Andrew Faulkner, Heady Bloom

  

Faust saw the devil

and Faust is made up.
Not to say the devil’s not real.
Abstraction accumulates 

in the body until made definite.
A fever dream, a bit of coke

in the night’s false bottom.
A faint droning unfolds

behind the eyes and an unpleasant
sensation wriggles free. (“ON VISIONS”)

Picton, Ontario poet Andrew Faulkner’s second trade poetry collection, after Need Machine (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013), is the remarkable Heady Bloom (Coach House Books, 2022), a book of meditations and conversations around headaches and pain relief, writing on Advil while offering classical references amid dense language and deft turns. “From spit and straw,” he writes, as part of the poem “WHAT ADVIL GETS UP TO,” “Advil assembles / amphetamine’s scarecrow cousin. // Advil sucks its teeth as it thinks. // Advil is thick, / as always Advil is thick, / with representation.” Heady Bloom writes a poetic response across headaches, as the opening poem, “ON VISIONS,” offers, further on: “The sensation / could be a headache only. // To obsess is a mistake. / What’s not to believe? Suffering // and ascendance require the same work. / The literature is clear: these things / happen all the time. // One is advised not to argue / with the extraordinary persistence of vision.” Through a remarkably fluidity, the narratives of Faulkner’s poems dismantle and reassemble with a remarkable ease, deftly turning corners and dodging traffic, working skillfully what should seem otherwise impossible. Heady Bloom is a book of big ideas and hard journeys, and even writes Advil against the late Canadian-born comedian Norm Macdonald, as the poem “Advil Clumsily Retells Norm Macdonald’s Moth Joke from The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” explores the failure to replicate Macdonald’s unique and gifted offering: “Advil’s wielded / explication like an ice axe // and the joke’s gone / the way of Trotsky, // theory murdered by praxis, / and what’s left is the most, // who’s staring down / a barrel-shaped dread, // and you, dear receiving end, / who must hold this shaggy // moment and hack through / the fact that Advil’s lost the plot, // can’t stick the punchline, / as the podiatrist has no clue // how to shoo the moth / from his office.”

I deeply admire the way through which Faulkner engages semi-familiar and familiar facts and references to write unexpected corners, akin to Tom Stoppard writing the spaces only he could see through Shakespeare’s Hamlet to compose his infamous play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). Through composing reflective passages on facts and truth, and the slippages of what both of those have become and might be, there are echoes of tone throughout reminiscent of works by Stephen Brockwell and David O’Meara; I could imagine either one of those Ottawa poets offering a lyric similar to the one that ends Faulkner’s poem “GUNS N’ ROSES PINBALL MACHINE”: “The game darkens the depot // like a sweetly blackened eye. / Skin discolours where blood convenes. // It's not quite pleasing. But whither the fun / in a jungle of leaving.”