Book Reviews

To Be Surprised Every Day

David F. McFadden (Author) and Stuart Ross (Editor)
Why Are You So Sad?: Selected Poems of David W. McFadden. Insomniac Press
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George McWhirter (Author)
The Incorrection. Oolichan Books
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Reviewed by Daniel Burgoyne

Nominated for the 2008 Griffin poetry prize, Why Are You So Sad? is the most compelling book of poetry I have read this past year. These are poems that invite perpetual rereading, alive in each instant and open upon return. "To be surprised every day" might have been a better title for the selected poems of a writer whose daily produce seems so effortless and unpretentious, whose constant innovation with the line, with voicing, with the very idea of a poem yields astonishment with the turn of almost every page.

I don't quite believe editor Stuart Ross' claim-perhaps it is McFadden's-that the order of the selection is randomly generated. I read through the book from beginning to end, and while the impression is sometimes bewildering in a chronological sense, requiring a quick thumb to the back of the book where most of the poems are commented on by McFadden, the progression and thematic patterning strikes me as too substantive to be random. Ross selects poems from a broad range of books like Intense Pleasure (1972) and The Art of Darkness (1984), rather than concentrating on the more well known books like Gypsy Guitar (1987). Perhaps it doesn't matter how the selection is organized because obliqueness is an art McFadden cultivates, like the random and almost anonymous encounter with Frank O'Hara during an Easter field trip to New York. O'Hara tells the young poet "never to let yourself / get bored by poetry."

One emphasis produced by this arrangement is McFadden's affinity with surrealism, as in the images littering "Desire Blossoms":

You know how you're walking at night
and the ground's covered with severed human hands
sticking up from the stinking ground like two lips
and the forefinger of each is pointing at you,
swiveling in synch as you slither by...

I'm not sure surrealism is the right word for it though. There is rarely anything like a non sequitur in McFadden. The juxtapositions seem purposeful, notices required of the poet like the "Lion in the Road." The "lion larger than six elephants" is "lying in the intersection of Bloor and Avenue Road": "what is it about me, why do things that most people scarcely notice affect me so, why can't I be like everyone else and simply turn and go back the way I came without honking? Why do I always have to give a damn?" The subconscious-if that's what it is-seems necessary.

Ross observes that McFadden's poetry is insistently social. Perhaps it is the shifting second person pronoun-poems are conversations, often punctuated with dream poems like "Greaseball" and "My Body Was Eaten by Dogs" as if the membrane separating individuals from each other was dissolved at the turn of a line. "Secrets of the Universe":

You tell her you don't want to dance
for there is too much snow
and not enough music
and she says you didn't mind
dancing with me last night.

And when you tell her she's mistaken
you didn't dance with her or anyone last night
she says oh yes you did...

leaving you to wonder about the part of your life 
that is secret even from you.

A finalist for the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, The Incorrection, by George McWhirter, Vancouver's first poet laureate, reads like a shambling fusion of observations in retirement and incisive flourishes of a master wit. I can't overemphasize how disorienting this combination can be. The first suite of poems, "Fluid Places," self-described as fey commentary and slender sonnets, eludes me completely with its transparent scenes of writing and enumerative miscellany. The second suite is a different matter altogether: "Epicuriosities and Po-Essays from the Dailies" begins with the bray and snort of daily news, poems that open around incidents of reported contemporary life taken from publications like The New York Times. These self-reflexive poems are perhaps the most innovative of the volume, dancing around topical or merely eclectic issues like how much water it takes to make a Californian t-shirt, an "absorption in juicy articles, a discussion." "Conviction," the third suite, is pre-occupied with love, and it is here that the governing theme of incorrection comes to the fore. The volume's epigraph told us, "In trying to correct an old wrong / I seem to create a new one"; and in "Yellow Isle," at "the Court of Incorrections / the indictments add up on an abacus." This promise of insight fades, perhaps appropriately, through the final suite of the volume, which is preoccupied with nostalgia and marked by cliché at points, as in the poem "What is the First Thing You Do in the Morning?" 

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #200 (Spring 2009), Strategic Nationalisms. (pg. 173 - 174)

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