Ending with Music

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.

Although he has lived in many countries, Maurice Mierau has established
a deep connection to rural Manitoba and the Mennonite communities there.
His fascination with his extended family, as well as his obsession with
jazz, Rilke, and American popular culture, inform his first collection.
Running the gamut from mad comedy to tragedy, the poems exude a slightly
deranged energy: the language jumps around a lot, and the syntax keeps
breaking down.

Comedy can be serious, and in Mierau’s hands it usually is. There’s
a composed nostalgia in the poems about his family, as he registers his
grandmother’s descent into Alzheimer’s and his grandfather’s slow
dying. The poems in the section entitled “Murders,” especially those
that attempt to convey the experience of warfare, falter somewhat. The
poet’s use of his uncle’s experiences as a German translator and
then a Russian POW feels willed. In poems like the short “Soldiers,”
the political stance takes over completely: it’s an editorial. Other
poems about martyrs to the faith feel a bit too scholarly.

Still, the sense of blood, anger, and loss that attends these poems
comes to the fore in the elegies for friends and others that appear in
the final section. Here the fragmentation of speech seems fitting, the
pain earned. Moving from others’ suicides to the call to life found in
one’s children and partner, the final couple of poems bring this
engaging book to a satisfying close.