Marcus McCann, The Hard Return

He’s suspended in a porno of oppositions,

his particles part, the pause’s bowed drywall takes bets

on the boxing match of spent jerk vs. Zappa plunge.

And caught in pestle and grist, hassle and pest,

you – wimp, worrywart, Pythagorean pilot of plan B,

oh, you bookish pansy – wait for the unclenching whup,

for his frame to tap the coup he’s singing. (“Scene in Which a Neighbour Tries to Jump / from Your Window onto His Own Roof”)

Over the months since his first trade collection, Soft Where (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2009), former Ottawa poet Marcus McCann’s gymnastic poems have become nearly bulletproof, composing lines one can bounce both quarter or a round off. His second collection, The Hard Return (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2012), one of the final season of Paul Vermeersch’s tenure as poetry editor (before heading off to Wolsak & Wynn) writes of dislocation and location, writing the tension between a series of opposite positions. The density of McCann’s lines are incredibly packed, and move at lightspeed, nearly light-headedly so.

Prayer

To be read aloud in unison

Non-proprietary methods of composition:

collaboration, enmeshment, mutually assured

instruction, Hail Mary, heightened sense of self.

Shoulder to shoulder, odd phalanx of bowled-over

lover-friends-lovers. Cosmic spirals of communication,

retuning, junk talk, yammer, here is a voice

and we are using it.

Here is a voice and we are using it.

Loose, jangly, not-quite-unison,

Discording. Us in a nighttime parking lot,

song-spilled, gin-singed, stab-slatted, yonder-longing

sketching on the side of a convenience store

that we are rattled. We use our hands sparingly.

Rickety wicker of our common selves.

Brittle, inhibited, possessive, jealousy ours,

especially. Us or a common alternative supplied.

Our shares in publicly traded company

indeterminate and valuable. Pleasingly left

guessing in the futures market.

In The Hard Return, McCann writes poems that pilfer and magpie from just about everything that surrounds, reshaping them into his own fantastic entities, and include commentary and critique on human interactions as well as the failure and confusion of those interactions. His poems are nearly those of Montreal poet Jon Paul Fiorentino’s, but with a denser line and far less pessimism. This is no Alpha or Beta Male but an eye that rakes and rages, processes swirling with comprehension. One of the threads through the collection is the critique somehow in the titles alone, a series of poems that lift lines from other sources [see Cameron Anstee’s review/commentary on the same here], his “Twenty-Two Toronto Poets Wake up on the / Bathroom Floor and Discuss Their Hangover,” “Twenty-Two BC Poets Use Orgasm As a / Metaphor for Belonging,” and “Twenty-Two Ottawa Poets Fail to Agree about / the Morning” (all of which list in the colophon the poems and poets borrowed from for each piece, in order of appearance). The Toronto poem begins:

It is spring over the porcelain bowl

and needs total silence. It carries you

hacking the day into shape on the phone, there is still no

water and erotics

to show I was prepared to die. Here, orange

stares at the grief-plunge.

I call myself every bad word I know.

How does he manage to boil so much down into such small spaces? He even includes a poem for leaving Ottawa for Toronto, “Town in a Long Day of Leaving,” the title poem to a small chapbook originally self-produced in a give-away run around the time he left. A great believer in the power of chapbooks, a number of these poems appeared previously in various chapbooks, including the works Heteroskeptical (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2007), Town in a Long Day of Leaving (Ottawa ON: The Onion Union, 2009; above/ground press, 2009) and The Glass Jaw (The Onion Union, 2010), but a handful of the chapbooks he’s produced over the years. You know there’ll be more.

Poem for a Precious Chapbook

If spine is sheep, a fold

is a fold.

If spine is a wallet, fold

is a billfold

If spine is gimme one good reason, fold

is twofold.

If spine is a puzzle, fold

is baffled.

If spine is smothering grandma with a pillow, fold

is her, muffled.

If spine is a whip and harness, fold

is a blindfold.

