be comforted
beware
The ending here, “beware”, leads us into the next poem, “Old Joe”: “you remember Old Joe, the handyman, helped me on the farm, burned down the house, made us all sit out in the fields and forests and on the beaches under the stars / Old Joe / once the husband of Mary, the luminous mystery strange paleface Joe, you think maybe he is crazy? where is Joe now we don’t see him any more? hanging out in the backwoods or listening at the door?” In “Old Joe” we get humour and paranoia braided together as they often are, so we don’t know which is the true story as is also often the case.
Then the poem opens our view further to the possibility of chaos right behind our door. Here we are introduced to the ironic underpinnings of much of Gadd’s writing.
Gadd delights in using both drama and irony, almost as some painters delight in the quality of the paints they use. These are some of the most basic materials in Gadd’s work.
This poetry is full of these movements of doubled story and thought. The writing is exact, deep, covers philosophy, politics, art, history and psychology. It deals particularly with our fears (dread and paranoia—as with “Old Joe”), our pleasures and our insights as well as more mundane, everyday happiness and sadness. And finally, this book is full of a wonderful use of language and is brilliantly written.
Maxine Gadd is a poet’s poet and also a poet for anyone who wants their minds and their lives enriched. When I first saw Maxine she was trying out for Euripides’ Bacchae and I was astonished by her screaming energy as she flew across the floor. Such drive, such energy, such access. Maxine’s poetry has this same access. Maxine is one of our best contemporary writers. Read this book and you will understand why I say this.
It has always seemed that Gadd’s poetry should have had a much larger exposure and more attention that it has, until now, received. Lost Language, Gadd’s largest book, was published by Coach House Press in 1982. Since then there have been a number of chapbooks published but because she has been a prolific writer for most of her life there is still a good amount of her work which needs to be introduced to a larger audience. With this new book New Star is starting to address this oversight, for which they should be thanked.
Maxine’s reading aloud of her poetry is so complex and dramatic that if you have ever attended one of her readings it will have made it very easy to hear her works when they are on the page. Yet people who haven’t heard her read have been as impressed as I have been by the poems on the page.
In her teenage years and a bit after that Gadd sang in coffee houses, and during that period she was also an actor in community and university theatre. This may help to highlight and explain why Gadd’s vocal abilities are so great. Along with these abilities there is also Gadd’s philosophical emphasis on the voice as having importance as the main origin of poetic utterance. Perhaps due to these factors Gadd is able to slip (or leap) from one idea, emotion or tone to another; for example, from grief to pleasure to straight exposition and back, in one sentence.
One thing to remember about Maxine is that she is a pioneer. Many writers have been inspired by her. Her feminism and other political concerns had a language-centred approach ten or fifteen years prior to the emergence of these ideas in Canadian literature at large. Her refusal of the outwardly imposed boundaries of syntax and line have led her to language play that has become, to some degree, more recognized today. Her dramatic presentation has never really been emulated; no one can come up to the level of her subtle and exacting performances.
Gadd was brought up a Marxist and the social and economic analysis of the power in her surroundings is so ingrained as to be almost subliminal, but it is there, rational and clear-eyed. It is embodied here in poetry but there is constant, complex, analytical power operating in Gadd’s poetry. This includes multitudinous debris, “rich in excrement”, and is full of the vitality almost always necessary for creation. For example, there is the energy of “a temple for Parasvati”:
then i woke in a dream of rage
of a white-haired naked child
the blaze of her rage
the urge
of every being
to be free
to rise
only
when the call comes
[...]
and the bomb
will be laid
in a sealed
tomb
The fluency in these poems is important. Gadd believes in the importance of open speech, uttered without mental or emotional censorship. Yet the mind never hesitates to subvert and redirect these thoughts as soon as they misstep, get lazy, or boring. So that the twists and turns of our most intimate language are caught on the page. In this way, the lyrical aspects of language appear and mutate rapidly as in “alba for Howard”:
hyssop and rue
the moon
inconjunct
void-of-course
my mouth
stuffed with dust
i go rowing with Charon
[...]
trees
cannot save themselves
from worm and butterfly
entire species die
in this coarse course
soothed
with reason
in summer
the sweet brief place
i write this at dawn
when there is
song
Although much of the writing in Backup to Babylon is complex, this poem ends in complete simplicity as death sometimes demands.
The poetry here comes close enough to our own fears that we may not want to pay attention to it, and yet considering these pains and fears is, in the end, a relief. Drama and irony go hand in hand here, pointing out our essential singleness and necessity and yet impossibility of dismissing our fears of separation and death. The poem “backwards” starts with:
every day yu slide a little backwards into the
woodpile that shrinks into the hungry void.
face it; it aches, if you never leave yr home you’ll
never have to go home alone.
On the other hand in “sailing to San Salvador” the poet imagines humourous and exuberant natural wealth:
do you believe
in the good
wind
the water from heaven
sharks and turtles
struggle aboard
for yr soup
There are also poems which start out as clearly political but which go deeper than usual, such as in “for the iwa’s Jack Munro upon betraying Solidarity”:
pickup of the month club
maybe one welfare recipient to take home
a lottery
sweet flower of “the great unwashed”
[...]
armadas of trawlers and trollers, draggers and
hookers
angry
that dreams be confined
by one scheme
a dead man’s dream
[...]
when a man is weak he is ignored or exploited
by other men
and a woman
what will she see
a big cock
unemployed
that withereth away
like the State never will
six hundred miles from the shore
Space Mother waits
we go out to her
trembling
The hope was so great, the feeling so complete that as the betrayals come down on top of them both men and women are driven into first destroying each other and then themselves. Then the choice of facing the emptiness of their anger and despair or falling into madness—the imagination, the world of the Space Mother, creator and destroyer—drives them (us) back into the ocean of the unconscious, while the fantasy allows for the double (or triple) perception which exposes and releases our grief.
I could give a subject for each poem but that would only be a small segment of the whole poem. Still there are some parts which are so clear they beg to be quoted as in “notes for an opera for Chinatown”:
is where the walls are
where you are?
Old Homogenous
digs away
at the Inner City
with his huge toy
the orange back hoe
antique
tiles
in the garden
shattered
today
Old Homogenous, the force which standardizes us and turns us all into identical cogs or pieces of exchange in a mechanical or monetized world is made up of both the forces of oppression, the market economy, many aspects of our own cupidity, and also a personification which hearkens back to deeper, more general powers of schizoid or split attention. The poet, with rapid, sharp images, slices open the poem which allows us to become conscious of and experience this moment of sorrow over our wasting of our world and then move through this and beyond into new action. Then, just as quickly, the poem moves on to other areas.
This poem and the book end with a four-page coda entitled “the seer’s song” and “the dancer’s song”:
once again the well-scrubbed hero
bursts out of bubbles
the house leaps up in an explosion from heaven
the angels catch the pieces
test
skin prints for identities
write it all down
Thus the lively, mythic carousel of this final poem ends with the protagonist, or writer, writing and thus expanding the complexity of the work while incorporating the writer and her alter ego directly into the poem in a slightly light tone which underscores these images.
A range of humour runs as counterpoint through the book sharpening and leavening the words. Sometimes it becomes enlivening and humourous so that the reader, writer and protagonist share a small joke while at other times the irony is scathing as in the poem regarding Jack Munro and the iwa.