have a satisfying sense of completeness.

Take, for example, “The Man Who Was Mistaken”, about a man who reconnects with his own sincerity thanks to a drug-addled roommate. The poem begins by mentioning the speaker is often mistaken for another professor at his university, who in turn is often mistaken for Moby, the electronica artist beloved by the speaker’s roommate. Then the turn:

Once he thought our furnace was talking to him.

Which is when I said, Why don’t you tell me
what the furnace was trying to say?

Which is when he said, It said
that me and it would always be enemies.

Which is when I said, Son, that’s a fight you can never win.

Which is when he said, Okay, and then went outside
to dance on the hood of his car.

Which is when the cops came.

Perhaps he was right. Jesus was inside the music.
And that music was inside my roommate.

And the state could not tolerate it.

I should note that this is just one small part of a long chain of events; “The Man Who Was Mistaken” follows Olzmann’s typical form: an opening gambit, a turn into shaggy dog territory, and then a return to the original theme in the third act, sort of like a sitcom. And the poem, already a page and a half long when this anecdote begins, goes on for another fifteen lines. The final line in the excerpt serves as that second turn, bringing the poem back to its original line of thought. While it acts as a punchline, dripping with false indignation toward “the Man,” it is also filled with genuine dismay that such harmless enthusiasm should lead to police intervention. The line rests precisely between the cynical and the sincere, which is where much of Olzmann’s best work happens.

But Olzmann’s competence can be its own trap. This is not a book one should read cover to cover. Taken at random, and with few exceptions, any one poem in this collection would be considered very good. The imagery is evocative, the humour charmingly ironic. But this one jarring, book-ended form would be more effective if used more sparingly. Reading Contradictions in the Design comes with a sense of degradation: inevitably some poems don’t seem to hit as hard as those which came before, and add nothing that earlier poems didn’t imply to greater effect. The Olzmannian diversion can lend a poem a sense of efficiency that it does not usually deserve.

This is a limitation to Olzmann’s style, as well. While the hyper-colloquial first-person narration affords him a degree of freedom not found in other poetry, it can also lead him to strain for importance. Such is the case with “Still Life With Heart Extracted From The Body Of A Horse” (16), a clearly personal, pointed poem, which devolves into bromides and clichés and eventually ends with a thud. When Olzmann gets political, as he does with this poem or “Imaginary Shotguns” (14), his politics are unthreateningly liberal^[1], more bumper sticker than rallying cry.

What does one look for in a poetry? How can one define it? Olzmann himself might view even the question with suspicion. The poems which make up Contradictions in the Design are not challenging in any sense, but some might assert that “not challenging” is not necessarily the same as “not good.” I find myself, admittedly to my own surprise, in this camp. Olzmann draws insightful, even profound, connections between object and meaning. An artful poem, where several components work together in harmonious efficiency, such that you cannot replace a single mark for fear of breaking it, offers a kind of wonder. Here is a thing that shouldn’t exist, yet can’t possibly exist any other way, a made thing that feels innate. Olzmann’s poems are robbed of this wonder. But if the poems are without wonder, they still provide something like relief: that thing you noticed about the photocopier? Matthew Olzmann noticed, too, and he’s found some meaning in it that you hadn’t. Sometimes that’s enough.

—Patrick O’Reilly

Patrick O’Reilly was raised in Renews, Newfoundland and Labrador, the son of a mechanic and a shop’s clerk. He just graduated from St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Twice he has won the Robert Clayton Casto Prize for Poetry, the judges describing his poetry as “appealingly direct and unadorned.”

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Be advised: this is the opinion a Canadian critic. Issues like gun control and same-sex marriage, more or less settled here, may demand a less daring or incisive take in the United States.↵

Theory and Ardour: A Review of Alice Fulton’s Barely Composed — Patrick O’Reilly

May 022015

Photo Credit: Hank De Leo

Barely Composed
Alice Fulton
W.W. Norton & Company
112 pages ($25.95)
ISBN 978-0-393-24488-5

Robert Pinsky once wrote against “the stupid, defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less ‘difficult.’” After all, he argued, “people still read the poems of [Marianne] Moore and [Wallace] Stevens because they don’t wear out, because they surprise and entice us—and maybe, in part, because they are difficult”^[1]. Difficulty takes on many forms, and comes with its own rewards.

