What They're Saying about the Poets: Donato Mancini's You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence

You Must Work Harder To Write Poetry of Excellence
Donato Mancini
(BookThug, 2012)

Reviewed by Darren Bifford

The title of Donato Mancini’s You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is an ironic misnomer, as Mancini’s concern is less with poetry than it is with the state of poetry reviewing in this country. Poetry reviews in Canada, according to Mancini, have especially lacked in their treatment of postmodern poetry. The guilty parties are identified early on as “conservative critics” shackled by an ideologically crippled critical paradigm. With their dimmed and inflexible vision, these critics see merely what they want to see in all that they might profitably see, if only they worked harder. And it is not merely poetics which are at stake, but also politics. Mancini agrees with what seems to be a truism among some postmodern writers, and assumes that a poet’s (or critic’s) commitment to literary tradition and so-called traditional forms entails that he or she is also, even if tacitly, sympathetic to conservative and generally right-wing political agendas, while postmodern commitments, whatever they are, are allied with leftist ones. Carmine Starnino is thus declared an “arch-conservative” (though it’s unclear whether that title denotes solely an interest in formal elements of English prosody or an interest in lower taxation, or both), and George Woodcock’s “nostalgic reviewing […] writes its way willy-nilly into neo-conservative values, however “liberal” or “left” or even anarchist its departure points.” The dominant Canadian poetry review, then, tells us more about its author’s various poetic and political assumptions than it does about the poems it criticizes. These assumptions turn out to be embedded in a series of tropes—the common reader, accessibility, craft, tradition, meaning, the human heart—which lurk like a sickly mold beneath the surface of our typical reviews.

The stakes are high. Mancini suggests that there is a kind of war-of-poetry going on, with “innovative” or “progressive” Canadian poetry generally on the defensive. [1] Mancini asks us to consider, for instance, David Solway’s ruminations about the reading habits of his neighbor. Solway writes that he’s unable to “frankly conceive of any intelligent middlebrow reader spending an evening with Anne Carson or Jorie Graham in a way that my neighbor, a retired engineer, reads Houseman and Hardy and listens to recordings of Dylan Thomas”. No doubt the truth of David Solway’s thought experiment will be obvious to people who generally resemble persons named David Solway; and it is, Mancini rightly notes, an irritatingly dumb generalization. (For instance, my own neighbor, an unemployed alcoholic, spends his evenings reading Jack Gilbert.) But how about Mancini’s response? “The poets [Solway] rejects are US and Canadian women. The model poets are white, gentile, UK men: A.E. Housman, who writes eroticized war propaganda; Thomas Hardy, who writes misogynist social criticism; and Dylan Thomas, the hard drinking, womanizing, troublemaking, bad boy romantic”. I’ll grant Mancini his suspicion of the gender and cultural disparity but his reductive dismissal of Housman and Hardy and Thomas is just as weirdly righteous as Solway’s.

The most useful and entertaining parts of Mancini’s book—and, as it happens, the most problematic—consist in critical analyses of those above mentioned tropes, which are often clustered together throughout the course of a single review. Since Mancini’s book is about the rhetoric of dominant Canadian poetry reviewers, it’s really important that the examples he offers of those dominant reviews are both sufficient in sample size and typical. If not, then Mancini’s argument loses a great deal of force, and what he attacks merely a series of straw-men (and women). So what then to make of Mancini’s method? He begins by citing a more or less brief example of a what he offers up as a typical poetry review that errs in exactly the way he proposes it to err. For instance, Solway’s retired engineer neighbor, busy reading his Hardy, is evidence on Mancini’s analysis of that Common Reader who often emerges in poetry reviews. This is the reader for and to whom the reviewer often speaks, either to recommend a book of poetry or to warn against its consumption. The reviewer, in this capacity, assumes him or herself a member of “the common sense police” who defend not poets and critics but “also their readers who are members of that hard to please but demanding clique: the general reading public. Voracious but impatient, the general reader reads to understand and to be pleased.” The assumption of this trope thereby tacitly allows the reviewer to reject poetry that doesn’t fit into his preconceived mould. The reviewer’s “discourse,” says Mancini, “[is thus a] sign of [his or her] difficulty lining up the dominant ideolect [i.e., the way a class of critics usually talk] with the aesthetic imperatives governing the actual book under review.”

