The Door
Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart, 2007
120 pages, $18.00

The usual modus operandi, one she herself has gone to great lengths to encourage, for exploring Margaret Atwood’s poetry is thematic. Rather than follow in the murky prints of the clan and add footnotes on the individual as victim in an indifferent, even hostile, natural and political macrocosm, on familial disaffection, on the past as sepulchral and inviolable law, on creation as futile reactivity, I’ll instead fondle the poems in The Door from an aesthetic perspective.

The Door is divided into five parts: poems on the personal; on writing; on war and politics; on prophecy; on old age. I like the ordering here. It mirrors the progression of a life through identity, creation, worldly concerns, wisdom (real or imagined), and the long goodbye.

The book’s opener, “Gasoline,” uses the spilled substance as a metaphor for attractive danger. “Was this my best toy, then?” And later: “I knew that it was poison, / its beauty an illusion.” Atwood is at her best with extended metaphors and witty dramatic turns, and “Gasoline” incorporates its effects organically, with resonance. “As if I could. / That’s how gods lived: as if.” The first line expresses the narrator’s limitations; the next one posits a fictional alternative. But even here, “lived” is in the past tense, though the last “as if” refers to “as if anything was possible,” not the narrator’s resigned “as if I could transcend hardship.” This is a curious passage, an important one in Atwood’s unfolding canon. It amplifies the ambiguity the narrator expresses in many of her earlier poems, going as far back as 1971’s “They Are Hostile Nations” from Power Politics, in which the ambiguities jostling between hope and resignation are unresolved.

“Europe On $5 A Day” is a mess. Terse banalities reign: “I can feel this place”; “The city’s old / but new to me”; “I walk along, / looking at everything equally.” It cocoons into the straitjacket of its subject matter. Here it may be appropriate to anticipate a response to this last charge of flatness and torpidity, the response being that dullness in this case is a strategy used to link form and content, thereby giving greater force and authenticity to both. I don’t buy it. Disinterested linguistic structuring puts readers to sleep. One can hardly be stimulated enough to explore, in depth, nuances and layers of meaning when there is little or no nuance and layering of sound, syntax, and feeling. To be quicker: music is necessary to evoke depth, and in an effective poem the two are fused and their conditional apogees disappear.

With the next poem, “Year of the Hen,” the heart sinks. It’s the “uh oh” moment, the first indication that the rest of The Door may resemble “Europe On $5 A Day” rather than “Gasoline.” “Year of the Hen” takes the list poem to new lows. A catalogue should at least be entertaining, various, sonically stimulating. The language in “Hen” is relentlessly depressing:

This is the year of sorting,
of throwing out, of giving back,
of sifting through the heaps, the piles,
the drifts, the dunes, the sediments,

or less poetically, the shelves, the trunks,
the closets, boxes, corners . . . .

Less poetically? What’s the difference between a “heap” and a “pile”? It’s lazy writing. And the inevitable happens. When a writer paints herself into a corner with an accumulation of undifferentiated grey, there’s a mild physiological panic to make room for oneself by an unconvincing leap of emotion, ending (as here) in bathos: “and fingered for their beauty, / and pocketed, space-time crystals / lifted from once indelible days.”

Elegies dominate the rest of the first section, one for the narrator’s father, one for her mother, three for the cat. And it’s the cat that receives the most connective grief, though, with the exception of some fine appellative fondness (“sly fur-faced idol” in “Blackie In Antarctica”), any sentiment in “Mourning For Cats” collapses into inane rhetorical questioning, no fewer than eight consecutive head-spinners (“Why such deep mourning?”) in the closing twenty-three lines.