Barely Composed is a difficult piece. It is Alice Fulton’s first new book in more than a decade and in some ways I am still waiting for it because it continues to reveal itself in increasingly exciting ways. Employing virtually every linguistic trick there is, and lighting on themes from art to love to death to time, the poems of Barely Composed demand the reader parse the lines again and again in new and creative ways. In that sense, the book’s title is a taunt to the reader, a challenge: catch me, if you can.

The most striking feature Fulton’s writing is her maximalist approach to language. Barely Composed is built on a fragmentary style where shrewdly broken lines constantly heighten ambiguity. As they go, Fulton quotes Shakespeare and Celan while dropping in the occasional emoticon or snatch of Esperanto; puns and nonce-words abound. Repetitive artificial forms and meandering vers libre are equally welcome. High and low language coexist harmoniously, but not peacefully. One result of this approach: there is not a single page of this book in which I couldn’t find an astonishing line or image. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a poet who adventures through language so broadly and enthusiastically. Lines like these, from “Wow Moment,” exemplify the book’s usual tone:

……………………………..The gentle interface of yawn and nature.
It would soothe us. It would soothe us. We would be soothed
by that slow looking with a limited truth value. See

how the realtor’s lens makes everything look larger
and there’s so much glare the floor looks wow
under the smartificial xmas tree.

……………………………………………………………(24)

A Fulton line seems as effortless and thrilling as a Muhammad Ali spar session, but it can be just as dizzying if the reader is not paying attention. A tribe of disembodied pronouns roam across the landscape, and the purposeful ambiguity of the phrasing can send the reader on the wrong track unnoticed for lines at a time.

This difficulty isn’t frustrating if one is willing to be taken wherever the words lead them, and find an individual meaning in every line. Even a passive reading of this book offers more than the usual amount of surprise. This play-impulse becomes a powerful argument in its own right: what is poetry for, if not to test the limits of language, to bend things to the point of breaking, then cobble them back together? And certainly, a number of poems, such as “The Next Big Thing” and “’Make It New’” attest to poetry’s inherent value. As a defense of poetry, or of “art for art’s sake,” Barely Composed would stand just fine on its own. However, as Fulton writes in “Triptych For Topological Heart,” “Without ardour, / theory suffers” (19), and there is a more stable bedrock below the swift current.

Barely Composed is not merely a case of style in lieu of substance; the dense verbiage can occasionally obscure, but not replace or negate, the somber contemplation at the book’s core. For example, the longer poem, which begins the book’s second section, “Forcible Touching,” questions the ability of art to respond to trauma. True to form, the poem weaves a variety of narrative voices together, including the advice of a children’s grief counselor, a children’s story about death, the anecdote of an animal control officer whose voice is “Un-American,” and a modern re-telling of the story of Philomel^[2]. Throughout, however, more conscious poetic voice lurks within the text:

……………………………….The voice of the shuttle = =

as on a clumsy native loom she wove a brilliant fabric,
working on words in red. When the child colors One day
…………Chipper’s mom told him his sibling
…………had died it is all right
…………to suggest crayons for the blotchy insides
…………of the ears and the blank circles in the eyes
…………that indicate reflection. Unmellow Yell-
…………ow Cool and Crazy Blue. The Animal Control

guy trembled in the one tongue
…………that must do for all his days. I hear the animal soundings.

…………Cage cage scream scream. So pain.
…………In this point I scared. I sad

…………I’m gonna lose job here after.