Mancini’s survey of the ambivalent reception of his own poetry book, Ligatures, is characteristic of his method. The reviewer writes that it is his “pleasure to report that Mancini mostly […] com[es] off usually like a bright Martian inquiring into this thing humans call language, and only occasionally like a grouchy Marxist who has read 20,000 books and got tenure the year Foucault died.” Randall Jarrell this is not; but no matter. With citations from the questionable review now on his operating table, Mancini attempts to show that this review is not in fact revelatory of any feature of his book but again only of its reviewer’s dominant ideolect, which in this case relies on the trope of accessibility. Whether Mancini’s final analysis is convincing is another matter. Mancini sees in his reviewer assumptions that “Erudition is ‘degenerate;’ subhuman […] Because very little in my book signifies either writerly toil or Accessibility, to protect Ligatures from hostile criticism Neff turns me into phantasmic Human shield for myself […] The Common Reader is advised against braving this book.” Indeed, says Mancini, the reviewer has in fact turned his book into “a rarified piece of work, a cunning and esoteric thing, built for connoisseurs,” with the implication that those “who could like my book” are in some way “arch-perverts.”(To be fair I should say it takes a reference to Zizek to get him to that unusual final statement.)

Mancini applies the same method to reveal (or not) other tropes. In almost all cases he seems to equivocate his discovery and analysis of the aesthetic values embedded in a reviewer’s tropes with their refutation. On the one hand, it’s worth asking, as Mancini does, what exactly a reviewer might unwillingly imply by the following sorts of assertions, (all made by different reviewers about different poetry books): it is a “bland book [that] isn’t meant to make you feel or know anything”; she is “a better and more human poet now’”; “Failing to appreciate the subtle depth and force of blert may require you to consult your mouth or heart for a pulse or feeling.” It’s easy for me to sympathize with the very general claim that one of the ways poetry reviews must work harder is to avoid the lazy kinds of hypostatization that Mancini discusses. The common reader is indeed no reader at all, and Mancini is probably right to say that such invocations often function as empty receptacles for the reviewer’s own ideological predilections. He is probably right to say that the specter of accessibility or humanity or craft or tradition can simply be a way for the reviewer to reify his or her ideas about what poetry is—and isn’t. Thus what I think most useful about Mancini’s argument, i.e., that it makes a case for the necessity of more imaginative critical practices in order to negotiate the very broad range of poetries that have developed in this country over the last sixty or so years. If that’s the case, the terms by which those postmodern poems are to be engaged by critics and reviewers ought not be identical to the way we might, for example, engage a book of sonnets. Likewise an appreciation, say, of Arnold Schoenberg would be obviously impossible if I believed that music must be tonally conceived; any atonal work would be, by definition, not music. (And I would be, almost by definition, a cultural boor).

