Acrobats

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Paul Savoie’s first collection consists of 28 poems which more or less focus on the theme of sleight-of-hand magic or circus atmosphere perceptions. Acrobats, astrologers, lords and ladies, musicians, outlaws, warlords and wizards, and children populate this poetic dreamscape, and the poet attempts to be an acrobat with language. Through use of such shock tactics as disjointed images and scenes (e.g., “each time you were beheaded”), he paints a curiously anachronistic, surrealist canvas that could well have been written in the early seventies, instead of the early eighties. If the avowed aim of surrealism is to fuse matter-of-fact reality with dream experience to arrive at a “super-reality,” then Savoie fails in his attempt to portray his version of this “super-reality.” Surrealist poetry is notoriously difficult to write because of the incredible control needed to fuse dissimilar images to produce a desired effect; often the language of the poems, the diction, zooms out of control and the poem comes crashing down with very little meaning indeed. There are some strong images in this collection, but they do not coalesce into strong poems. Such clunkers as “ghosts of unlaughter,” “gongs of derision,” “stagnant universe,” and “looking-glass space” abound in this collection and diminish the impact of both the image and the poem. Some of the poems are particularly clumsy and one has to wonder if some of these poems are translations from French (there is no mention of this in the book). The book is well designed by Aya Press, and house artist Jerry Silverberg has contributed five illustrations which are very good but which do not enhance the quality of the poems.