………………………………………………….(30)

The blend of clinical jargon with broken English, and the application contemporary language to an ancient narrative, plays to the imagery of the Philomel story, while also conforming to the established style of the book (at least in the sense that one can “conform” to a style the strength of which is constant motion, incorporation, and evolution). More importantly, these stylistic jumps enact and reaffirm the impenetrability of narrative, forcing the reader to interrogate just how well narrative can convey trauma, let alone repair it. Nonetheless, the poem concludes “It is a good idea. It is quite surprising” (34).

No subject is explored more thoroughly than parental death and abandonment. The image of a dying mother recurs throughout the book, and especially in the fourth section, which deals with the topic most directly, and which is comprised mainly of elegies; the linguistic experiments, while present, are more restrained here than anywhere else in the book. These poems become a record of the mother’s passing and the child’s anxiety, a perspective in which “the future is a room / so small you can sit in the middle and touch / all the walls” (“Doha Melt-Down Elegy,” 73-74), and where the speaker passes time in the waiting room, editing “a sweat of student essays, changing is to was” (“Still World Nocturne,” 66). The language here becomes conspicuously scientific, making allusions to nuclear energy – a slight tonal shift which emphasizes the cold, post-traumatic space of the clinic. The grief swells and warps, reshaping all previous imagery; by the time the book reaches its ending, the “quietude” and “snow crystals” invited in the opening poem (“Because We Never Practiced With The Escape Chamber,” 11), are invaders, colonizing forces, best kept at bay by writing (“Personal Reactor,” 60); “Make It New,” 83).

The subject matter itself is often grim. And in their way, these lines can take on a bleak dimension of their own, a nihilistic push off the cliff of linguistic certainty. But silence, once it has been confronted, must be pushed out. The “gift” imagery which appears throughout the book reassures the reader, and the speaker as well. A continual appraisal of what a gift is, its purpose and reason and significance, begins in the very first poem and lasts to the very end. It is often mirrored by a self-reflective discussion of writing itself. Having spent the book refining the idea of “gift” – “Love is a gift” (“Triptych For A Topological Heart,” 19); “A gift cannot be cynical / unless the giver is” (“Triptych For A Topological Heart,” 21); “giving it away / doesn’t make a thing a gift” (“Malus Domestica,” 37) – Fulton concludes this thread with the lines “and when you said I gave you what I wanted / myself I gave you what I didn’t want” (“You Own It,” 92). That gift is grief, repurposed into language. Writing becomes a response and a salve for pain, “the fire / that burns fire” (“A Lightenment On New Year’s Eve,” 88). Seeking solace in reading, the speaker of “Doha Melt-Down Elegy” remarks “It was a good book to be lost with. I began taking notes / and by the end realized I’d transcribed every line” (76); that statement is such an accurate description of reading Barely Composed, one cannot help but see it as an anecdote about writing the book, as well. This book, more than most others, has not been completed until it has been read.

The fifth and final section of Barely Composed is fixated on newness – the newness of poetic language, and the newness that defines aftermath. One poem takes its title from Ezra Pound’s famous modernist axiom, and declares “New / breaks the reckoning frame and rests / in pieces,” before requesting “Let me collect its DNA / from the tears on your desk” (“’Make It New’,” 84). “End Fetish,” the last poem in the book, is made up of that DNA – the final line of the previous poems. Taken together, the end-lines serve as an inventory of what it took to crawl through grief, and an index of the gift now being given.

It happens sometimes that a reviewer encounters a book which is smarter than he is. He knows it’s good somehow, but articulating the reason or root of that good-ness is beyond his capability; he is overwhelmed and hyperactive, leaping from one highlight to the next, never pitching down anywhere just long enough, and must be satisfied to say “trust me” until he finally learns his way around. I’ve read Barely Composed a half-dozen times now, maybe more, and I like it a little more every time – each time, the darkness becomes a little more palpable, the structure more instinctual. But the language never becomes less surprising; I plan to reckon with it a few more times at least. Whatever work the reader puts in is well-rewarded here. Trust me.

— Patrick O’Reilly

Patrick O’Reilly, from Renews, Newfoundland and Labrador, is pursuing an MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan. He earned his BA at St. Thomas University (Fredericton NB), where he was a three-time winner of the Robert Clayton Casto Prize for Poetry. His poetry has appeared in Qwerty, untethered, and Numero Cinq.

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Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

“In Praise of Difficult Poetry,” Slate, April 23, 2007.↵
In the story of Philomel, the titular woman is raped by her sister’s husband, who cuts out her tongue; she reports the assault to her sister by weaving the narrative into a tapestry.↵

Her Mother’s Keeper: A Review of Susan Paddon’s Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths — Patrick O’Reilly

Feb 122015

Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths
Susan Paddon
Brick Books
96 pp., $20
ISBN 1-926829-94-8

THE MOTHER IS DYING, and soon. There are few new memories to be made, no place to keep them, and no time at all for rehashing half-forgotten romances and arguments. But what Susan wants most from her mother is a finished story, a memoir ideally, which could adequately sate her own curiosity. As the mother’s death draws urgently near, it becomes clearer and clearer to Susan that she is not going to get it, that whatever secrets, stories, even anecdotes her mother has will go with her. Like anyone else, the mother is both finished and uncompleted, leaving Susan with the fragments of a story and no satisfying conclusion. This lack of finality may be why Susan has become so consumed by Anton Chekhov, a playwright whose own life was both celebrated and scrupulously edited by his executors.

This is the parallel that drives Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths, the debut poetry book from Susan Paddon. Chekhov and Susan’s mother, both victims of respiratory illness, are imagined by Susan as similar figures: important, intriguing figures whose lives are the victim of redaction (self-imposed or otherwise), the details of which Susan is itching to discover. Other figures from Susan’s life have Chekhovian counterparts as well. Her withdrawn father and pregnant (and therefore reasonably preoccupied) sister share the role of Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s inconstant wife. Even Chekhov’s curious, admiring visitors are represented by Leona, the lonely next-door neighbour. The parallel strongly established, but also fairly flexible, allowing the characters to sometimes step out of their roles and exist as themselves.

It might have been tempting for Susan to cast herself as Chekhov in the ongoing drama, but she wisely identifies with Masha, Chekhov’s sister, to whom the opening poem of every section is addressed, and who protected Chekhov in life and death,. It may be that Susan’s frustrations stem from the fact that without answers to her questions, she is unable to protect, and control, her mother’s legacy as Masha did with Chekhov. These questions are elaborated on in the poem “Yellow” (34-35): “Who was Penny again? Why did you leave Fort Lauderdale? / Did dad ever write you letters? Are they under your bed?” Without these details, Susan is forced to focus on “record[ing]” the more observable aspects of her mother’s life. Susan soon reveals “I have already imagined after,” a telling line from a speaker who often alludes to her own authorial aspirations, adding a layer of meta-narrative to the book itself.

In reality, the mother is not an especially mysterious figure, and the answers are gradually meted out later in the text: a few youthful flings, maybe, a long-lost friend, nothing that rewards this level of curiosity from Susan. Instead, Susan chafes against her mother’s hesitancy to answer any and all questions; it confounds her, spites her, when Susan considers all she has given up to be at her mother’s side. Before returning to rural Ontario to care for her mother, Susan had lived an implicitly bohemian life with “J.” in Paris. The series of “Unsent Letter” poems, addressed to J., aim to establish a kind of Prozorovian nostalgia for the Paris Susan left behind. Unfortunately, these are generally unsuccessful. “Unsent Letter #2” reads

Today is the Ouvres Portes. On your way up the hill, you will pass three / boulangeries with meringue in their windows, resist each time because there / are milles feuilles on Boulevard Simon Bolivar worth holding out for. The street / cleaners will spray the sidewalks as you pass. (45)

The second-person voice, the future tense, the abundance of unnecessary French, all contribute to a sense of speculation, implying a Paris that is more imagined than experienced. Ultimately, the “Unsent Letter” poems only add to an already lengthy list of diversions from the main text, and reiterate Susan’s self-absorption.

