Eyewear on Sitcom

Todd Swift's blog, Eyewear, just ran an in-depth review of David McGimpsey's Sitcom. I've put some highlights below, but the full review can be read at http://toddswift.blogspot.com:

David McGimpsey's Sitcom (Coach House, 2007) marks the writer’' much-anticipated return to poetry (it's been six years since the release of his Hamburger Valley, California [ECW Press, 2001]). As expected, Sitcom is sometimes uproariously funny, always pop-acculturated and intimidatingly literate. Of course, McGimpsey's humour has always been thoroughly noted by critics, while the formal, thematic, and philosophic scope of his work (i.e. the more literate elements) -- omnipresent in Sitcom -- often willfully ignored. Critics will grant that McGimpsey's humour succeeds; however, that very humour is also used by those same laudatory critics to dismiss McGimpsey's efforts as trivial or light. An even greater problematic: because McGimpsey has shown repeatedly he possesses a capacity to access and effect a comic mode with ease, it's wrongly assumed that McGimpsey's always only working within that mode. Thus, those poems that seemingly challenge such a purview of his work are either misread as exercises in hip postmodern irony or damned to be, in the end, utterly heteroclitic works in his oeuvre.

Thus, his moving elegies to Alan Hale, Jr., Hank Williams, John Kordic, for example, have suffered damning fates, as have poems like 'As Seen on ER' and 'Ancient Rock Mythology' -- the former, a seemingly simple ekphrastic study of an episode of ER, though in fact an expression of empathy for a TV character-actor lost in the background (not quite an extra, but definitely not a star); the latter is a lyric meditation, in four parts, on the process of losing child-like whim and sovereignty in an adult world governed by 'codes of maturity.'

And then ...

Moreover, there is an emotional transparency that charges the opacity of the flora and fauna of TVland and English poetry to which McGimpsey's speakers' allude, and vice versa. It's this shift that marks the occasion of McGimpsey's Sitcom as a significant one: composed entirely of demanding, extended monologues and intermittent ventures into the sonnet, the collection -- McGimpsey's most accomplished -- repeatedly foregrounds the essential interanimation of humour, pop culture and literary learning within the complex and (more often than not) damaged psyches of his various dramatic personae. And the source of this damage is, and always has been for McGimpsey, the imminence and immanence of loss. Thus, what his early work only suggested, and what Sitcom finally makes irrefutable, is this (stand back: here I go very much against the grain of popular opinion): McGimpsey is first and foremost an elegiac poet -- a designation, to be clear, that still allows for his timely comic touches.

Then, after an analysis of the poem 'Irresistible':

What else is there to say, except that with this poem, in particular, as well as other monologues from Sitcom ('Invitation,' 'Reunion,' 'Manhattan,' 'Sitcom'), McGimpsey leaps to the front of a generation of essential Canadian poets -- such as Stephen Cain, Jason Camlot, Kevin Connolly, Wayde Compton, and Steve Venright -- now in (or soon approaching) the primes of their respective careers. And, ultimately, 'Irresistible' should serve as parallax for McGimpsey's entire oeuvre thus far: in other words, it's the poem that forces previously unsympathetic, confused, or single-minded readers and critics (i.e. those who think he's a surface comic poet only or he's all-irony all the time) to re-orient themselves as readers and thus come to read McGimpsey's work in a new, more comprehensive and evolved manner.