Jake Byrne, Daddy: Poems

 

But I do try. I try so hard.
That’s why I bus to see my therapist mid-winter.
I am seeking his assistance with a complex project. (“PARALLEL VOLUMES”)

It is good to finally see a copy of Toronto poet and editor Jake Byrne’s second collection, Daddy: Poems (Kingson ON: Brick Books, 2024), following their full-length debut, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Across a loop and reloop of articulated, traced and repuporsed trauma, Byrne’s poems offer a curious blend of sexual swagger, explorations through and into “patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and queer desire” (as the back cover offers), and a degree of tenderness, including the very fact of the author dedicating the collection “to the memory of a little cat / named My Sweet Princess (2018-2023).” The poems assembled here are expansive, allowing for this large project built out of intricately-crafted small parts, opening with a poem of short lines held aloft by such wide open space. “My father calls to talk about my poems,” Byrne writes, offering a four-line stanza at the top of an otherwise empty page, “and seamlessly incorporates my words into his paranoid delusions. / He says I ought to be more careful what I write, implies the poems / come from a demon birthing itself through the vessel of my body.” This is Byrne in a further step of moving beyond composing poems to composing books, something already evident in the umbrella of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin, a structure that encompassed the entirety of the poems in that collection, but Daddy: Poems provides a more overt and more coherent book-length structure; and the coherence is further impressive through the assemblage of a variety of lyric shapes and purposes. “My parents taught me many things the hard way.” the poem “A POEM ABOUT MY PET CANARY II” offers, “But I cannot for the life of me recall / what the moral of this lesson was. // Do poems require moral lessons?”

Daddy: Poems is constructed in two roughly-equal halves—the title section, and “gnostic iambic pre-exposure jockstrap jukebox prophylaxis”—each of which offers poems that accumulate in swirls and sweeps, emotional gestures set with a precision that holds what otherwise might flail. There might be excess and messiness, but Byrne’s lyrics explore with such deep and empathetic clarity.

A baby is born between shadow and crevice

The baby cries out for the touch of a hand

The hand delivers the sting of authority

A man doles out; a boy receives

 

 

 

Splitting between black and white

I have not resolved my DADDY issues

I bring them to my bed to sleep with

Not terribly uncommon, is it (“II OF RODS”)

There’s a vibrancy to Byrne’s lyric, whatever the subject matter; an energy that can’t be denied, making for a powerful collection on trauma, desire and how one might move forward, even through the flailing, a flailing that might hopefully find its way toward something more stable, certain. “sometimes you know / by the crackle of static in the air,” begins the poem “event coordinator moving into / project management,” “the vibrations in the puddles / on the sopping sauna floor. / i had so rarely felt the virtues of a / tall white man before marco.”