The Unavoidable Man

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

The Unavoidable Man is a rewarding collection that testifies to the
creative power of human relationships, rooted in individual bodies but
growing beyond them to entwine us with others, defying the abysses that
our minds discern.

The first section, entitled “The Body Recovers,” employs a lot of
Eliot-like image, metaphor, and situation to paint the desolation
(wasteland) of nonfaith, before the body stirs toward its birth. As life
struggles in us, we find ourselves “Waiting for miracles, you / know,
money tree, a / relationship” (“The Waiting Room”). We progress
through a stage of envying—and warring over—the things of others,
since we still have only two sides: “The past and this, / a pose to
compliment your hands” (“The Waiting Room”). When “the body
begins to flicker again” (“The Body Recovers”), it acts as a
salutary check on the visions or poses of the soul and brain, which
tend, finally, to undermine the rooted life.

In the second section, “The History of Love,” Dempster explores a
life informed by the body. Some of the earlier metaphors of battle are
invested with a different significance. Cautioning against striving to
clutch and hold and claim as ours, he writes (in “No Man’s Land”)
that “embraces flatten fences, borders, walls, / our bodies rising and
rolling like the hills.” Dempster’s detailed, sensual, intimate
descriptions reveal a faith in love, but a faith that is grounded in a
tangible humanity.

In the next section, “Wild Men,” Dempster—often with a
much-appreciated humor—describes his frustrated yearning to understand
himself as part of the larger world of men. In the hilarious title poem,
we have a beautiful skewing of the “ordinary, average guy” next
door. Yet as we join with Dempster in a knowing smirk he pulls out the
rug in the last two stanzas by having the speaker (and us with him) join
the “guy” to “wolf down our / paper plates, throw ourselves
gassily / into conversation, take it / easy or whichever way we can.”
We’re unavoidably part of this too, he implies, and we deny ourselves
when we deny the unavoidable man.

In the last section, “Holding Father,” he struggles as he watches
his father grow older day by day. Then, in a deft shift of perspective,
he reflects on his relationship with his own son.

For the reader, Dempster’s poems are enlightening. His lack of
traditional belief, combined with his obvious intensity of commitment to
living fully and with meaning, challenges us to reconsider the value
that religion, love, and family have in our own lives.