I am, however, suspicious of Mancini’s method in its specifics. What he gives us are psychoanalytic-like redescriptions of the surface features of what is claimed to be a typical review. Yet the same problem holds for this procedure as holds for psychoanalysis in general: it offers an interpretation the strength of which is almost entirely conditioned by its acceptance as strong by the patient. If I fail to see the implication, for example, of an arch-pervert hidden in the unconscious of the connoisseur, then Mancini is simply left with repeating his interpretation. Or it’s as if Mancini offers us a series of jokes. Whether they succeed as jokes depends entirely on whether they make us laugh. If one does not, there’s little use saying it again. Moreover, I wonder whether some of these tropes are not far more useful than Mancini believes. Take the tropes of craft and tradition, both of which Mancini goes to lengths to dismiss. I agree that when taken as static fetish-like ideals, they may be less illuminating than otherwise. But when I praise a collection for its author’s attention and attainment of a high level of craft and of interestingly engaging with the English literary tradition, it seems possible—indeed, good critics show that it is possible—that I’ve used those tropes to point to actual features of the work of art as such. Of course these are not neutral categories; but it takes more than pointing out that fact to give us grounds for rejecting them. Furthermore, it seems to me that root metaphors—like craft and tradition—can be invoked to deal with a range of poetries. Again, no good critic would limit his or her discussion to the terms these tropes set beforehand; and he or she may wish to reject them for some artworks. Mancini will take issue with the very idea of “a work of art,” and claim to the contrary that these tropes are “inadequate to all poetry of any type.” To praise or simply engage a poem at the level of craft is then a kind of bad faith. Here, I feel, our disagreement runs far deeper than reasons comprehend.

What is a review for? What does a critic do? What a critic does not do, on Mancini’s view, is offer normative assessments. Those reviews which do so are characterized as “mercantile,” and are reduced to capitalistic tokens. Shane Neilson, for instance, is dismissed for evaluating poetry according to a normative checklist—intelligibility, meaning, emotional expressiveness—and rejecting poems which fail those criteria. I doubt Neilson would agree with this charge; nonetheless it is, on Mancini’s analysis, what he’s really doing. (Again the influence of psychoanalytic interpretation). Neilson, says Mancini, is representative of the critic-as-angry customer who merely wishes to return a product that he is unhappy with. Instead, Mancini endorses Frank Davey’s prescription that “textual criticism [be] informed by transnational creative and critical influences, one that attempts to meet language at its material bases, and to meet poetry at the site of composition […] What Davey envisions are poetics, rather than mercantile review criticism of imperative value judgment.” I won’t pretend to understand all the terms Mancini invokes. I’m not sure, for example, what is meant by the material bases of language, nor whether by transnational creative and critical influences Mancini means simply non-national. In any case, Mancini contrasts Neilson’s assessment of Kiyooka’s work—e.g., “it is difficult to pick just one offence against style and taste; Surrender is a repeat offender […] Indeed, confusion is a constitutive experience when reading through the whole book”—with Al Purdy’s reading of one of Kiyooka’s earlier books. Purdy describes Kiyooka’s poems as “creat[ing] an energy vortex in which all things turn inward and circle to an end inside the poem without question. The poem answers any implicit questions in process of asking.” The worth of Purdy’s description will naturally depend on our own acquaintance with the poetry in question, and I’ll assume here that Purdy’s statement is at least apt, if not illuminating. Mancini praises the review in the following terms: “without academic training in cultural theory, Purdy is perfectly able to read the effects of the form of Kiyooka’s poetry” in terms contiguous to those which the poetry itself asserts. He is “not fixated on poetry’s meaning […] representation or message.” I’m not sure if this example is sufficient to show the sort of textual criticism Mancini finally advocates. I take it, however, that Purdy’s critical attention is nonetheless lauded because he extends beyond his own poetics and inhabits Kiyooka’s work—albeit without, as Mancini notes, knowledge of critical theory.

It’s possible to disagree with Neilson’s rhetoric. And it seems equally possible, though a distinct activity, to disagree with Neilson’s opinion of Kiyooka’s poetry. It’s not obvious to me, however, why judgment and assessment of any kind is either precluded or opposed to the sort of hermeneutics Mancini calls for. It’s thus easy, again, to distrust the strong dichotomy Mancini asserts. In art, as in life, we do well to encounter strangeness with curiosity and an open mind. Even that supposedly conservative critic, T.S. Eliot, disparages the “dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who affirms a value.” Such a critic, Eliot continues, “has left his labour incomplete […] but in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse or better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the correct judgment for himself.” Critics and reviewers are just those partial and fallible readers who publically articulate their responses to texts as best as they can. A good critic’s evaluations are always tentative; he or she knows very well the risk of attempting to judge a work of art. He or she will acknowledge that evaluation is never neutral and no perspective is from nowhere. Good critics, in other words, wear their aesthetic biases on their sleeves and, like Nietzsche remarked, match the courage of their convictions with the courage to challenge those convictions.

