Mosquito Nirvana

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

As the title of Ted Plantos’s latest collection might suggest, the
poems operate something like a Canadian summer. After a long stretch of
brutal cold comes the welcome relief of summer; however, along with the
heat come mosquitoes to disturb the serenity. Mosquito Nirvana
challenges the construction of blissful nostalgia by calling to mind the
seamier realities of life’s often difficult passages.

Part 1, “Mosquito Pickles,” primarily concerns the lighter, more
reassuring side of memory. Here Plantos gives us rich, evocative
metaphors and sensual imagery. Two kindly old women are summed up in a
young boy’s mind as “lilacs and lemon oil and wrinkled sunlight.”
The narrator of one poem recalls riding on a farm tractor with his
friend Danny, the skin of the two shirtless boys described as “sponged
August, each furrow / sweated to overflow among the burning crops.”
Scattered in among these generally benign representations, however, are
more frightening intimations, as when a young boy bluntly reasons that
“Ernie’s dad beats him / So Ernie tortures cats, / and one day
he’ll kill someone to get even.”

Part 2, “The Flip Side of Nirvana,” generally brings the reader
into the present. In these poems, the comforting distance of memory is
less operative. The darkness is mediated somewhat, however, by a
sardonic sense of humor, as in the case of George and Maud Miller, who
were captured by a UFO and “entered a future time-zone / known only to
mystics, / extraterrestrials / & progressive conservatives.”

While generally witty, in the sense of showing unexpected
correspondences between unlikely things, Plantos’s lyricism
occasionally gets the better of him. For instance, his question “What
have we made of remembering / when even the night forgets our names?”
hangs heavily at the end of a poem that gives few clues as to how to
answer it, or, indeed, why we should not forget. Similarly, when
discussing sex, Plantos’s imagery often becomes strained, as when a
speaker imagines coming together with a woman “when dolphins leap at
dawn / out where the sea and sky are one.” Such pretty images
basically obscure Plantos’s greatest talent—the depiction of
sensuous, tactile reality.