“Heart” is a preemptive defense of the writer from his or her critics: sensitive heart-spilling artist being silenced by “instant gourmet[s].” The opposite is the reality, of course. There is a paucity of responsible criticism of contemporary Canadian poets and poetry. Many of those poets take this as implied, if not overt, consent for their efforts. The further irony to “Heart” is that its narrator’s commiseration with mawkish revelation is surprising in a poet who registers continuous flatlines on the electrocardiogram index. And there is a third irony: a conspicuous disparity between the harsh diction (twisting, shucking, coughing, broken, racket, guts, deep-red clot, coarse, wound) and the emotional tenor of the poem. It’s analogous to a vivisectionist decrying destruction. Organs from virile bodies must be excised to feed the possibility of life in “victims,” a reverse of the poems’s last-word claim of “heartless,” with its predatory accusation. (Contrast this poem with Atwood’s remarkable “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart” from 1978’s Two-Headed Poems, where the images are crisp, the assonance apt and purposeful, and the narrator’s ambivalence affecting.)

Ironies proliferate. There is something disagreeable about draping clichés like dull tinsel on a Boxing Day tree when defending the dedication of poets. “She never thought she could do this. / Not her.” . . . “Like the sun through mist.” . . . “Are they dead, or what?” . . . “surely there is still / a job to be done by us, at least.” These latter bon mots are taken at random from the rest of section II.

The middle, and longest, political section continues with infuriating questions: “Is it our fault?” . . . “Or does it?” “What if it does” . . . “Who let it out?” . . . “Why were we so careless,” all from “The Weather.” Is it a searching, honest open-endedness? Coy maneuvering, as in covering all bases? A posturing sublimity? See how adding a squiggly mark after a sentence can make one think? (As in, “how did this pass the publisher’s first screening?”)

“War Photo” is a lovely possibility for an arresting conceit, but the images are cancelled at the outset by the egregious description “very beautiful” for the dancer / dead woman. Repetition takes over as if to transfer feeling by insistent statement rather than imagistic surprise, phrasal lilt, or sonic suggestiveness: “dancing there on the ground,” “dead beautiful woman,” “it’s this beautiful woman.”

Atwood’s political attitudes are cheap scaffolding where thin, broad brushstrokes bleed off plank-pages with the first scrutinizing rainstorm. Dead language abounds. “Nobody cares who wins wars.” “Of course it’s better to win/than not. Who wouldn’t prefer it?” from “Nobody Cares Who Wins”; “They speak words, I think / They testify. / They name names” from “They Give Evidence”; “Even if you had remained alive, / we would never have spoken”; “Now though it seems I am asking / and you are answering” from “War Photo 2.” Political poems, especially, need attention to lyric sinuousness and organic shaping, lest they slide into propagandistic prose and ideological proselytizing. Bald messages belong in an op-ed daily, not in a poem.

“Another Visit to the Oracle” from Section IV is simply embarrassing in its mishmash of cryptic circularity, hermetic inconsequence, colloquial asides, and stray soliloquizing. The addressee is unknown though not important anyway since the “prophetess” narrator is a transparent excuse for one more installment in unengaged Survivalist declaration. Quoting is superfluous, but the final two lines are worth pondering for their terse philosophical applicability: “I tell dark stories / before and after they come true.”

On that fatalistic note, let’s knock on the volume’s closer. I detailed a bit the book’s first effort, “Gasoline,” as opening the door to the possibility of renewal or spiritual transformation. The same struggle, albeit with more energy and conviction, is available in Atwood’s 1971 “Hesitations Outside The Door” in which “The right lies would at least/be keys, they would open the door. // The door is closed.” And several sections later: “. . . there are no doors, / get out while it is / open, while you still can.” The usual artlessness prevails: haphazard line breaks, skinny diction, clumsy images (“shining blood”), numbing abstractions (“the false / bodies, this love / which does not fit you”), narrative separation, relentless repetition of metaphor (I’d love to have a loonie for every “rock/stone/boulder” appearance), and relationship struggles lacking idiosyncrasy – but at least something approximating engagement, if not passion, occurs in “The Door’s” “first draft.” Last year’s effort, despite its unhinged swinging, shuts – no, entombs – the protagonist in a kind of secular Calvinist futility. What can one say about the offensive reduction of an actual life in which, “you buy a purse, / the dance is nice / . . . you wash the dishes, / you love your children, / you read a book . . . The dog has died. / This has happened before / You got another”? The final, “The door swings closed” is not only anti-climactic but an obvious redundancy, devoid of tension because the lack of juice, the lack of verbal play, in the poem mirrors Atwood’s simplistic idea-phantom of wife and mother. The poem’s ersatz profundity is offensive not only in its reductionism, but because it uses an assumed particularity as a vide supra for universal extrapolation. (One may wish to read John Hersey’s novel The Walnut Door as a lively corrective for what an engaged author can do with this overworked, plain metaphor.)