I’ll end with the acknowledgement that there’s much more in Mancini’s book that I would have liked to discuss: his ideas about aesthetic conscience take up a good portion of the work, and will be of interest to those interested in the link between moral psychology and aesthetics. Also, I’d have questioned more explicitly Mancini’s use of critical theory and the jargon which comes with it. This is a book wherein you’ll encounter, for an extreme example, statements like this: “[t]he poet activates polysemy on the formal level of parataxis, and activates it contextually with indexical signs.” I’ve provided no context for this quote but, truth be told, there isn’t much context to add. Mancini offers this remark almost out of nowhere as a clarification and extension of the sort of criticism he believes adequate to distinctively post-modern texts. Elsewhere, citing an example Stanley Fish’s use of Derridian theory to deconstruct a Dirty Harry film, Mancini seems to seriously ask: “If Derrida’s ideas are good enough to write about the films of Clint Eastwood, why not about contemporary Canadian poetry?.” This is an odd rhetorical question. I don’t believe any serious critic, by which I mean a person with a broad and generous cultural sensitivity, will say that Derrida’s or Hegel’s or Marx’s or Foucault’s or whoever’s ideas aren’t “good enough.” The question, I assume, is whether those ideas are useful and illuminating when applied to contemporary Canadian poetry. And the answer is probably, yes, in some cases. In this connection, and at a more basic level, I believe it worth defending yet another trope Mancini dismisses: that of the non- (or anti-) academic critic: the strong distinction between those in the university and those not beholden to the university. Mancini’s text proves to be an unusual attempt to extend the concerns and categories of the former to the critical practices of the latter. That by itself makes this book an interesting read, especially and even if chiefly to those of us who have suffered both within and without the academy. Nonetheless, the expectation, often encountered in the 1990s in literature departments and ubiquitous in Mancini’s book, that a front line of progressive politics is practiced in the seminar room seems to me extremely dubious. Without reifying aesthetics and politics into separate spheres, we still do a disservice to both by collapsing one into the other. So too I wonder whether the influence of critical theory, with its roots in Hegel, Derrida, Lacan and co., is not merely a more recent example of Plato’s desire for the philosophers to tell the poets what they’re really doing. And, as in Plato, those who agree with Socrates nod their assent while the poets (and, probably the critics), then as now, imperfectly carry on.

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[1] I suspect this combative rhetoric here, and in the literature at large, is largely nonsense. The only audible conflict is between those who feel it necessary to shout about their aesthetic preferences. I take it as obvious that it’s far more common than not for a single poet to be interested in many kinds of different poetry, even if he or she writes more or less formally (or more or less postmodernly). I know Carmine Starnino (again) and Christian Bök don’t much like each other’s work and once had a cage match but, really, shame on them both for agreeing to take part in such staged idiocy. ↩

The Collection as Companion: A Review of Darren Bifford's Wedding in Fire Country

Wedding in Fire Country
Darren Bifford
(Nightwood, 2012)

A disarming sincerity suffuses Darren Bifford’s debut collection. Or perhaps I should say—respecting the proverbial distance between poet and persona—a disarming illusion of sincerity. In the case of this book, though, such hedging is hard. Much of Wedding in Fire Country takes no pains to distinguish the voice of the poems from Bifford himself, so that one continually feels witness to a young poet’s struggle to transfigure his richly lived experience into memorable art. The biographical details the paratext gives us—Bifford originally hails from Summerland, in the Okanagan Valley; he is married to a woman named Iris; they currently live in Montreal—end up informing our reception of the poems because so many of them take such facts as context, and thus encourage us not only to care about the poet’s life, but to invest in whatever degree of artistic distance he manages to achieve. Some poems initially read like merely skillful anecdotes, while others effect quite startling shifts into the surreal, and it is the interplay between these two poetics – earnest anecdotalism and searching aestheticism – that defines this collection: Bifford tells stories about his life while striving, as an artist, not to bore us with stories about his life.

