Hong Kong Poems

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Geddes is at his best as a poet in the documentary mode; the poem being a vehicle for his anger at political and bureaucratic ineptitudes and injustices. In the tradition of Letter of the Master of Horse and Terracotta Army, Hong Kong Poems is another such documentary, being an account of an event many Canadians would like to forget, the “fate of the ill-trained, ill-equipped Canadian soldiers who were sent to Hong Kong by MacKenzie King to defend the colony in 1942.” In preparation for this work, Geddes consulted memoirs, journals, novels, popular and military histories, journalism about the Pacific war, particularly that relating to the fall of Hong Kong. Most important of all were the testimonies of the veterans themselves, given to him personally, or made available on tape by the Aural History Section of the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg, or in written form through books. Geddes himself made brief visit to Hong Kong “trying to imagine the feelings / of soldiers, beleaguered and outnumbered here, / so far from home and the familiar.” These testimonies and personal experiences are what make this book stand out from his other documentary poems, which although based on historic fact were of necessity fabrications of the poet’s imagination.

The poems, narrated by different veterans, reveal the horror and stupidity of the war. In “Sullivan,” a soldier in a hospital sees “Two soldiers proceed to bayonet the sick and wounded / in their beds, to a chorus of screams and protests. / A nurse throws herself on top of one of our boys / to protect him — it might have been the kid / from Queen’s — and they are both killed / by a single thrust of the bayonet.... Pinned at last, she does not struggle. Her hands / open and close once, like tiny wings, / and the dark stain on her white, starched uniform / spreads like a chrysanthemum, a blood-red sun.” Geddes finds post-war Hong Kong an anticlimax of drugs, sex, degeneracy, poverty. He sees “the Crown Colony as a colossal headache.”

The tone of the narratives is low-key, sardonic and offhand in the face of unspeakable atrocities, as if this were the only way the men could survive the experience. The trip for Geddes himself was a trip into horror as he plunged deeply into himself in order to understand the experience. “I went AWOL from my writing when the nightmares started.”

In Hong Kong Poems, Geddes explores a theme which has long interested him, “the dark zones of the Canadian consciousness.” Here the dark zones are represented by the “1975 soldiers, one for every year of the Christian calendar, thrown away, pawns to the vanity of their leaders, the bungling of bureaucrats and the indifference of elected officials.” This is by far Geddes’ best work to date.