Globe and Mail reviews Blert and Troubled
In blert, Jordan Scott gives us a kind of poetic abstraction of a completely different order than Karen Houle's (During). If abstraction is a disengagement from the familiar, then Houle's disengagement relies on the peculiarity of her syntax, so that we must ask ourselves what a word means given its position in a verse.
Scott's poetry, on the other hand, frequently ditches the notion of syntax altogether. Words don't need to mean anything when they can exist solely as physical matter, as literal building blocks, and for Scott, words are eminently physical, not only as ink printed on paper, but also as plosives, fricatives and taps, as a column of air shaped in his body and expelled from his mouth. Try saying this out loud: 'Brontosaurus lambada boom box, crunk bumps: knick-knack paddy whack tonsil clamcrack.' This physicality of language is especially significant to Scott's poetry because -- like Lewis Carroll, Somerset Maugham and John Updike -- Jordan Scott is a stutterer.
When a recognizable voice does emerge in blert, it comes to tell us something about the often unreliable engine of the author's mouth: 'If you brace a megaphone to my throat, you will hear a tiddlywink bleat, a lark rustle in the ripe corn, and my esophagus blunderbuss -- exhaust in your glossary.' The exuberance of this text is only enhanced by hearing Scott read from it aloud, when his own speech apparatus lingers and hesitates without warning, fondling random syllables as they struggle to become physical, audible, real, and then die in the air.
Admirably, Scott has taken his so-called impediment and from it crafted a poetry that is physically beautiful, conceptually rich, and relevant to the world outside the book that contains it.
Finally, we come to Troubled, by poet, novelist, playwright and visual artist RM Vaughan. Good lord, what a gorgeous and courageous book! I scarcely know where to begin, but here are the basics: Troubled is a memoir in poems; it chronicles the disastrous sexual relationship that Vaughan had with his actual (and unnamed) psychiatrist and the emotional, legal and professional fallout that ensued.
It is a story of lust and manipulation, of excitement and risk, and of a trust betrayed. It would be easy for any writer to let this kind of book sink into a morass of embittered diary entries and tawdry sentimentality, but Vaughan is too canny, too gifted for that.
What struck me most about this book, perhaps because of its appalling subject matter rather than in spite of it, is the equal measure of tenderness and disdain with which Vaughan conjures his own vulnerabilities and the exploitive tendencies of his abuser. He manages this very balanced feat precisely because he wields the tools of his poetry so well. The language is rich, involving, and evocative. The poems crackle with emotional and ethical efficacy. Recalling the moment the principal players acknowledge to each other that a line has indeed been crossed, Vaughan writes:
Here is where you cut my heart,
inserted snakes in the folds, blood holes -- garters
not pythons, not eels
nothing monstrous or broad,
fanged or rattle-tipped -- finger curls, not fists,
because you are so very clever, smart as salt.
Rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric, all the weapons in the poet's arsenal are strategically and expertly deployed here, and RM Vaughan, both as poet and as victim, achieves a final and decisive victory.
Paul Vermeersch is the author of three collections of poetry, with a fourth due in 2010. He lives in Toronto and teaches at Sheridan College.
