The love poem is becoming a lost art. As society becomes more and more obsessed with scientific explanations and the language attached, there has been a move to distrust sentimentality and overt emotion. Hierarchy of Loss attempts to reclaim this lost language by constructing a set of poems directed to a mysterious and amorphous lover.
Hierarchy of Loss struggles against this loss of sentiment by arranging itself as a collection of photographic poems, lyric works that hinge on the viewing and descriptive eye that frames each poem off from the next. The poems are at their most effective when they are at their tiniest, their starkest. Midnight Julie for example is a brief and intense portrait of loneliness and longing told through the filter of a Van Morison song:
"Your radio turned too low
Filling my bed like an actress on the big screen
It's not midnight
And you're not Julie
But it sounded good"
In this poem McCabe does a good job of filtering all the excess sensation (the song, the TV screen and audio) and turning it into a tight, small corner of understated sadness.
However, McCabe rarely describes a scene in this way and lets it sit on its own. He creates distracting excess in the poems by first abstracting the scene he is describing, then further narrating his own thoughts on that very scene. The poem Above the Elephants begins:
"The heroic half wish exists in that space
Or half space
Where droplets contain revelations:
Manifestations of being and beginning
Beginning being unto a greater good"
Immediately, the reader is thrown into a place of complete non-existence, being forced to navigate the vague landscape of abstracts. Nothing concrete is given to the reader to grasp onto. This constant move away from the descriptive objects and images the works are initially focused on in favour of the abstract musings of the narrator is both distracting and often redundant. More than this, the abstractions muddy the description, forcing McCabe to include excess language and adjectives to explain more to the reader, when a stark simple line centering around a physical act, sensation or object might have worked better. Later in the same poem the reader is given this description:
"The brightly painted unicycle
The laughing rubber horn
The well-used spritzer bottle"
The poem stretches out here needlessly as the adjectives pile on and further, detracting from the honest and interesting emotional connections and relationships being developed in the poems.
From this over description, he begins to reflect openly on the bucket he's been using as a central object:
"I realize the circular hole is not tin
Nor is the drop falling
Compared to what we don't see
Which may or may not be galvanized tin"
Again, the narration of the poet's thoughts is heavy-handed, breaking the cardinal rule of "Show, don't tell." Along with guiding the reader too directly, it populates the work with the speaking ego too much. This detracts from the relationships attempting to be explained here. Unfortunately, Above the Elephants is a microcosm of the problems plaguing the book. Hierarchy of Loss is over-saturated with the "I" perspective, an intrusive ego, describing or commenting, steering the reader away from the interesting and effective sentiments here. McCabe finds more success at other times with focus, with something in the foreground of the poem.
Aaron Tucker is a regular reviewer for The Danforth Review and The Women's Post and has published further commentary in The Antigonish Review, Matrix Magazine and The Southernmost Review. He is currently living and writing in Toronto.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading