House of Anansi Press, 2008
Read by Nick Thran
Kevin Connolly’s 2005 collection, drift, delivers more immediate pleasure than any Canadian poetry collection in recent memory. The poems don’t rely on a voice or personae to carry their momentum forward so much as buzz “like a bee on a psychotropic leash”: what is glib can turn earnest quick, the pastoral can back-flip into a surreal dreamscape, and the more rigid forms feel like aquariums perfectly suited to watching his multifarious digressions swim. drift is so good precisely because it satisfies a certain expectation for multiplicity. His fourth collection, the muscularly titled Revolver, is packaged as a challenge (I’m quoting the back-cover) “to the idea that an honest poetic voice need be singular, static, egocentric, and bound by convention”. 45 different revolutions through form or vocal register, 45 shots from 45 chambers. I’m not sure how many readers out there still wholeheartedly adhere to the idea Revolver confronts; I thought that the modernists sunk that “singular, static…” stuff years ago. It might be important for readers already familiar with his work to ask if we even have a sense of what Kevin Connolly’s voice singularly would be? Would we know, without being told, when it was being subverted? In keeping up with the quick wit and “angular logic” of his poems, part of the pleasure of reading him is already wrapped up in expecting the kinetic, the unconventional — that his vocal registers and forms could change from poem to poem.
“Terre Haute” opens things up where drift left off, a trip back through the seasons, heading south through the States, where “it suddenly makes no sense in reverse”. Connolly’s poems are strongest moving at this speed, where his surface inventories — plates “piled up with straws and Jell-O and the ends / of fish-sticks” and “White Castles and / giant inflatable gorillas colliding in the dark” — can be stacked one on top of the other in a bizarre kind of syntactical jumbo-burger. At this speed the occasional lyric postulation, such as “what could they really know/ (if that’s even a word anymore) about us, / about themselves” gives way quickly to the “I”-negating “bright bristling rushing / surfaces” — or what another poem calls “the underrated glamour of being”.
For all of their supposed variation, the voices in Revolver spend a lot of time wrapped up in the recurring question of how best to destroy the idea of a poetic self. In “Powder Keg”:
“The violins declare
my death wish uninteresting.”
In “Counterpane”:
“…Interpretation
that’s where the problems start”
In “Company”:
“Bloom says it’s about erasing others,
digesting them, spitting them out as you.
Really it’s more about smothering yourself,
your shaky lines…”
Yet it’s these knowing winks to the project “at large” that come across as authorial and detract from what the collection seems to be trying to accomplish.
I don’t mean to imply that there’s not a lot to like about Revolver’s variety. “Litany” is a poem that manages to come across as both deliciously hyperbolic and sincere, with a killer pun or two to boot: “Did their throats emit anything resembling a pun?/ No. /So they took their punishment honourably?” “Pellucidar” beautifully pits the light world of childhood storybook fantasy against the dark realization of violent culpability, where a baby sitter tripped with a booby-trapped skipping rope never comes back again, and:
Steve King was my best friend, until he
boiled down a raptor’s bone and beat my extinct
and endangered species drawings at the science fair.
The okapi and white tiger, reduced to tribes of dozens;
panda, fragile bamboo porn star; the passenger
pigeon, whose flocks once darkened the sun…
Here again we see that Connolly is most successful when carried by the torque and momentum of the individual poem. Then a childhood story can fan out into broader implications, or in the midst of playing games the voice or personae can openly acknowledge a moment when its guard is down: “I really need Ted Lilly to throw the hook. / It changes nothing, but it’s suddenly important now.”
One also wonders why many of the more overt language experiments in Revolver, such as “Three Sonnets (Assembly Required)” “Three Songs” “Antonia Is Not the Plasterer” and “Fatherly” are jumbled together in the book’s second section, rather than being interspersed with poems such as “Injury” “Revolver” and “Love Song”, which rely more on shifts in vocal register within standardized stanza forms. This book seems to beg even more for the kind of random alphabetical organization that drift had. As is, the poems in Section II seem relegated to a gallery of their own, the majority of them being constructed in three takes or sections, inadvertently (I think) establishing a predictable pattern to his experiments. It feels like a revolving door, to go back to possible connotations of the book’s title: problematic not because the poems experiment so wildly, but because in the final three sections — with the exceptions perhaps of “Rewind” “No Windows” and “Pull” — the more overt language experiments seem like they’ve already been given their pink slips and been ushered back out.
These quibbles aside, there are moments in Revolver when the collection feels less like a “challenge” or “high-wire act” and more like what I imagine it was intended it to be: the work of a poet in love with the sheer range and abundance of tools available to anyone who practices this art. Connolly’s poetry is suspect of the lyric impulse, of canonical dogma. Much of the pleasure that arises from his work comes from the difficult twists and turns he takes in an effort to “[scare] that/ cynic heart you worship straight” (“Last One on the Moon” ). Tear the cover off this book (well, don’t really, it’s beautifully designed) and you have a book that buzzes — albeit more self-consciously and a little less frenetically than drift — over the same commendable theme, what to make of: “the / mother lode, the surfeit of beauty, / which on this day is just a fancy way/ of saying lots, too much, skidloads, plenty.”