Anne Stone's Delible

Very different from her first two novels is Anne Stone's third, Delible (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2007). A Montreal author working the boundaries between fiction, poetry and performance, Stone's first two novels appeared nearly back-to-back, with her first small novel, Jacks (Montreal QC: DC Books, 1998) published just a few months before her second book, Hush (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1999). After moving to Vancouver a few years ago, she started working on her large novel about missing children, and has been quietly working for quite some time, releasing fragments in side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (2002) and in The Capilano Review, among other venues. Compared to the language from the first two books, the language of Delible is far less lush, less lyric, moving the story through the story itself, predominantly of how a fifteen-year-old girl in the town of Streetsville in the 1980s copes with the disappearance of her sister, barely a year older than she is. How does a teenage girl cope? The main character, Melora (known as "Lora"), for all of her teenaged reactions and hormones, is a girl who sees the bad but manages to find the good in just about everyone, eventually. It's a quality that comes even further out after the strange disappearance of her sister Melanie (known as "Mel"), which her single mother and almost everyone else immediately presumes is simply the "troubled" teenage girl Mel running away from home, yet again.

Melissa Anne Sprague and Melora Ann Sprague. Melora and Melissa. Our mom named us so that we would sound alike. Of course, people were always shortening our names. I would’ve liked it if they shortened me to Mel too, but they always called me Lora and called Melissa Mel, as if they wanted to distinguish us more than we would ourselves. Mel was the first born, and so, was supposed to be named for our grandmother, Penny, but Mom didn’t want to name her for so little money. "Why don’t we just call her Chintzy and be done with it?" she said. And so, my sister was named Melissa. Melissa Ann Sprague.

Delible works from that singular point and holds there, moving through the rest of the book in a strange kind of pattern that isn’t holding and isn’t really furthering, moving from that singular point of Mel's disappearance. Essentially, Delible is a book about forgiveness; working back and forth through the time following Mel's disappearance and flashbacking to the events that might have led up to her "leaving," the main focus of the book comes through the voice of Lora (with others, such as the girls' mother and their paternal grandmother as well), trying to figure out the now-empty space where her sister used to be. Not entirely suburb or urban or rural, the family lives on the edges of 1980s Toronto in the now-defunct Streetsville, a city that only seems to be referenced as the place where the subway is, and where Mel's belongings are eventually discovered, leaving Lora convinced that her sister hasn’t left, but has been taken; to her deepening frustration, it takes longer for anyone else to either realize or admit this, leaving Lora lost in her own spreading and singular darkness, with very little for her to turn to. Originally from Streetsville herself (Anne Stone even attended Streetsville High School, the same alma mater as Red Green creator/counterpart Steve Smith), the place itself has long since been overcome by Mississauga, once a suburb outside of Toronto, which itself fell prey to the Toronto Supercity.

In some ways, it wasn’t Mel who was gone, it was everyone who hadn’t loved her
that was gone. After Mel, my field of vision became unstable. I became prone to drift. In all things. It was an effort, a real effort, to focus in and talk to people. The ones I clung to were Mom and Uncle Dave, Val and the Woodsman.

The world that went on without Mel in it became dim. I could list the things that were real to me on one hand. Mel's old glasses were real, and so were the people I could see with the glasses, the signs of hurt eaten into, made soft, by her powerful lens.

Nobody and nothing else mattered.

When I missed her badly enough, I could put on the glasses and we could look out at the world together. I could sense her, the moment I stopped seeing everything clearly and my world clouded up like hers would when she would take her glasses off each night before slipping into bed.

After she was gone, my sister and I were more alike than ever. We shared the same lens and we shared the same language. My experiences did not happen apart from her. My experiences did not happen apart from her. I could not, in my head, split off from Mel because she was gone. To think about Mel meant my experiences, even those without her, were bound up with her still.

For all of the beautiful lush language of her earlier works, Stone's writing has always embraced a particular kind of darkness, writing about illness, insanity, suicide and other dark threads throughout almost everything she has written, but always with a particular kind of light somehow seeing its own way through it, no matter how dark it might get. How does an author or a character find light, in such a darkness?

With all the media attention given to the horrors of the Pickton trial, the west coast is overwrought with the issue these days, and apparently Stone is co-editing an issue of West Coast Line dealing with some of these same issues of disappearing women that is due out any day now.