Susan’s frustration is clear not only to the reader, but to her family as well, to the point that her mother, dependent though she is, suggests “Why not / get your hair cut? How about / giving Tammy a call?” (54). From Susan’s perspective, her father is only minimally attentive. The sister’s absence, encouraged by the mother’s insistence on not worrying her with details while the baby is due shortly, reawakens Susan’s impressions of favoritism and sibling rivalry, as depicted in the two poems titled “My Sister” (38, 64). Left with the burden of single-handedly caring for her mother, and without at least the compensation of a startling revelation from her mother, Susan’s resentment is understandable, but no less obvious.

This is a reminder that it’s foolhardy to demand like-ability or noble stoicism from our narrators, because one of the strengths of this book is Paddon’s depiction of Susan’s growth from a figure of self-pity, to one who is both sympathetic and sympathizing. Susan’s development comes as steadily and surely as the mother’s death (another parallel), and pays off with the one-two punch of “Jacksonville” and “The Minister’s Visit.”

“Jacksonville” finds the mother in the hospital. Susan, sitting at her mother’s bedside, begins musing on her mother’s beauty, both her physical beauty and her inner beauty. As she’s thinking, a handsome young doctor comes in to tend to her mother. Susan identifies him as someone who could be swayed by her mother’s beauty, even by something as simple as the taste of her blueberry pie. She begins to imagine herself bargaining with the doctor, convinced that her mother’s beauty and her own grief should be enough to halt the train. For the first time, we sense how imminent and undeniable the mother’s death really is. For the first time, we see the depths of Susan’s fear and desperation, previously obscured by the daily business of caring for her mother. The bargaining gives way to a list which emphasizes her panic, a show of desperation and dependency which echoes the mother’s. “I want,” Susan says, “to show him the Jackson / shot to see if your beauty can inspire a miracle. / I want to shake him in to God” (91).

Within a few pages, the mother has died, disrupting the parallel. Susan is no longer Masha, or Chekhov; With J. leaving Paris for Egypt with her own mother, Susan is no longer even the Susan who writes in her journal and ruminates on her worldly past-life. Instead, in “The Minister’s Wife,” she assumes a third-person voice centered on Leona, the nosy neighbour. Leona is sitting on her couch when the minister arrives. She’s been expecting him (she had already assembled the ingredients for a consolatory quiche), but his appearance provides a concrete image of finality, a cause for external grief. “Oh, God no. Oh, God no.” she says. The speaker continues

….When she is finished, she cries
for everything bad that has ever been.
Not because this loss
is so great, but because loss
is a reminder of other losses. (96)

This is the apex of the book. Susan’s resentment and self-absorption are completely washed away by Leona’s tears. Through the actions and emotions of a (literally peripheral) other character, Susan comes to understand her grief as not hers alone. It is one grief of many, significant, but not singular.

These are strong poems, and when they appear they have real emotional impact. However they are two bright lights in a technically troubled book. Two Tragedies reads very much like a novel, to the point that calling it a “collection” feels inaccurate. Though this isn’t bad in and of itself (“novel-in-verse” is a genre for a reason), it leans uncomfortably close to prose. The poems push forward in a punchy, journalistic writing style, steadily chugging toward their destination, but there is none of the precision, and none of the metaphorical illumination, of truly great poetry. Whatever could be gained through metaphor, surprising enjambments, or complex metrical shifts is missed here. Any allusion to Chekhov’s life is inevitably underlined by the direct explanation of that allusion. Take, for example, “This House,” in which Susan compares her mother’s house to a stage:

No two props set more than three steps apart,
the distance she can travel now
without a pause. I am her leading stagehand,

Danchenko: driver, bodyguard. (20)

It’s a clear case of over-telling, drawing didactic lines to Chekhov in a way that overwhelms the poems. The sentences are concise to the point of fragmentation, and still somehow too heavy.

