Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

Confabulations — a psychiatric term for “the recitation of imaginary experiences to fill gaps in memory” — is Thesen’s third book. It opens with a note on Lowry’s death, two quotations, and the repetition (twice) of the cover photograph, hardly so good it deserves such attention. What follows is 26 pages of untitled poetry, roughly chronological, based on the life, work, and death of the English-Canadian writer Malcolm Lowry, currently the subject of much interest. Some poems are too colloquial and flat, and a few are repetitious; but for the most part Thesen writes with skill and without sensationalism, quite aware of the “spirit resembling love /hence sabotage of same” that informed Lowry’s life. Although the tone is occasionally flip (“on the third boozeless day he rose”), it is more often empathic and forceful: “manuscripts / &bottles of Bols gin /snatched from the hellfire /always at your heels /panting and fanged.” Several themes — Lowry’s protagonist’s persecution by the Mexican police, his ambivalence toward redemption, the mental and physical symptoms of his deterioration — recur like hallucinations. There are a few low points here, but when Thesen finds her own voice and sings — as she does often — Confabulations is a well-crafted tribute to a great writer.