The title poem succeeds at this in subtly stunning fashion. Its opening lines illustrate several key elements of Bifford’s poetics:

We pretend the water bombers are buffalo
bellying the lake, which they slurp sloppily.

Sloppily we suck at our beers and cut into
my father’s steaks. The fires in the mountains

are at first far enough away we don’t notice them.
The smoke they issue is barely distinguishable

from the white clouds, except by the way it gathers
instead of dissipates, as clouds will do after storms.

I am here and you are comfortably beside me.
We’ve flown to our wedding and everyone is coming.

In a Canadian poetic milieu increasingly enthralled with surface flash, this is refreshingly understated, with odd touches lifting it above the quotidian: the disjunctive comparison of water bombers (aircraft that take on water to fight forest fires) to buffalo (land animals), the appropriately sloppy repetition of “sloppily,” the minutely observed distinction the speaker makes between smoke and clouds. And yet the poem remains firmly rooted in experience, exhibiting a social warmth that radiates from the collection as a whole, a calm conviviality that lets us know the person behind these poems isn’t afraid to speak as himself, doesn’t feel the need to lacquer his work with artifice. Bifford places himself in a long line of writers—from Frost and Williams, to Kerouac and O’Hara, to someone like Charles Simic today—whose artistry partly consists in concealing their artistry, in fostering the illusion of straight talk.

This isn’t to say, however, that Wedding in Fire Country doesn’t sometimes lift into a more self-consciously poetic register. In fact, the moments when it does so stand among the book’s finest, effecting tonal shifts so gradually and subtly built up to that their arrival leaves us not only thrilling at their unexpectedness, but admiring Bifford’s skillful, restrained sense of pace. As the fifty-odd-line title poem continues, for example, the backdrop of encroaching forest fires casts a looming sense of menace over the titular wedding; rather than drift into darker territory, however, the reprieve of a summer shower (“Look, it’s raining! / This is a fine thing, considering the fires. Under the umbrella / you are huddled in your white fine dress”) exalts the speaker into a rapt inhabitation of the celebratory moment (“and our friends / are throwing wet confetti, and see!—there is my father / and your father joyous with one another”), leading into an absorbing poem-ending meditation on patrimony, matrimony, and the elemental nature of love:

I am the son of my father and you are the daughter of another.

There is a difference between us that is distinct from the troubles

of mountains and deer. Now here I am talking about deer.

We are distinct from the deer, who are the siblings

of the slender trees that are courted by the wind,

and when so courted, do not totally resist its ravishments.

The wind is close in kind to the breath of the sky,

which is all the extension but not the progeny of anything

other than itself. For the wind is the fury and the author

of the way your hair flirts by not staying in one place

but flits above your eyebrows and ears. I wish at this time

to be the courter of your hair and the comforter

of your whorled ears. For tonight we’ve sojourned

close in that place where the fire’s herd freely roams.

For a poem that begins almost prosaically to end so convincingly in the vatic mode is a feat in itself, but it’s the gradualness, the naturalness, with which the speaker comes to adopt the voice of seer that so impresses here. The sense of occasion Bifford builds through telling details over the poem’s first two-thirds makes this closing shift to a Shelleyan communion with nature feel, however improbably, earned. The poem convinces us that a man at his wedding, surrounded by loving family, apostrophizing his bride as forest fires smoulder, partly quelled by rain, in the distance, would utter these thoughts—or at least this man would. And yet for every element that asks us to take this seriously as a meditative flight—the copious alliterative repetitions (daughter/ difference/distinct/deer/distinct/deer, wind/wind/wind) and pairings (flirt/flit, courter/ comforter), the lush diction (slender, courted, ravishments, whorled, sojourned), and the animistic personification of nature (“the breath of the sky”)—there are aspects that undercut this Romantic seriousness: the way the long lines stilt the visionary momentum, for example, or the stiff phrasings their length seems to encourage (“There is a difference between us that is distinct,” “I wish at this time”), or the speaker’s second-guessing of himself, as if half-ashamed of his rhapsody’s indulgence (“Now here I am talking about deer”). Here and frequently throughout the collection Bifford keeps us intrigued as to whether he’s impervious to postmodern irony or subtly embodying it.

