Violinmaker's Lament

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.

John Weier, himself Winnipeg’s resident luthier, has written an
eccentric little novel-in-verse in Violinmaker’s Lament, a story
constructed from the fragmented memories of Josef Csutor, who was born
in Hungary and lived in the United States and Canada. Josef fills his
diary, remembers his past life and wives, dreams, and thinks about
Stradivarius, Guarneri, and other great violinmakers. His “lament,”
about lost love, lost family, lost violins, lost chances, emerges in
various kinds of verse, prose poems, lists, and concrete poems.

Weier gets inside his violinmaker’s head, full as it is of arcane
knowledge, erotic longings, and a deep loneliness due to his obsessive
relationship to his work. The writing is full of quick shifts of topic
and mood, and it moves with a fragmented and wild wit. The prose pieces
grope for meaning in a broken syntax of desire, while many of the poems
float across the page in a delirium of puns and sly metaphors. Slowly a
life story emerges, of fighting in the 1956 uprisings in Budapest, of
loving one woman after another yet watching each one eventually leave,
taking their children with her, of always finding another, because
violins and women both call out to his deepest needs.

Violinmaker’s Lament is full of knowledge about violins and how they
are made; the art of the luthier stands in for the art of poetry, or any
art. Josef’s work is also his art, his very life, and he can’t seem
to give up even a bit of it for his lovers, who in the end share with
his violins both beauty and eventual disappearance. Weier captures
Josef’s obsessive desire for the beauty of both women and violins in
the language and rhythms of his writing. There’s both a sense of
tradition and a casual blues feeling to these poems, which makes
Violinmaker’s Lament an entertaining delight.