Customers

Carrie MacKinnon was a personnel officer for a large Toronto insurance company.

Customers is divided into two sections: “Fingers Small and Brittle” and “Elbow to Elbow.”

“Fingers” begins with “We’re at the Market Square,” which describes a five-year-old’s way of seeing and feeling the world. The intensely personal, egocentric world of early childhood is evoked. Trainer shows children’s passive, amoral recording and judgement of the world (e.g., their curiosity about deformity, in a world where parents are supposed to make everything all right). Trainer places the child as victim in the world, hurt by what start as miracles and end as pain, with the agony of growing to independence, adolescence.

A peculiar, jarring poem, “Are Those the Muses Singing?,” ends the first section. After the earlier poems, with scenes of marketing stalls and family meals, this poem uses classic poetic images (the Muses, Medusa, Pegasus), which seem annoyingly out of place. The reader is struck by the incongruity of these nine lines — a Greek chorus in a market stall? “Elbow to Elbow,” the second edition, fails to convince the reader of the importance of writing about buying shoes or going to a drugstores. Glimpses of a life spent in shopping malls, bookstores, even hospitals, are informative. But they aren’t interesting. There is no glistening image to transmute this description of daily life, to make it new, to open our eyes, to teach us, show us something. Rather, at the end of it all, the reader feels like a voyeur, a trespasser, having accidentally seen through uncurtained windows the private life that dwells within.

Customers displays Trainer’s competence as a craftsman, but it leaves the reader hanging, waiting for inspiration.