Margaret Atwood’s poetic world is an uninviting one. I don’t merely mean the fictive psychogeography, but more the silty conduit with the reader. Her writing represents only one of the six primary tastes: astringency. Conspicuous by emotional absence are connections of sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and pungent, and more enjoyably, the resulting delicious intermingling.

Orphic Politics
Tim Lilburn
McClelland & Stewart, 2008
86 pages, $17.99

Orphic” is loaded with associations: it stands for a mystic sense, but of course derives its essence from the mythic figure of Orpheus. Aside from the relational ties to music, Dionysus, the arts, agriculture, and rapidity, the unavoidable dominant link is to the continually influential story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Even though the allusive density of Orphic Politics is daunting, I believe it’s rewarding (with direct ties to Orpheus’s descent, ascent, death, and ambiguous transformation) throughout the text to focus on the singular titularity because of allegorical propinquity as well as spiritual yearning.

Lilburn is not concerned with jotting down offhand verse of banal diurnal anecdote. In non-dual spirituality, there are the relative and absolute worlds, though (paradoxically) each can join with, and dissolve into, the other. But language is a logical construct. We can only converse in a relative sense. The idea or description or presentation, no matter how artfully transmitted, is not itself enlightenment. Lilburn’s spiritual antecedents were likewise concerned with the higher plane, but they knew the limits of words when it came to “falling/into knowing’s body” (“Theurgy II”). Lilburn, throughout his poetic career, has presented his terms (Names Of God), celebrated his epiphanies (Tourist To Ecstasy), wrestled with reconciling his visions to supreme consciousness (To The River, Moosewood Sandhills, Kill-Site), and amplified a change in that latter volume towards a frenetic, even desperate, attempt at union (Orphic Politics).

I realize the last charge may seem hyperbolic (though not as hyperbolic as the tone of Orphic Politics), but let’s investigate. Here, in its entirety, is “A Surgery Against Angelism”:

Set a fat layer of fire grazing into the chest of engine heat, breast-
stroking against motion perfuming from the sickness of volt swollen
inhalations. Let this heat
sag to a half-eaten meal not its own; let it eat rods,
iron shavings, green stones, dead yarrow, words headfirst
from a rock overhang in the upper right, a skeleton of a seal; let it learn
to heave-hiss through its mouth the complete psalmic blade.
Five pound fire gravities against hurtling’s musk.
In the chest of engine heat, a concussed floor;
whipped light-heads cough in blows’ trampoline, and choir above
their husks, they lurch into a blurred but, yes, readable circle, moving,
yes, the gear that jacks the cranial dome.
You go into the fish’s mouth which is the body of a cousin
at the volcano’s wedding.
We come out of the upper colon tunnel onto the ledge, sweet-looking
antlers to smoke from the cloud deer. We’ve built a shack
out of this numbnutsness,
we’ve hidden in this long grass. A stick will cure us.
Your eyes in the fish’s gut are moved like a wand around the dark.
The knife snugs down through skin. And this is politics.

