Sympathetic Magic

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This, Brown’s fifth book of poetry, is wildly uneven. The poet revels in image and can use it well: “fate is a mahout astride a large elephant, impersonal as dark sun with winds raging across a desert.” Too, there is a wry humour informing much of the work: “Poor Mexico — far from God & / so near the United States / a snippet of history remembered / through the Gadsden Purchase seems / irrelevant.” When Brown can focus on one image and allow his curiosity and energy to develop it, he is capable of interesting, even arresting, work — especially since many poems are set in exotic locales.

Unfortunately, the love of image can become sheer ornamentation; and when combined with pretentious language, it results in bad, clumsy writing much of the time: “a post-mortem flick / or the lank equestrian eyelid / that signals morning’s first crepuscular move.” Too, the humour often degenerates into grotesqueness: “noon and blood purring / like a two minute egg / over and over.” In his prose pieces Brown considers such topics as the passing of the ‘60s, Lennon’s murder, the emergence of Japan as a world power, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The tone, when not facile, is often hectoring. These faults are greatly exacerbated by the hideous beige paper stock, on which drawings faintly appear. This reviewer has never seen as many typos as appear here, whether from Brown’s carelessness or that of a proofreader (if there was one). The quality control was non-existent.