Tuesday

Reviewed by Inkslinger, April 21, 2009 (The Overdecorated Bookcase blog)

Colloquial, quirky, and compelling, Barry Dempster's Love Outlandish* centres love and lust in all its variations, joining slang with figurative language to create an immediacy that is engaging yet thought inducing. This collection will draw you in, rough you up, and send you back into the world marvelling at how much fun it all was. And then you'll return, begging for more.

In the juxtaposition of disparate images, by allowing the colloquial to play about in the fields of the poetic, Dempster repeatedly illustrates dazzling pyrotechnics of line and image and language. Look at these lines (from "Lack of Light"): "the sun suddenly ta-dahs, all / fanfare and ribbons." Or these (from "Willingness"): "Love is nothing // like an expectation, instead / a wham from out of nowhere, / years rippling around us like comic strips."

The elasticity of the imagery he employs is fascinating. Dempster joins images together that are both surprising and delightful. Like the opening line from the poem "Glowing" in which he inverts the expected in one deft move with "The sky has flung open its bedroom windows today."

There are so many examples to choose from, really, to illustrate that this collection is a must-have addition for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. In "The Phone Rings" the sound of a telephone is linked to the drama of opera. In "Yoga Class" Dempster gives us desire and want in a basement, "prayers / spraying in all directions, the scattershot / of fate." Love and germaphobia co-exist in "Oozing," while a "man in the moon gives one / of those wry romantic grins." So much fun!

Here's one of my favourites from this collection (one of the better examples from the long tradition of "Come Live with Me" poems):

Come Live with Me by Barry Dempster

Come live with me, I'd like to share
this watch that doesn't tick, this
TV set that takes the sickness
of the world and wraps it
in sex and show, this chimney
growing taller with each blast of heat,
this window staring at a dying oak
and calling each loss a gorgeous miss.

I want to live closer to the core of
all my things, the springs and screws,
the blinking lights, the seams that separate
the do's from don'ts, the gleam within the shine. I want to be right here
when you find the perfect word
strayed across the line and learn
the courage it takes to face a brand new story.

Please, come live with me, the sun
with its hundred arms, the steam of the tea
floating from lips, the damp spot on the pillow
where soul squeezed through. I want
the marrow, the stretch, the stirrings of green
deep within your eyes. I want the house
to catch your flame, soak in your perfume,
surrender its bones to the creak
only your feet can play.

Come live with me, I'd like to share this
death without a name, this breathing
that aims to outlast desire, this wholeness
belonging to the both of us, like the loops
and straggles of conversation,
or the soft babble of a kiss.

* yet another great book of poems available from Brick Books!