It would be more charitable to say that Paddon is as committed to telling Masha and Chekhov’s story as she is to telling Susan’s. Occasionally this leads to some stirring moments, like the catharsis of “Dearest Maria” (97). More often, it leads to the intrusion of epigraphs, allusions, and diversions from the more urgent contemporary narrative. Paddon makes frequent use of epigraphs from Chekhov, but these are not often in service of the poems, and sometimes appear to their detriment. “Chekhov’s Bishop Dreams” uses another favourite tool of Paddon, the bridging title. This first-line/title is immediately followed by an epigraph from Chekhov’s “The Bishop”, thereby interrupting the poem to no apparent purpose. It’s a glaring technical misstep, and the poem suffers.

The truth is Two Tragedies is a little overstuffed, indecisive of just which story it should be telling and how much to tell. Another pass of the editor’s pen, a stronger focus on Susan’s own story, and the omission of some less-effective poems and epigraphs (three before the first poem even starts), could have greatly served the book. That Susan finds solace in her reading and her writing is important to her character, and to her story, but it’s not the whole story. Nonetheless, when she’s focused, Paddon is capable of some of the most touching, human poetry I have seen in a while. It is her first book, and I’m more than willing to chalk up any missteps to earnestness, enthusiasm, and commitment to the idea.

—Patrick O’Reilly

Patrick O’Reilly was raised in Renews, Newfoundland and Labrador, the son of a mechanic and a shop’s clerk. He just graduated from St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, and will begin work on an MFA at the University of Saskatchewan this coming fall. Twice he has won the Robert Clayton Casto Prize for Poetry, the judges describing his poetry as “appealingly direct and unadorned.”

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What Wolves Eat: Poems — Patrick O’Reilly

May 122014

Patrick O’Reilly is a bona fide discovery. I met him in an undergraduate senior projects creative writing class at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. He was wearing a tweed suit. With his mustache and parted hair, he looked a bit like pictures of E. M. Forster — Edwardian, an aesthete. He is from Newfoundland. He’s got poetry in his genes. His poems have an Irish registry, something in the rhythm, phrasing and diction. That gives him a glorious air, an authority, which, coupled with what he has learned from the Imagists and the early Moderns, renders him unique amongst the young poets I have come across. He already fits within the tradition. He has read and absorbed tradition. But then you’ve never read anything quite like this. Biblical, epic, dramatic, hammers and tongs, surgical phrasing. You just wish he’d go on.

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What Wolves Eat

Twice-banished, blood-spotted Cain
limps across the barrens,
the mute, unyielding ground of Half-brother Country,
far-far-east of Eden.

Eight wolves sprawl and watch
with indifference:
choosy beggars,
they will not eat scavengers,
tramps, trash-eaters.
Cain does not know what wolves eat;
he keeps walking, keeps not breathing.

He walks ’til sundown. Every limb pleads
“It wasn’t me. The first murderer was God.”
Adam in furs. Adam forcing the plough. Amateur.

Shivering among twigs,
his back to the cold cold ground
his chest to the cold night air,
he falls asleep inventing names for himself:
Cain the First Born Man,
Homebody,
Stanza-Maker,
king and government and nation.

Then, always, the vivid dream:
a fist reaching into the wheat,
clenching a paleolithic stone,
red tendon, white knuckle, black stone
raised high against the sun,
smacking him into wakefulness.

The Offer

I’m sitting on a rock,
throwing rocks at the harbour,
chewing on the word husband.

Love is a corset word,
snug on the girl
that can hold her breath.

But husband.

That’s a word about a house,
and I’ll be good
god-damned if I’m hitched
to three rooms, seven youngsters.

Lost

His collar’s been dry this ages.

I heard nine different places

his ship spun round
like a crumpled needle.

But he won’t talk about it.
What monsters, murders
he beheld
in that crumbling ocean-close

I’d only be making up.

i mBolc

Rubbers sob at every step.
He’s come to the high place of the meadow
this first thawed day of spring.

The Ground quivers – swelled belly,
starved for whatever’s near:
booted feet, the heads
of shovels, picks, beads of sweat.

