For the Back of a Likeness

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This is, to be generous, a very mixed book. The reader will encounter such romanticism as in “The Youthful Alexander,” who “lets fall his princely mantle’s flowing folds,/Steps from the subtle sheath of his apparel.” This effusiveness can degenerate into greeting-card sentiment: “though the day, this day, is a day that will never be through?/Words put it far beyond words: the day is you.” Phrases like “the deathless moment” and “wondrous realms” mix queasily with such statements as “we pass as passing trains/Pass a one-sided sorrow” and “positive negatives, like intangible band-aids.” In one thoroughly silly poem, a lily and a rose debate their respective beauty (“Pshaw, the lily sneers,/You think I cannot beat a rose? I can.”) In another, high school students, unconcerned about crack, AIDS, fashion, or even tobacco, use phrases like “sticky him up” when engaging in a food-fight. These flaws are greatly exacerbated by the rigid forms — sonnet, quatrain, couplet — in which most of this book is cast. The line, all too often, becomes merely the vehicle for a rhyme that is sometimes strained, frequently predictable.

All this is unfortunate, because two of the book’s five sections are a good deal less clumsy. The third, “Twelve Epigrammes,” maximizes that form’s potential for brief, satirical observation. “Reminder” posits the insatiability of lust in four glowing lines; “The Two Statues” suggests the hypocrisy of almsgiving; “Leaguers and Beleaguered” takes a good swipe at the League of Canadian Poets. In this section the poem is anchored in concrete detail, and the form’s immediacy is very unlike the airy abstractions elsewhere in the book.

The final section deals with Christianity, and here Finch writes with knowledge and conviction. The Christian theme yields cohesion and focus. Probably the best poem here is the fine sonnet “One Thing,” the final couplet of which speaks directly and with authority: “One thing he gave us we can give. Our will./To him. Or not to him. This isours still.”

Were the rest of this book inspired by such surety of both belief and language, and if it exploited the wit, insight, and brevity of the epigram, it would be a delight. Unfortunately, the world Finch creates is one where poor craft cannot carry intellect. The result is like an elephant trying to balance on a beachball.