Backup to Babylon

Lynn R. Szabo is chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

Backup to Babylon, a finalist for the 2007 Dorothy Livesay Prize for
Poetry, is a collection of vignettes of hippie life on the Gulf Islands
connected to intense exposés of Vancouver’s deathly slum, Downtown
Eastside, by an unexpected “arc of idealism”—all part of “the
fool’s attempt to re-enter ‘The Garden.’”

Gadd’s anti-poetry is conventional in its lack of capitalization, its
grammatical elisions, and its unusual typographical experiments. Her
narrator creates a macaronic language replicating truncated, alcohol and
drug-induced intensities of thought and sensation: “a procession of
sages marks a fish on the ground; poinsettieas [sic] burst / from the
earth / people come up bearing banners / ... I must know quickly. what /
am I? butterfly or / fish.” Colour, sound, and smell suffuse the
imagery with power beyond its narrative threads. The satire has the
effect of keeping the reader an outsider, looking on without
comprehension, even if with compassion, wondering with the inhabitants
of their community, “is there, after all an intricate meaning to the
pattern of persons who wander this city this night?” Dwellers in their
drug dreams, the narrator speaks for all: “yu fight / the steel hook /
til yu agree / to fall apart / pincers seize yr arm.” In “cabin on
the shore,” numerous concrete poems paint multi-textured images that
flood the language. En route through the Gulf Islands, Berkeley, and San
Salvador, the poet narrates the protest history of the 1970s and ’80s.
The literary aspects of the writing are enhanced by allusions to
Biblical and Greek mythology, and gestures to First Nations legends and
Spanish folklore.

Ultimately, the value of Gadd’s writings would seem to reside in
their particularized geography and their narrator’s ability to
articulate a life lived without boundaries in places where dreams easily
become nightmares and hope is short-lived, if persistent.