Poetry matters. Whole books have been written about why. The best argument for its necessity comes from a collection like this one. Gary Hyland, whom I claim as a friend, has been – it seems like forever – a crucial figure in Saskatchewan’s enviable community of writers. Brought to poetry by the tragedies and beauty of the place he’s from, Gary has crafted a body of work to be carried close to the heart through all the stages of a life. I can think of no one who has seen so clearly what is around him – people, land, city streets, stories in magazines or the local paper – and transformed them with such purity into the love and ache of poetry. From his home in Moose Jaw, he has “on a lone wing…/soared into the mind of the universe.”
With wit and inventiveness, he populates his page with kids bearing nicknames like Deke, Scrawny, Zip, and Bumper. They spin on bicycle wheels from the real streets of his boyhood into his poems, but they’ve been altered with a storyteller’s flair. They’ve been given breath and substance in the hands of a writer who can make myths out of the ordinary and the lost. Gary’s characters are kids from any neighbourhood, yet they remain peculiarly local; Deke, for instance dreams of flying over Moose Jaw like a contemporary Icarus, wearing wings stuck on his shoulder blades with Juicy Fruit gum.
Although many of the poems are humourous, they are achingly so. The comedy is flavoured with sadness and sometimes bitterness, like the seed at the core of a jawbreaker. For Deke’s graduation his mom gives him an ill-fitting neighbour’s suit she bought with her tips; Scrawny’s mom, when he’s four or five, runs off with an auctioneer and Scrawny shoves the bike she buys him under a mainline freight. Outsiders in a middle-class world, they and their friends pose, bluster, fall in love with girls and sense a familiarity of spirit in the outcast Neesh who lives in a shack by the CN line. No other poet I know shows such an affinity for the small, enormous pains suffered in a childhood stained by poverty. No one else endows boys like these with such a fierce and enduring grace.
One of Gary’s gifts is his ear. He hears speech and transcribes it into a score on the page. Here’s Deke talking about Dante’s Divine Comedy:
Worse yet it’s ten thousand years old
so you can imagine me in grade nine
squinting at sixteen miles of poetry
but I decided I was gonna get some laughs
from this thing come hell or my old lady
which is what does come – a trip to hell
and jezzusmurphyman was it sumthin awful
about as funny as your average math class.
Gary is, of course, writing in the form called the dramatic monologue, perfected in the Victorian age by Robert Browning and carried forward brilliantly by Eliot in poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and by Edgar Lee Masters in The Spoon River Anthology. A learnèd heir of that form, Gary is one of its most stunning contemporary practitioners. You can hear his ability to shift in and out of different voices with tonal precision in his series about a boxer who has taken one too many punches. In the book After Atlantis, the poet tells the story from the points of view of the boxer’s manager, trainer, doctor and opponent, until finally we get the story from Vern, the boxer himself. No one can read Vern’s take on the fight without being moved in the way that only poetry can move you. Vern says about his manager, “I wuz okay once…Arnie says.” He goes on:
Arnie…he’s good
a pal. He let’s me do things
when no guys are there –
punch onea the bags or…
or, y’know, dance kinda
inna ring
sorta fightin
an I don’t haveta pay
or clean up
or pay money
The last stanza shows Gary at his best, stating what is literal and believable in the speaker’s voice, but at the same time, striking the deep chord of metaphor:
So who knows he sez maybe you’ll come back
an I sez from where
an we always laff.
I’ve taught these poems for years at the University of Victoria; the silence in the room after students hear them for the first time is the silence of respect and sadness. How did he do this, my students ask, in such a simple poem?
If the mastery of the colloquial and the voicing of the lost were all that Gary had to give us, it would be enough. But he is a smart, curious, and richly imaginative man who reflects on the last sermon of the 14th Dalai Lama, the mathematics of John Nash, Leroi-Gourhan’s insights into Paleolithic cave drawings, the movements of tai chi, the burning of a child in Viet Nam, the mirror of Elvis Presley. The scope and intelligence of his reading illuminate these pages and show up as well in his panegryrics to poets whom he admires: Pablo Neruda, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, Patrick Lane, P.K. Page, John Hicks, Gwendolyn MacEwen, to name a few. Readers further see his erudition in his mastery of traditional forms: sonnets, pantoums, a glosa, dramatic monologues, and epigraphs provide a rich countermeasure to the free-verse vernacular and open-form, lyrical meditations he excels at.
But perhaps what impresses me the most is the deepening wisdom, longing, and lament that thread through this collection. The longing was there from the start; in an early poem, even the boy Deke was able to express it. Commenting on a girl who loved Hank Williams in a time of rock and roll, he says, “but you believed everything so beautifully/ I used to wish you’d be right just once.” Longing turns to despair in the perfectly rendered “Out of Habit,” a poem about the break-up of a marriage. The perspective smoothly shifts between the husband and the wife. Nothing could be more terrible than his outburst of anguish juxtaposed with her detachment and control:
He pulls into a closed service station.
Trying to expel the pain, coughing, crying, he
doubles over, slams himself against the door.
She lights a cigarette and takes a slow drag.
He looks like one of those black and white
films, the old ones where nothing much happens.
Towards the end of the book the insights are more predominant and somber, with enough grit and texture to carry a reader to another level of knowing and loss. Those of us who know and love Gary as well as his poetry also know that he is ill with ALS. Never one to give up or turn away from any difficulty even when he “smashes into God,” he has been able to transcribe what is happening into the cadences and gristle of his written words. You hear a new kind of poignancy in lines like “Your mind not recognizing/your body,” and “I/fret myself to sleep, and each/day learn to breathe again,” and “It’s never as late as you think/It’s always later.” Never has hope been so sweet, so hard-earned and so purely expressed as in the final section of “Arguments in the Garden of Prayer.” It is a poem to break the heart:
The first sounds will be the bottle rattle
of the milkman and the chattering sparrows.
You don’t get up right away. You listen
to your mother clatter in the kitchen,
your father shaking out the paper.
The endless sun spills through the window.
You think of school. All your homework is
ready and all correct. New clothes beckon
in the closet. A playground of friends awaits.
Your father’s voice, low and casual,
spreads warmth and your mother’s voice responds.
One of them turns on the radio.
A voice declares eternal peace and welcomes
you to heaven. Stretching, you decide to rise.
In “November Waltz,” a poem addressed to his father and mother long after their deaths, the speaker confronts the problematic couple who created him:
Look what I’ve become, you who feared
the dream-lost lad would never learn to work.
Look what I’ve become, you who thought
I was too frail or foolish, you who thought
I’d wear a uniform in danger or in jail.
Have I got it, father, have I got it
right at last? And, mother,
may I have this last waltz?
Yes, we say, for his father and mother, and for ourselves. Yes, Gary, you got it right, over and over again in your life and in these poems. In the early morning, open this book, read the pages and see what you’ve become.
