Vallum Magazine

Review by Jason Rotstein

Primer on the hereafter by Steve McOrmond.
(Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 2006, $17.00)

Steve McOrmond is a regional poet with an extraordinary range. As we proceed through Primer on the Hereafter, we are tempted to proclaim: this is a “Great Canadian Poet.” In this new collection, McOrmond takes stock with many of the traditional great literary themes: history, nature, mortality, temporality, and individual vs. collective identity. His sweep is great, his ambition on display aplenty. Here is a promising Canadian poet, who on first encounter can sit pretty, while we admire the sheen of an effortless poetry. What could be missing?

We want more from our poets today. They may know how to act, how to say, and even possess the semblance of a recognizable philosophy of their own; but for the poet to truly compel—for the Canadian poet to compel—he/she must do more.

Primer on the Hereafter is a selection of poems from the imagined point of view of a person living in the time and space “hereafter.” The many references to “crows” and “death” assure this, but the collection is actually more about changing-times. If this collection has apocalyptic sights or potentials—like Nietzsche—who is mentioned more than once throughout, it is a collection about memories; a sort of “last will and testament” from the imagined perspective of one who has crossed over and has only a precious few memories left with which to relate our present existence.

But this is not what this collection is wholly about. McOrmond’s conception is there, but this book of poems is actually I’ve said already about changing-times and the march of time. Poems like “Stockholm,” “Popular Science,” “White Mazda blues” and “Red Planet” are the kind of poems that define a particular space and time—our own—and go further to create a new cultural order in poetry. They form the core of this collection, and they promise a new very exciting poetry.

We cannot be fooled by the titles of these poems—“What remains,” “Clear-cut, as seen from above” and “So this is goodbye,” and others; McOrmond is not pessimistic or eerie or entirely apocalyptic in tones, the poems in collection come through full of optimism and new life.

I want to look first at the poems that position themselves alongside or in relationship to the Beaux-Arts. Poetry has frequently thought of itself in relationship to “Fine Arts.” We picture Rilke in Rodin’s studio, and more recently with the poetry of the New York School of Poets often produced directly in the studio, poets, among them Steve McOrmond, are looking to art for inspiration and presenting poetry and art side-by-side.

McOrmond’s interest in art is not an inherited gesture. In the poems, “Self-portrait as the middle-aged fool,” “Man in a room full of nudes,” “Self-portrait #33,” McOrmond performs an artistic study of a subject. In “The little-girl in Poltergeist,” he builds an image with artistic eye to his subject. The poem opens: “While her parents sleep, / the television keeps her / under its watchful eye” (59). This idea has comparisons with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, but the end of the poem imagines differently,

The light
we walk into at the end of days, not
a white tunnel, diffuse and benign,
but the pixellated glare of TV
reading us head-to-toe
in a suddenly darkened room. (59)

McOrmand is obviously tackling some very weighty subject matter. On the one hand, McOrmond seems intent on flipping the religious image of the “light at the end days” on its head by telling us that it is in fact in his version “dark at the end of the tunnel.” But this image may never reach focus and may remain confused by the effects going on around it. The sound of the words here are not rough or foreboding and the sexualizing of the “subject” earlier on in the poem may go against the image of the “darkened room.” If the aim is to shock, the necessity is never delivered.

Another poem that presents hermeneutical dilemmas for me is “Meander & Co.” The title, written as is, can only remind one of Sylvia Plath’s “Death & Co.,” from the Ariel series. This seems also to be inline with the theme of the “Hereafter.” Because of this unmistakable association, the images in the poem then seem to acquire a terrible horror when we compare them to what we know of the life of Sylvia Plath. The poem is lighthearted and does not possess the style of “Death & Co.” but is frightening, in the way, that Sylvia Plath’s poems are often frightening. It is quite possible, if we choose, to read that double-edged sword-like potential a la Plath into this poem. The poem begins: “I just hope we get lost and soon” (41). In the second stanza it acquires mystic or prophetic quality:

We passed the last signpost ages ago.
Moving deeper into rain, its wordless persistence.
Murky underwater light.
The spruce trees shuddering like wet dogs. (41)

Numerous allusions to Plath can be established and configured. Could the poet be speaking to Plath to directly? Evidently, it is a poem that puzzles and asks for further sustained readings in connection with Plath’s “Death & Co.” Whether Plath is its original model or not, the connection is important in understanding McOrmond in the context of other poets of mortality.

Sylvia Plath is also a good reference point for speaking about McOrmond. Like, Plath, “performance” is the topic of conversation with McOrmond. In “Popular Science,” McOrmond does not overwhelm us with his musicality of language but he deserves high marks for his readiness to take a risk at every turn to entertain an audience:

A long time ago, you believe it might be possible
to find one key that would unlock the whole shebang—
those giddy days teaching amusement park physics. (43)

One would never think to use the word “shebang,” if not for McOrmond. The lines as a unity may be difficult to get our mouth around and quite an earful on first measure, but at the end I think the poem really works.

McOrmond is most effective, however, and most economic in “Norman.” The whole poem is an excellent burst of energy:

The only guy in grade nine who can grow
a moustache, you’ve got the balls to go toe-to-toe

with Father Tate—cracking your knuckles in class,
hawking up a gob and spitting on his shoe.

Your casual relationship with violence,
a dreadful economy. You know precisely how

to inflict the most damage with the least expenditure,
making an example of someone twice your size,

forcing him to turtle on the ground. (27)

His poetry has that effortless quality in appearance but may at times become ponderous when it stretches for preachy meanings. One example is “your casual relationship with violence / a dreadful economy.” But the poem works because the language is simple, compacted, concentrated and because we see the poet step outside himself and the torrential downpour of “I’s” that seems to rain down in these collection. He escapes his comfort zone.

McOrmond could benefit from an attempt at formal innovation but he is already a developed a poet with much to say. He is a poet with a regional way about his hometown, Toronto, in poems like “Finch Station,” but also one with a regional way about places as far removed as the “Red Planet” and “Stockholm.”

I have difficulty, though, at times ascertaining where in McOrmand the performance ends and the poetry begins. If his interest in “Stockholm” and the “Far East” and his interest in “Clear-cutting” are part of a performance to show us that he is a cosmopolitan poet and a socially conscious one—and there is evidence for this argument—the sense that the collection seems so well programmed, neatly packaged and carried off without a hitch—I keep telling myself that this is role-taking is better than nothing. Or is it? McOrmond is best when he gets away from the program.

Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein lives in Brighton, UK, where he is completing a MA in Critical and Creative Writing. His art, film and literary criticism are available from many publications in North America and the UK. Recent articles are forthcoming or appearing in Film Studies, EI8HT, The New Welsh Review, Books in Canada and Rain Taxi. He may be reached at jason.rotstein@gmail.com.