Utensile Paradise

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This is the third full-length book from Toronto writer Richard Truhlar. It consists of seven discrete works, some written as prose poems, some in free verse, ranging from two to ten pages in length.

Truhlar is a language-centred writer, and objective reality is therefore sacrificed for the expression of ideas, moods, and the words that shape / contain them: “with abstract, in blue, unsettling itself in silence, too closely connected with blue, with silence unsettled in blue.” This book concerns itself with mirrors, reflections, the protean relationship between names of things and their substance, “the graceful futility of description / imposed on speech.” Accordingly, juxtaposition of images is often striking: “Thanksgiving” places scenes from a frozen turkey’s castration against those of a child’s head injury. The message, too, is often grimly satiric: “playback on videotape is indispensable for learning, teaches us how to minimize bystander quotas.”

There is often a sense of language falling apart: “the adjective is funereal.” Nor is there any doubt of Truhlar’s questing intelligence — all too few poets today would use “affects” as a noun, or use such a phrase as “a scopic pulsion.” And these same “helicopters of the intellect” both shape the structure of this book and give it momentum. Utensile Paradise may not be an easy book; it certainly is a well-written and challenging one.