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| David Rivard |
Drawing to More: Standoff, Poems by David Rivard
Review by Marc Zegans
A central concern when taking up a book for review is
whether the volume in question is worth the reader’s investment. For many collections of poems the answer is a
nonchalant yes in the sense that if a reader picks up the collection and thumbs
through it, more than likely this reader will find a few pieces to his or her
liking. A critical reader may also find
some elements of the material fresh, novel, engaging, and possibly worth
unpacking and assimilating. From a
reviewer’s perspective, collections such as these function in much the same way
as the old vinyl record album, a container for a single and a great, quirky
b-side, along with a a few other pleasant but unremarkable tunes to fill out
the package. Such collections—because
the stakes for the reader are low—are easy to recommend. It’s not hard to say, “This is a gatherings
of poems well worth thumbing through.”
Less commonly, we come across a collection which functions
effectively as a sustained and directly engaging performance, a collection that
draws us into its world and makes us want to stick around. Such works manage the trick of tautly
sustaining a project, generating willing attention to the line, the stanza, the
page and the poem, while cultivating a sense of urgency, and desire in the
reader. The latter aspect can and often
does represent, for the reviewer, a kind of deceptive seduction, an
encouragement to relinquish critical faculties and simply be swept up in the
succulent moment. If we honor our craft, we find an eddy amidst the rush to
consider whether there is something worth giving over to with such abandon.
When the answer is yes, we rejoice and commend the book to our readers with
verve.
There’s a different kind of collection, more challenging for
the reviewer to engage and assess, the kind written by an older poet, one
skilled in the craft, wise enough to know the field’s present boundaries and
limitations, and concerned with its expansion. Such a poet may proceed by
arranging a set of interconnected and mutually dependent poems, not as series
or cycle, but as consort—a gathering of associates who know each other’s ways,
and who—we hope—play well together.
While such gatherings of poems may be accessible to and
while they may reward serendipitous inspection, their claims to value do not
fundamentally depend on such fortune.
Their worth depends rather on how the collection functions as a whole, truly functions, which is a different
matter from how it plays as gestalt.
Such books are harder to assess and harder to recommend both, because
the aesthetic bar they set for themselves is radically higher than the other
types of collections I have described and because a reader may have to do some
substantial wading before getting to solid ground. In order to judge whether the slog was and
will likely be worth the effort, a reviewer has to undertake the full journey
and weigh the effort before expressing an honest view.
Standoff, by David Rivard, an established poet with
five prior collections to his credit is a volume that puts us to this harder
test. Rivard’s collection develops as an
encounter with and passage through a poet’s experience of a fierce conundrum particular
to, and sharply battled in, late middle age—what comes when our best may simply
be to have struggled to a stand-off with the forces and internal failings that
threaten full and final dissipation.
The topic is by its nature challenging and it begs disappointment, or,
should standoff be the result, perhaps a wan version of Sisyphean nobility—a
grudging acceptance that our freedom lies in rolling the rock yet again up the
hill. Why would we want to read a book
that might arrive at this conclusion, and what about a journey into the
experience of standoff, as poignant and honest as this may be, would make us
want to spend the time there?
Perhaps, because it addresses pressing concerns. Rivard speaks in honest voice to a reader on
the cusp of such dynamic blockage; to a reader in its midst, and perhaps one
who has passed through to something else and can appreciate the nature and
experience of standoff and what follows in or perhaps as its wake. For readers such as these, and I count myself
one, Standoff, takes us with
vulnerability, but without self-pity into this world and invites us to walk
with the narrator through it, one difficult poem at a time. We learn quickly that we won’t find a quick
fix in a single poem, nor will we find satisfaction by flipping and dipping.
The cover of Standoff
is somewhat at odds, with its project, and this creates difficulties of
induction. Below the title, we find in a
smaller black font, the word “poems,” implying that we can take these as
one-offs, clustered around a theme, rather than as a collection of poems,
functioning as a consort, that do work together. This is simply not true: The power, beauty
and wisdom in this collection lies in how the poems inform each other and in
how they proceed. To access these qualities,
we must read and consider each one in relation to the others. By suggesting that the books contents were
more gathered than allied, the cover disserves the enterprise. We would have
been better met and more effectively led had perhaps the cover said less and
signaled more.
Structurally, Rivard draws us into Standoff, the experience and the book’s title poem (set as a hinge
in the book’s middle) by giving us a string of poems that force us to enter
intimately and uncomfortably into the tense realities of the narrator’s
situation. The first five poems scream for stanza breaks, but he doesn’t give
us a single one. Instead, he places us
in the numbing run-on of the stanzaless situation, so different from the
experience of life as a pearled-string of moments entered fully.