Lilburn varies little the length of lines throughout his oeuvre, but especially so in Orphic Politics. The Whitmanesque effusions in Tourist To Ecstasy suit the long, rolling units, as do the occasional galloping enjambments in From The Great Above She Opened Her Ear To The Great Below. Though “A Surgery Against Angelism” is studded with emphatic stresses, the tone is searching and the physical resources compromised, a far cry from, say, Isaiah’s long confident declarations. I found myself consistently and naturally pausing at the medial foot, and this gave some energy to the back-end line which not only ran out of steam when subsequently reading the poem aloud, but which then also bogged the lines down in confused referents – always a challenge, at the best of times, with Lilburn’s work. Varied line indentations are arbitrary and rife in many contemporary free-versifiers, but I enjoyed Lilburn’s use of the severe indent as seen here in lines three and fifteen. The uncomfortable pause before “inhalations” creates an effective mimesis with the narrator, and the suspense before “at the volcano’s wedding” also works to set up the image’s surprise.

Speaking of surprises, what can we make of the imagistic leaping, in this poem and elsewhere? Starting with To The River, Lilburn’s narrative persona has, with few exceptions, been an ephemeral, hermetic (and Hermetic) presence, without history, idiosyncrasy, or emotional subjectivity. (The latter charge is somewhat ameliorated in Orphic Politics; more on that later). I can appreciate the daring metaphorical tags, and after many brow-scrunchers there is the successfully strong, “In the chest of engine heat, a concussed floor.” But the exception doesn’t negate the inaccessibility of long swatches of drifting animal/outback symbolism which, at least to this reader, confounds (and perhaps derides) any poetic equivalent to a musical ordering and understanding. Only a churl would cavil about a passage such as, “missiled hissing from the river through thinnest ice,/ runelling mud and spur” from “Fr. Paul Le Jeune. S.J., In The Forest,” but the approach shouldn’t be to obviate meaning altogether, a temptation influenced by Lilburn’s suggestion (in an interview) that the reader “just trust the poet and let yourself go.” No. Trust has to be earned. If I trusted any versifier who hurriedly stapled together their summa opus by being a blank container for every unfiltered rumination, I’d have Cerberus biting my brainpan a minute after Orpheus had fled the flood (temporarily) with Eurydice.

The wayward and scattershot imagery (“weather-drum, salmon-beaked,/Neanderthal forehead of weather” from “Politics”), the private mythopoeia from “He Holds” (“We’re talking the Epiphany of the Imam,/more or less, amigo, or Parousia in backflip.”), the glancing allusive intrusions (“John Stuart Mill/power-take-offs into his sideburn whorls, Gerard Manley Hopkins/Titans from a chair” from “Politics”), the narrative pinballing restlessness (“skid on your ass down the mudded incline to the pulse of cosmology/wobbling off the wall, poulticed by burning fish” from “Getting Ready”), all produce an insuperable fault in Lilburn’s work from To The River forward: obscurity.

Philip Larkin, speaking of his own contemporaries, decried “an obscurity unlike previous types in being deliberate and unnecessary”; the Advaita Vedanta adept Jean Klein criticized the two extremes of artistic procedure: giving away the game, on one hand, or completing all the work for the reader/viewer, the latter then becoming nauseated with its sweetness, and on the other hand, withholding all cards through malice, ineptness, or unreasonable challenge. Here’s an excerpt from “If Metaphor Is Theurgy, It Must Form”:

“the eggwhites castle of Aristoteleanism, which, un-
crossing its arms, monstrances itself as a reed boat smoothing through
crow-smoke and palms barging the loudly oiled, drive-in-movie-screen
forehead of Christianity
on a red leather Hausa cushion”

I try. But I simply can’t negotiate my way through this with any clarity. There is no transmission.

