How to Swallow a Pig

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Robert Priest is definitely one of the tricksters in Canadian poetry,
and his fiction—at least exemplified by the tiny fables in How to
Swallow a Pig—is full of tricks, too. You could call many of these
surreal little tales just shaggy-poet tales. Although many move toward
some kind of punchline (not always that nice: in “The Arms Race of
Obbagga,” the arms are cut off and the story ends, “You can easily
recognize the contestants, though. As the old saying in Obbagga goes,
‘They’re the ones who aren’t clapping.’”), others adopt a more
traditional fabular tone.

The pieces range from instructions (such as the outrageous title
piece), to odd first-person tales of body parts gone walkabout (or at
least significantly seen as somehow not a part of the narrator), to
“Unstable Fables” that parody the form, to a series of turns on the
Three Stooges. In all of them, Priest’s particular wit is given free
play, leading sometimes to groans, sometimes to loud laughter. As with
any good slapstick—and both the slap and the stick are in evidence
here—there is pain as well as laughter.

“Peaches” offers a good example of the Priestly imagination at
work: suggesting that the peach is “a huge hallucinogen,” it goes on
to argue that peaches have influenced great peacemakers, lovers, and
poets. “Poets eat peaches and forget. That is why they write poem
after poem. That is why there is always juice on their chins.” There
we hear the genuine Priest, and he’s worth listening to.