On Abducting the 'Cello

Stephanie McKenzie is a visiting assistant professor of English at Sir
Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is
the editor and co-publisher of However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of
Poetry and Song from Newfoundland & Labrado

On Abducting the ’Cello is a sonnet sequence consisting of a prologue
and 24 movements (cycles).

The prologue, “establishing our protagonist’s credibility by way of
the pennywhistle,” makes us feel as if we are entering a play, or
perhaps the act of play. The sonnet is self-reflexive, delighting in the
sounds of language, the relation between the discourses of different
classes and communities, typography, and the musical lilt of the tongue
and human actions. “What was wrong with play?” the narrator of
Clifford’s prologue asks. “Yes, the lady flayed off peels. / But
weren’t her pans a-boil dancing to his hots?”

It is not only the beauty of colloquial speech that Clifford pays
homage to but also the rhythms and internal rhymes that the best of
wordsmiths are capable of crafting. The following passage from “2b”
reminds me of the technical strength that one finds in the work of Irish
poet Paul Muldoon or Canadian poet Ken Babstock: “Folks, the flaw /
he’s born to, solitary as the rain / that blinks thru blurring
headlamps to the drain / and under, sings the trees to frenzy.”

My criticism might sound strange, but this impeccably crafted book’s
flaw is its perfection. The plays and resonances in the text are clever
in the extreme: sometimes it would be nice to be relieved from an
awareness of the intricate aesthetics and presented instead with the
immediate and accessible.