Unlike Ralph Gustafson, another densely allusive poet who used historical, musical, literary, and spiritual figures in philosophical juxtaposition with in-the-moment natural observation, but coloured those figures in human dimensions, with great sympathy, Lilburn trots out Plato and crew as disembodied treatises, suffocating with theory any link to Lilburn’s experiences. Why the numerous, various, and lengthy epigraphs? Is it simply to browbeat the reader with a muscled erudition? A deflection from a perceived inability to clear the high-jump bar without steroid shots from the canon? Whatever the reason, it was annoying to sit through (for instance) two Phil 204 lectures from Plato’s Phaedrus, and then to read only four Lilburn poems linked to the first, and three to the next.

And what of those seven poems? It is a grand irony that Lilburn, even with personal subject matter, cannot cut away the grandiose – “Ten yards of mineral hair fall inside the cruciform hummingbird” (from “Meeting The Angel, Tasting What It Sees”) – to reveal a clarity, a vulnerability, a recognition that one would like to receive what he is giving, when the story has Socrates showing up and changing the mind of Phaedrus in an impassioned support for the superiority of a lover’s worth for the beloved over any and all non-lovers/friends.

And this leads into the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The comparison of the latter myth with the Phaedra discourse is illuminating. Orpheus didn’t descend in a painful psychic katabasis because of mysterious illness, but through an impassioned choice to be reunited with his great Love. The narrative skein in Orphic Politics is diffuse, and the obscurity (at least partly) attempts to deny the fact that a self-contained, withdrawing illness is a poor precursor for elevating the experience into audacious confrontation with the gods of the underworld for personal salvation instead of union with the Beloved. Lilburn’s version of the Beloved is nebulous, all-encompassing, and sexuality, throughout his oeuvre, is narrator-merged with animals and nature, which is anathema to the idiosyncratic and specific qualities of an individual human, and which is given power in the Orpheus myth. Remember, even after Eurydice died the second and final time (Orpheus was so peculiarly enraptured, he risked a second descent), the lyrist rejected the advances of the Thracian maidens. Lilburn’s allegory is inapt for the same reason as his eroto-enlightenment urges are misinformed. “Nothing infinite but in finite things,” said Huang Po, said Pythagoras. In the negating-the-name Christian approach that Lilburn favours, just as in the non-dual approach of Advaita, the emptiness of Zen, the unnamable Tao, and the “shall not” deductions (not prescriptions, as universally mistranslated) of Moses, all esoteric spiritual traditions affirm an absolute reality which language cannot explicate or enter. But there is also a relative world, one which can be all the more affecting and joyfully celebrated (while hinting of enlightenment) when accepted without the overreach, as in this exhortation from Lilburn’s “Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life Of The World” from Tourist To Ecstasy: “Come mumblers after quarters, with your newspaper shoe shuffles from the high-heeled, well-healed, Dior-cheekboned streets.”

I realize this essay has drifted on occasion towards a concern with the ineffable (though not with the obsessional repetition of Lilburn‘s work), but when I read and experience these words from earlier Lilburn I enter a piece of heaven unknown before, and from which a confused katabatic drop of, “on a flake of dead skin, the Vita coetanea of R. Lull, in barn swallow” (“The Gift Of Europe”) had me wallowing.

An addendum of sorts: I liked Orphic Politics more than the To The River, Moosewood Sandhills, and Kill-Site series since the personal element (illness, in this circumstance) emerged, anchoring somewhat the Hermetic frenzy and giving it a more (at times) understandable and arresting metaphorical interplay. On that note, here are the powerful closing lines from “Orphic Hymn”:

The dogwood tree blooms in the full window a rising whine.
The temperature of this nuzzles in like sediment that’s already stone.
A knife waits, girlish, down the hill, flipping over, over, small
fish flash at the bottom of that boat, convinced, the knife, crossing
and uncrossing its legs.

I hope Lilburn continues, in his next volume, to touch and contextualize the universal with the personal, the absolute with the relative. For all the long-breathed imagistic pyrotechnics, sensory imprimaturs were fleeting and have evaporated (save for the above poem, and scattered lines from a few others), philosophical insight was poorly integrated or inappropriate, and form shattered into hit-and-miss shards of beautiful broken coloured glass.