The book’s longest pieces—especially the title poem and “Near Coral I Listen for Trains” (one of a strong trio of poems selected over at Joyland Poetry)—are among its clearest highlights, with their wide loping lines allowing Bifford the space to effect the subtle conceptual and tonal shifts at which he is already so adept. So fascinating is the mind on display in these longer pieces that I could readily imagine this version of Bifford producing a book-length meditative poem along the lines of A.R. Ammons’s Sphere or Garbage. (I’d read it.) The shorter lyrics in Wedding in Fire Country present a different Bifford, one less given to the absurdist turns and metaphysical speculations that lend the longer poems their moments of greatest uplift, yet at the same time a more focused and intimate poet. This sense of intimacy arises not just out of so many of the poems’ apparent biographical sincerity, but out of the warmth and intensity with which they dialogue with other writers. Bifford has clearly studied his craft with reverence, and like many debut collections, Wedding in Fire Country teems with intertexts; authors cited in epigraphs, apostrophized, or otherwise referenced include: Robert Lowell (twice), Walt Whitman (twice), William Faulkner, Robert Kroetsch, Charles Simic, the Beats, and most crucially, Czeslaw Milosz—who is addressed at length in the nine-poem epistolary sequence “Letters to Milosz,” the first of which illustrates Bifford’s short-lyric technique at its most forceful:

A circus swaggers into town. Its tents

flop down like the lopped-off ears of giants.

Stink smears the air, spreads like a rash:

elephant shit and elephant skin, smells

of lions and tigers in crated dens. Shriners

go dwarfed under red dummy hats,

trace circles around the stage in their golf carts.

All’s a bestiary parcelled into tricks and danger

for a kid’s vacant imagination, who stares

and slops hot toffee into his mouth.

Smoke pilfers a darkening purple sky

and disappears through a hole in the sky.

What isn’t here for you, Milosz? Either

we despair or we forget about it. Forget about it.

This poem leaves us with pregnant questions, most immediately: Why does the speaker turn from this circus to address Milosz? Is the circus an extended metaphor for the carnivalesque human condition amid a culture of spectacle, environmental degradation, and interspecies exploitation? Is Milosz, then—whose poetic reputation is inextricably bound up with his perceived status as a moral authority—being appealed to by the speaker as someone with the capacity to perceive what is missing from this empty extravaganza? At no point in the sequence is it ever entirely clear why Milosz in particular is being addressed, but like the above example, all nine poems impress with their imaginative vividness, their descriptive precision, and the speaker’s authentic-seeming confrontation with feeling existentially bedazzled by the world’s crush and clamour. Which is not to deny that I find certain of the poems’ aspects problematic. In the above piece, for example, I can’t fathom why Bifford chose to end two consecutive lines with “sky,” except perhaps to prepare us visually and aurally for the repetition that ends the poem. In that latter instance, though, the fact that “forget about it” registers in two different modes—first declarative, then imperative—makes it incredibly effective, while the repetition of “sky” just feels clunky. On the other hand, anyone who has read Wedding in Fire Country in its impressive entirety will trust that Bifford knows this, and that for some thought-out (but inaccessible, at least to me) reason, he consciously chose to risk that clunkiness. 

