Loveruage: A Dance in Three Parts

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Though it is called “a dance in three parts,” Loveruage is more
aural than visual in nature. It contains three long sections, each one a
prose-poem. Together they tell of an “I" who moves from silence into
articulation and from anonymity to identity. On this journey the “I”
passes through alienation, victimization, self-loathing, love, and
fulfilment.

Part 1, which I think is the best, tells of an immigrant who arrives in
a foreign land not knowing the language or customs. The cousin who is
supposed to be there isn’t. People in this land can’t even tell if
the newcomer is a he or a she. The task is twofold: to live
through/survive the negative identity as “worthless foreigner” put
upon this person by a mysterious sadistic man who harasses the newcomer
at work, and to create a positive self-image.

Part 2 explores the relationship between sex and language, and between
love and language, two separate, albeit related, things. The newcomer
finds love and language: “You breathed words onto my back and I
breathed the words upon your back. We slid our bodies into language and
we languaged our bodies to each other.”

Part 3, the most formally poetic of the three sections, is spoken to
the accompaniment of a drum, which is voiced as “bhumm” throughout
the poem. The immigrant has been in the new place for a long time and
has built up an identity and experiences; indeed, he has created a life
and is now looking back, singing of it to the accompaniment of the drum.

My summary only scratches the surface of what is an excellent and
important book. Anyone interested in contemporary poetry should read it.