Driving the Angels Out

Andrew Vaisius is a Winnipeg day-care director.

This is a difficult book to review. It’s an enigmatic book and seems to be an important one, yet it leaves me unconvinced. I lose my way under the layers of metaphors and images and don’t feel compelled to find my way through them. I’m buried until I decide it’s time to turn the page. Misogynous lines like “The bottle / the needle / and the cunt / poisoned our blood” do not help matters. It’s hard to take pleasure reading this book. I lean toward assessing it as pretentious snobbery until I come across pure and clean lines, or a poetic twist which doesn’t smack of gaming.

The title poem is the anomaly of the volume. It’s adaptive poetry. Rules are trashed. No punctuation or roadsigns aid the reader. There are gratuitous line breaks. Thoughts run on or connect or split by the reader’s choice. It’s a fascinating poem, and easily my favourite. It’s a hybrid of ordinary speech, oration, and stream of consciousness.

In the “Exiles” section a few other poems stand out. “My Father Carved Me” expresses the heavy burden of ancestry and passes seamlessly from symbol to metaphor to allegory. “The Poet’s Sons” impresses me with its subtle irony and tone. A notable section of the poem “Chimera” entitled “Make No Prayers” is unnerving because of its blatant nihilism. It’s not written out of an informed anarchism, on even a bare-assed conservatism, and it’s not so much a reflection of 20th-century life as a model of impoverished 20th-century thought. It provokes, and I can admire that.

Simmons fairly radiates in his best moments, but I can’t help doubting that they are enough to illume the entire book.