Evoba

David A. Kent teaches English at Centennial College and is the editor of
Christian Poetry in Canada.

There is no possibility of mistaking Steve McCaffery’s Evoba as anything other than self-consciously avant-garde, unabashedly self-reflexive — “I am here / in a common space / face / a (visual) reality behind / the chin’s particular temptation …” — and yet, at the same time, fashionably anti-self — “i / pretends to be conscious / i am only a machine.” McCaffery’s poetic narrative is elliptical and enigmatic, advertising itself as an anti-text and repeatedly subverting the conventions of what used to be the normal contract between reader and writer. Certainly, there are explicit statements and recurrent images scattered throughout the text, but most of this long poem is evidently preoccupied with questions of language and meaning: “and language lies there / a slice of meat i’m cutting into / slices slicing in / the rules....” Word play (“grammarphones” is precious), typographical dalliances, and occasional quotations from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations complicate an already fragmented text which, I confess, often frustrated me. Touches of unexpected violence and moments of fantasy suggest a story behind the preoccupations, but the contours of that story remain blurred by the foregrounded concern with the medium itself. Understanding McCaffery’s intentions in detail would require a much longer time than I could give in preparing this review; even then I’m not entirely sure it would really be a worthwhile undertaking.