The Antlered Boy

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

This collection of 23 poems explores the intimate connections between man and nature, as well as the connections between the natural world and the metaphysical. Abbey weaves a fine tapestry of plants, animals, and human beings, caught in time, an often grotesque blend of victims and survivors, all of whom have their tale to tell.

They speak with a common voice that is remarkably consistent — and remarkably dispassionate. A cardinal, for example, as it performs its winter harlotries for scraps of bread, explains its actions matter-of-factly: “Here is my paradox: /That I survive because /I wear my blood outside.” The ironic sacrificial fox of the opening poem, trying to free himself from a steel trap, is equally direct when he says, “I chew off my foot.” And the flat tones of the television viewer in “Cambodian Children” serve to heighten the feelings of horror and revulsion that threaten at any moment to rip through the thin surface of the words:

I watch the death tents fill and empty.

Baby gooks are wrapped in burlap sacks

then placed in pickup trucks.

Most of the poems turn upon concrete images like this, although the images are not necessarily always so abhorrent. Building upon images ranging from the commonplace to the exotic and the grotesque, Abbey pulls thoughts and emotions into the realm of the metaphysical. In “October Snow in Kingston, 1980,” the descriptions of experiences and impressions of the poet from late evening, through a night of disturbing dreams and disorienting awakenings, to a cathartic early morning run, create an intense hypnotic effect, blurring the borders between man and nature and illusion and reality.

The voices of The Antlered Boy plead quietly for some sort of reconciliation among men, nature, and death, and for an escape from the traps which prevent this. The boy in the final poem who casts his father’s muskrat traps into the stream is offered a mystical vision of quasi-redemptive herons who fill his soul even as he guards them through the night, suggesting that the compassionate human act still has its powers of achieving such a reconciliation.