I could offer similar caveats to most of the reservations I may have about the collection. Take the poem “Late Summer,” for instance:

Once in a kitchen I was most of the night

at the refrigerator stacking beers and the party

kept going on. Thus, early in the morning,

I also was dancing. That August

would not stop being exactly itself: turning

back around and stopping at the house for dinner,

always the same dinner: chicken, steaks, peppers

grilled well in olive oil, plus beers so that now

when I think about things it’s blurry

what we did and where we were. Tennis,

sure, and I’ll continue to be very poor at playing

against you as the great dusk north of the city lapses

our last serve, volley, and its all-night again

and everyone is staying in.

To paraphrase Randall Jarrell’s criticism of Auden’s later work: the poetic pressure here is not high. This poem is anecdotal, lacks sonic torque, and contains virtually no figurative language (though there may be an implicit personification in the “lapsing” of the “great dusk”). On the other hand, there are only a few such poems in Wedding in Fire Country, and they all serve to pace and diversify the collection, relieving the tensile energy of the many more forceful metaphoric and rhetorical performances—as if the book were a body in motion, muscles contracting and relaxing in necessary rhythm. My initially indifferent response says as much about the poetic milieu in which I am entrenched as it does about the quality of “Late Summer.” Just as I agree less and less with Jarrell’s ungenerous assessment of later Auden, I find myself more and more wary of how transient parochial fashions influence my own critical sensibility. In other words: Does the "poetic pressure” always need to be “high”? Many Canadian poets of Bifford’s generation and younger (it's my generation too—he was born in 1977, I in 1978) have been tending to favour a kind of surrealism-lite: wry, off-kilter, never too serious, clever rather than strictly intelligent, favouring associative leaps over sustained development, often wedded to sonic strategies that virtually fetishize a Hopkinsesque coiled sonic tension, and rarely favouring a common word when a baroque one can be rooted out. This line of development has produced some excellent work (and will doubtless continue to do so), but we’re approaching the point where what may have once been innovation risks ossifying into mere fashion. We can’t ignore the fact that many of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century—Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Millay, Riding, Auden, Bishop, Layton, Page, Merrill, Walcott, Ashbery, Hill, Plath, Heaney, Muldoon, Duffy (to rattle off a quick and incomplete personal canon)—often pursue virtually opposite aesthetic strategies to those listed above, and still have an infinitude to teach us. This touches on part of what so distinguishes Wedding in Fire Country, and makes it one of the most refreshing and interesting books I’ve read this year: it is resolutely unfashionable, presenting instead a young poet mapping out and bouncing off his own personal canon, one that includes some important voices—Robert Creeley, for instance, or even Jack Kerouac—that are resolutely out of vogue among our younger poets, especially in the eastern half of the country. Now I’m not claiming that “Late Summer” is a particularly strong poem—in fact it’s probably the least strong in the book—but I’d never describe it as “weak” either. Besides its pacemaking function, it does have its virtues, managing to convey quite lucidly a particular stage and style of living without lapsing into saccharine nostalgia, and exhibiting the same refreshing attention to friendship, food (plus beer—a man after my own heart!), and simple human enjoyment that also enlivens many of the collection’s more powerful pieces.

