Incubus: The Dark Side of the Light

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

As the title of his previous collection, Fire Before Dark, indicates,
the relations of light and darkness continue to fascinate this poet.
Also, there is continuity with McWhirter’s first book, The Catalan
Poems, set in Spain; Incubus is set in Mexico. Both are places where the
vivid colors and intrusively powerful sun nightmarishly evoke their
often-hostile opposite, darkness.

For a book so insistently visual in its orientation, Incubus
nevertheless resists staying in focus. Complementing a strongly
deconstructive inclination, are the poems’ exotic Mexican settings
(reminiscent of those in Lowry’s Under the Volcano, or in Gaugin’s
or Picasso’s paintings); the poems’ language (as dazzlingly detached
and sculpted as Stevens’s in “Eleven Mexican Crows” or as vigorous
as Layton’s in “Queen”); the poems’ surrealistic discoveries
(verbal facsimiles of Buсuel’s filmic images in “Iris”); and the
epigraphical opening poem’s reincarnation of T.S. Eliot’s Symboliste
cat. None of these revelations of temporal and spatial insight remains
in focus for long. His creation of poems as restlessly transformative as
holographic dreams is impressive. To read the poems is to see with
different eyes.