Primer on the Hereafter.

David Anonby is a sessional instructor in the English Department of
Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

Steve McOrmond’s second published collection of poetry explores the themes of love and death, tinged with an exquisite melancholy appropriate to his elegiac style. McOrmond’s poetic voice is confident and invigorating, enabling him to capture vivid images and moods in an abundance of memorable, even quotable, lines. His haunting meditations are divided into three sections, each of which is introduced with a world-weary, philosophical epigraph.

Crows are a recurring image of death in these poems, which are imbued with a Freudian thanatos. In response to the malaise of middle-age, “the only / suitable gesture is to weep.” Even an island is seen not as a seaside solace, but as a place of confinement and disappointment: “The bare bones of living here.”

But McOrmond’s poems do not merely chronicle the depressive aspects of post-modern life; his art creatively and compassionately transcends the very despair he observes. “Man in a room full of nudes” captures the loneliness that fuels the sexual desire in an old man who “might recently / have lost his wife, or maybe a daughter.” “Scales Pond” portrays the cheapening of an adolescent love which is somehow still irresistible. “So this is goodbye,” a sketch about a young adult leaving home, has intimations of the final departure from life: “Like the beaches of our youth, grain by grain, / we are washed away, deposited elsewhere.”

“The second coming” is a highly allusive poem which rejects both the doomsday prognostications of Yeats’s original piece and the eschatological hope for the return of Jesus to the world. Instead, McOrmond depicts what Mark Twain called the ordinariness of “quiet desperation”: “You’re the future, / neither bright nor certain.” A number of his poems recount the inevitable collapse of love in death, further contributing to the tragic pathos underlying his vibrant lines. “Primer on the hereafter” presents the humorous situation of a ghost trying to reconnect with its loved ones left behind in the land of the living. Yet the comic tone only thinly veils the poet’s spiritual longing for the permanence of love.