A Broken Bowl

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

“Set firmly at the end of the millennium, A Broken Bowl takes on the
burden of history, with its heaped atrocities, its moral decay, its
unimaginable sufferings.” So runs the jacket-blurb, and it’s
accurate in a way—though not, I suspect, in quite the way the writer
thinks. The fact is that this is the kind of poetry that our age
believes should be written. We are obsessed with “the end days”—to
quote another part of the blurb—and Patrick Friesen duly provides what
our television screens assure us is the real world.

Here are a few extracts as examples of Friesen’s millennial vision:
“buying bullets with an unemployment cheque / shooting rats and
listening to them squeal”; “it is impossible to be good / only shame
and desolation move in the world”; “suicide as the final question /
the only question left”; “it’s a filthy place, all shit, used
condoms, punctured lysol cans, and the smell of rotting flesh.”

There’s a powerful rhetoric here, which occasionally lapses into
self-parody: “there’s a brain tumour in the house / a lung in the
microwave.” Friesen is intelligent, sensitive, and compassionate, with
a gift for the order of words; in consequence, he possesses all the
qualities a poet ought to command. But he is a victim of the clichés of
his time. When cities are in question, they must be “sarajevo /
auschwitz / soweto”—even though the millennium created other cities.
No one would deny that “death of a bag lady / huddled beneath the
bridge” is one possible image for our age, but such imagery is as
selective in its own way as that of Norman Rockwell or the
beaver-and-maple-leaf school of earlier decades.

Perhaps we ought to wallow in the awfulness of it all; however, it’s
possible to think otherwise. The publisher, paradoxically, has produced
a beautiful book to contain “scum ... / all filth and smell / ... a
fetid cesspool.” For my part, I offer a slightly unfair review; but
someone has to insist that although this may be the truth it is
certainly not the whole truth. Not all the bowls are broken.