The first poem, “Greenwood Tonight, “ thrusts us quickly
into difficult and unpleasant questions about, the poem and its construction,
or perhaps the narrator as character and what he’s choosing to share. After the narrator observes, “I miss myself
most/these days with friends/I feel a distance from/when talking to;” he
rapidly raises the stakes, describing how he stands, “clear-eyed &
cold/amidst the murderous/machinery of our birthright—“The careful consonance
of mmmmms denoting both self and
situation tells us that these things are somehow related: But why? What is his pre-occupation with a situation
writ so large? Why is he invoking in
this poem forces on such a grand scale? And why does he then shift to cheap,
commercial surreal imagery, “…in the telenovela/based
on my life/tall prairie grasses bent/by an Alberta wind/would sprawl
snugly/I’ve been told/ behind a woman vaulting/In blue pajama bottoms” Rivard drives us toward questions, making
them pile in our mind, until we reach poem’s bottom, on which there is no line,
simply a statement made question by dint of a mark, “greenwood
nightfall--/that’s what calls me now?”
He continues and escalates the jumble in “Less Than More
Than,” blending images of a used Mazda, Peshawar, Murdoch and privatization,
into “ideas,” then question again, landing finally on a double assertion—“a
little foolishness/goes a long long way, I’d say;/a lot drops dead/in it’s
tracks”—offered without persuasive image, evidence or logical support. Arriving at these flip, clichéd conclusions
orthogonal to the text that preceded them, we are left to throw up our hands
and say, “So what?”
It’s at this moment, and at many that follow in the string
of poems leading to “Standoff,” that we’re forced to the dilemma of whether to
put the book down and walk away, or to seek a real answer, and Rivard having
led us into the predicament of a late-middle life standoff offers neither
encouragement nor direct answer. Having
committed to reading the collection, I chip away: “Why the cliché?”
I know from the preceding material that the poet is capable
of original image, tightly crafted line and novel thought, so is it possible
that these flaccid assertions are a device meant to represent the character and
the motive structure of the collection’s perhaps fictive narrator? If I take the answer to be yes and place the
poem’s entire narrative in quotes, thereby making its lines expressions of a
character constructed by the poet, the cliché’s begin to make sense. They’re the utterances of a man in pain, the
flailings of one gesturing without conviction at freedom through regression in
light of the deeper fear of a futile ending.
We know that he does not believe that foolishness is a solution to a
problem that has no answer better than standoff, and yet, having not come yet
to this place, the character dissipates his energy and ours with hackneyed and
fruitless assertion.
By so doing, Rivard makes us enter viscerally the experience
of a scared, limited, struggling individual, fraught with resistance,
reluctantly traveling down the path to a balance of forces in which survival
without progress may be the most that this protagonist (or any protagonist) can
achieve. The clichés bring us to this
dispiriting generalization, and in the succeeding poems, the poet pushes us to
this place again and again. If we
continue, we will share this brutal path to its likely foregone conclusion.
In “Birth Chart,” he begs “Simone,” presumably his daughter,
“…don’t think badly/of me when I’m dead & you’ve gone deep/ into the
distance of love tangles, moneyed/
Interests & old-fashioned commutes…” He wants more, and vests in her life beyond
his perhaps the possibility of something more than standoff. The plea is earnest, because the character
has come to grief but not acceptance of the inevitability of standoff, “out of my reach/ your life will make itself
in struggle & love perhaps/dependent on the strength that will come/if only
I let go when you step out the door…”
But why should we believe him? In
part, because we know that the book does not end with “Standoff,” there are
many poems that swing beyond this hinge.
If we stay with it, we will learn what happens when this character meets
and passes the point of balance as dynamic tension under threat.
Will the poet teach us how to live in this state? Will he offer us something different and
more? Will standoff be a stasis that
breaks leading to a life richer and deeper?
For me to answer these questions would
be to strip from this collection the method by which it’s author realizes his
project, and realize it he does. If you
come to Standoff do so knowing that it’s virtue lies in its
completeness, its challenge in that you must travel entirely its crags and bogs
without guidepost or encouragement, and that you will gain its treasure only if
you stay the course. Standoff is
a demanding work by a mature poet that goes to a place many of us face, but
about which few of us speak with humility and candor. In giving us Standoff, Rivard opens
for us the possibility of drawing to something more.
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| Marc Zegans Left--Doug Holder--Right |
Marc Zegans is a poet and creative development advisor.
His most recent collections, The Underwater Typewriter and Boys in the woods
are respectively available at
