Lapsed WASP: Poems 1978-89

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

Coleman’s poems often strive for the critical evaluation of life
through comic irony. The attempt is important, in an age when forms of
undue seriousness, such as political correctness, dampen the alert
insight that comedy can bring. Unfortunately, Coleman’s irony often
collapses into a flippant presentation of the very attitude that irony
could undermine. For instance, he speaks of his desire to teach as a
desire to control others, but develops no real sense of what else that
desire might amount to, to provide an ironic counter-meaning. Rather,
the language of the poem shows that his aim as poet is to control our
easy applause through cliché (“the law’s long arm”), soft-porn
imagery (“fist-fuck”), and rhyme that jingles rather than deepens
thought (“masses,” “asses”).

Coleman’s tendency to collapse into shallowness is partly diagnosed
in his metaphor of humankind as thinking plants that produce “an
arrogance of vegetation— / no pain or pleasure, no heart.” What
needs to be added, for fuller diagnosis, is that if there is no heart,
no depth of commitment beyond the self, then no real thought is possible
either. Coleman puns frequently. (Puns are underused in poetry today;
so, here again, Coleman is adventurous.) However, the pun is often
shallow, and works to the detriment of poetic effect. “Handles,” in
connection with talk of Mozart, is a trite music-hall pun on
“Handels”; though “Thoreau me” for “Throw me” is fresher.
Puns are difficult devices to master in poetry, since they tend to
produce striking one-liners that fragment the unity of a poem. Coleman
does little to counteract this fragmenting effect.

Although the collection contains a handful of good poems, as a whole it
seems premature, containing many poems that need revision.