The constant striking aches – strike, strike,
gaffing the ground,
gouging down to the meadow’s toothless maw.

He feeds the meadow his horse;

junk by salt-stained junk she falls
into the ground like coppers.

Croft

Last New Year’s Eve (or day, it’s hard to tell
’cause every other soul was gone aloft),
while the dregs of rum were settling in the keel,
himself stayed up with the backhoe driver, Croft.

The bottle drained, Croft stumbled to his feet:
“Before I go, now, do one thing for me.
You sang a song once, this time years ago,
sing that song – I’ll dig your grave for free.”
Half-dreaming in the hallway I could hear
how, instantly, that voice shivered with shame,
but then the old man’s voice came, keening clear,
smashed to Hell, but singing just the same.

On the day they put the body down,
Croft shivered with the handful dressed in black,
and cried to see that casket in the ground,
then turned to go and never would turn back.
At any rate, that grave was dug for free.

No one knows this story, now, but me.

Clothes He Never Wore

His pallmen hitched their gloves around the rail
and down he crossed the bar.

We waited, sole in gravel,
until the drizzle dried into our coats
until the paper flowers burst
until we knew he’d never
pull himself from the dirt.

Just the same, we backed to the truck.
Just the same we left.

/////////////…

That night we ransacked the closet, mined
a trashbag’s worth of oily sweaters, the shoes
from last Christmas, laces curled beneath the tongue,
three piece suit, sans mourner. But no

secret will, no pirate’s map, no
letter from a bastard brother.
Nothing but the clothes he never wore.

The Dance

In a disaster of movement, accordions gasping,
their feet flash off the floor, sounding claps like sparks
flying into the awestruck eyes, mouths of the guests.
Awestruck eyes – the bride’s, the groom’s
fixed to each other: her brown hair shaken
against the fine lace patterned shoulders, a smudge
of blackberry wine on her upper lip, moving too fast
for a kiss. It must have happened then:
some time in the dance, suddenly.
The next morning he rose
and she rose,
announced the arrival,
the spark flung between them,
gestating.

Oldest Man in Town

One afternoon he might have
one memory after another
wrecking themselves
against his idleness.

His eyes are vices
squeezing every flinch
of every dog for scrutiny.
Things have changed here.

Sundays from his window,
watching the procession,
the long procession
heading to mass,

he can see
what others must miss:
the bodies shifting in time,
their clothes rising and falling

in and out of fashion, their bodies
rising and falling from old age
to fresh youth over
and over and
over.

A for Argyle

On the day the Argyle was first due in spring
the baymen waited for hours at the landing,
sitting with their chins in their hands like girls
waiting for the boys to come dancing.

When they heard the steamstack’s trumpet
they followed it to the water’s edge:
the loud mechanical trumpet blast that beat just once
before she rose above the horizon, a plated beast,
the bowels belching soot, the rivets straining
like a harness around oxen shoulders.

They lifted their eyes in terrible faith,
but I was watching the little girl
cowering behind her mother’s sepia dress,
her eyes grown big enough
to reflect the whole of the monster.

Shelter

His was a body in want of a bar –
a corner of West Country shebeen,
his face lit by a mug of punch,
scratching doggerel on a scrap of rolling paper.

Instead he’d sit on the daybed,
browned and bow-shouldered
like rum out of the bottle.

Instead he’d sit on the daybed,
loudly quiet,
his breath barely white on the window,
and his bones not content with the room.

Sure he was never big.
Still they say he starved himself
right down to the ribs, as animals do,
and excused himself to the quiet
shelter of his stable.

—Patrick O’Reilly

Patrick O’Reilly was raised in Renews, Newfoundland and Labrador, the son of a mechanic and a shop’s clerk. He is studying English with a Concentration in Creative Writing at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, and expects to begin work on his MA this coming fall. Twice he has won the Robert Clayton Casto Prize for Poetry, the judges describing his poetry as “appealingly direct and unadorned.”