I’ve repeatedly emphasized the impression of sincerity, authenticity, and intimacy one gets from Wedding in Fire Country. Though this is accurate, it’s not the entire story. Along with the many epistles, apostrophes, and slices of biography that make up the bulk of the collection, there are a solid handful of dramatic monologues, including the poem that first introduced me to Bifford, “Wolf Hunter,” which won the Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for poetry in 2010, and served as the title poem for his Cactus Press chapbook later that year. It’s a remarkable poem which, though it wavers slightly in voice somewhere between the colloquialism of the hunter (“Fuel runs low / and we gotta be back before dark”) and a more self-consciously poetic speaker (“time like a room we enter / together, a second or so before I pull the trigger”), convincingly thrusts us into the unsettling (and increasingly unsettled) perspective of a man hunting a helpless wolf from a plane. The companion piece, “Wolf Hunted,” though just as deft perspective-wise, fails to fully convince because it is written in virtually the same voice as “Wolf Hunter.” I find it difficult to accept, for example, that while frantically running from the “relentless stutter” of a looming plane, a wolf would observe with such equanimity: “The treeline, possible / cover, thick lodgepole pine (where I aim this sprint), / is like dark water stood on end.” On the other hand, that last simile is one of many smart, arresting moments in the poem—so what I’ve identified as its shortcoming is more an aesthetic choice I fail to relate to, one which raises theoretical issues about the dramatic monologue as a genre that extend well beyond Bifford’s work. For me, the pleasure of reading the form’s master practitioners, from Robert Browning to Carol Ann Duffy, largely derives from witnessing them not just inhabit a exterior perspective, but adopt a voice to match it. “Andrea del Sarto” sounds nothing like “Caliban upon Setebos,” and for good reason: one is delivered by an eloquent Renaissance painter wracked with professional and erotic jealousy he’s trying to suppress, while the other issues in a guttural first-person-pronoun-less spew from a subhuman creature musing on his monstrous god. Even Ted Hughes in “Hawk Roosting” (perhaps the most immediate forebear of “Wolf Hunted”) uses vocal poise not as a default, but to ironically convey the utter yet deluded assurance the hawk feels in its own supremacy (“Nothing has changed since I began. / My eye has permitted no change. / I am going to keep things like this.”). In “Wodwo,” on the other hand, Hughes adopts a much less rooted voice for his nosing forest creature (“Do these weeds / know me and name me to each other have they / seen me before, do I fit in their world?”). If I seem to be holding Bifford up to an awfully high standard here—and it’s not just him: I had a similar issue with the monologues in the first section of Amanda Jernigan’s otherwise amazing debut Groundwork—please know that I’m doing so because his writing warrants such respect (as does hers). Furthermore, Bifford proves himself more than capable of deft ventriloquism elsewhere in Wedding in Fire Country: in a series of three poems spoken from the challenging perspective of Faulkner’s Dewey Dell, for instance, or more subtly in the eight-line gem “Nightmare”:

What is that knocking, mother?

It’s the wind’s knuckles rapping at the window, my son.

What is that squeaking, mother?

That’s the procession of the mice within the walls, my son.

What is that rotting in the basement, mother?

Those are harvest apples in a bucket, my son.

Who are the men crouching at the door, mother?

They are my friends, my son. And they’re coming.

Not until we reach the end of this deliciously sinister poem do we realize that the “mother” is in fact the “nightmare” of the title, and that the “friends” who are “coming” are likely monstrous manifestations of the terror such bad dreams bring. But Bifford isn’t just giving voice to a fearful abstraction here; he’s ventriloquizing a whole tradition of macabre call-and-response poems, from the anonymous Early Modern ballad “Lord Randal”—

“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?

And where ha you been, my handsome young man?”

“I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,

For I'm wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”

—which ends with the young lord poisoned by his lover, to Auden’s “O What Is That Sound”—

O what is that sound which so thrills the ear

      Down in the valley drumming, drumming?

Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

          The soldiers coming.

—which ends with the first lover abandoning the second to execution by the soldiers who will soon burst through the door. That Bifford’s entry into this tradition feels both deliberate and utterly at home in Wedding in Fire Country testifies to how skillfully he has paced and ordered the collection so as to allow it to accommodate a great diversity of approaches (a diversity to which I cannot do justice even in this fairly lengthy review) while somehow feeling all the more unified for its scattershot approach. If urged to explain this paradox, I’d say that Bifford’s engagements with so many forms, voices, and traditions rarely feel programmatic—that is, they rarely strike one as abortive “experiments” but rather as considered, mature, fully realized undertakings—and so one is consistently left with the impression of authenticity to which I’ve so often alluded here. Reading this collection, I feel communicated with, and indeed, carrying it around for several weeks to dip into during my spare moments, I came to feel companionate towards it, as though the poems’ frequent depictions of people enjoying each other’s company had bled into my consciousness, tingeing my worldview with its sociability. I suspect that Wedding in Fire Country will have a similar effect on anyone who spends some real time with it, and I heartily recommend doing so.