Apostrophes to Myself

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Dyck’s fourth collection contains 23 more-or-less thematically connected poems and a brief essay which appeared first in Grain magazine. The essay, which is entitled “The Rhetoric of Language (or, the Choice),” is supposed to function as a postscript or afterword to the collection but it should probably be placed at the front of the book in order to give some clue as to why all of the poems are about a dolphin, an idiosyncratic theory of rhetoric which has its long roots in Greek philosophy, Nietzsche, and various moderns and post-moderns. The dolphin image is explained as more than an image; it is an audience or “synecdoche” — that is, the part explaining the whole or the whole explaining the part by transmuting into language, or, more abstractly, poetic language. Without wanting to appear terribly literal or unsophisticated, not much of this makes sense and is a struggle to comprehend and appreciate. But let’s get to the poetry.

The book’s very title reveals that it may be a solipsistic venture, the “apostrophes” being exclamatory passages addressed to the poet, not to the reader. The reader is permitted a voyeuristic perch but clearly should not intrude on the flow of the poems. Occasionally one of the poems literally leaps off the page (yes, like a dolphin), and takes on its own life:

The land is wrinkled and folded like a brain.
It is grey in every season: grass of summer,
snow of winter, bare of spring and fall.
All these are grey and wrinkled and folded
as paper is folded in origami.

(From “Topography.”) More often, however, these poems are too far submerged in the unconscious, too firmly manacled to metaphor: “This is how you effect me, Dolphin, like morphine / that third, that wakeful dream, that dreamed wake.” The Greek philosophers are there, too, from Aristotle to Heraclitus, and they are obviously swimming around the poet’s unconscious realm and they are ruled by eros to boot.

What does all this do to the poems? Some of them positively sing out, buoyed by their fluid images and various other antecedents, mainly mystical and philosophical. Others — too many others — sink under their own weightless weight, like heavy unflattering stones.