Lean Days

Thomas M.F. Gerry is chair of the English Department at Laurentian
University and the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s
bilingual interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Steve McOrmond’s award-winning poems indicate that he learned much
from the poet Don McKay, his creative writing professor at the
University of New Brunswick. McOrmond’s poem “Field Guide” could
almost be mistaken for a McKay poem, and is also a variation on the
theme and form of Christopher Smart’s 18th-century poem “For I will
consider my cat Jeoffry.” Smart’s writing explores relations between
rationality and sensuality; no wonder that, during the Age of Reason,
Smart’s inclination toward the latter as a means to spiritual
enlightenment landed him in a London madhouse.

From a 20th-century naturalist’s perspective, McKay writes poems that
focus intensely on wilderness to reach an awareness beyond human
language—a place, he once wrote, that we both long for and fear. For
Smart, such sublimity was experienced through observing and writing
about his domestic cat; for McKay, often, through wild birds. The
catalyst in McOrmond’s “Field Guide” is the human ear. Unsettling
as some older folk might find younger people’s penchant for wearing
earbuds and headphones, this behaviour corroborates McOrmond’s poetic
intuition of the 21st century’s reworking of solipsism. With earphones
and iPods and chat rooms, though, what develops is not a Cartesian
solitary consciousness, but an utterly public intersubjectivity. Why the
ear? McOrmond answers with 28 good reasons. Here are two: “Because it
is an ecology unto itself.” “Because it lends itself.”

Lean Days is a fine collection, clever and linguistically adept; it
deserves to be read carefully. Not all of the poems, though, are as
suggestive and rewarding as “Field Guide.” Too many of them use the
word “you” in confusingly vague ways. Sometimes “you” seems to
mean “I,” sometimes an unidentified “you” or “we.”
“Loyalist Burial Ground” ends, “You try on adulthood / to see how
it fits, practise saying I love you and goodbye.” Noticing deer
hoofprints, the speaker of “Apprehension” reflects that they are
“Evidence of another life / going on outside your own.” Whose life?
Mine? Yours? Perhaps such pronominal uncertainties could be interpreted
as further signals of the intersubjective consciousness noted above.
Because the vagueness thus impinges on a major theme of the book, it is
not a minor problem. I prefer “you” to mean “you,” as it does in
“Field Guide” and in the series of poems about Glenn Gould
particularly, where McOrmond’s poetry soars.