Monday, December 31, 2018

12th Canadian Challenge - 11th Review - Stereoblind

Emma Healey's Stereoblind is a slim collection of prose poems.  The word in the title, stereoblind, refers to the condition of not being able to visually perceive depth, i.e. everything is flattened out.  While this would be most common among people who have lost sight in one eye, it can also impact people with two functioning eyes.  I'll have to be honest here and admit that the poem that most closely dealt with stereoblindness, "Impossible Colour," didn't grab me as much as some of the others.  Perhaps a case where the concept in the abstract was a bit more intriguing than the implementation.

I did like several other poems along two basic themes -- bureaucracy (and paperwork in particular) and riffing on Blade Runner.  While Stereoblind came out fairly early in 2018 (and I am just getting around to reviewing it now), I imagine that the two Blade Runner poems ("ESPER" and "Voight-Kampff") were written quite a while back, i.e. before Blade Runner 2047 kind of brought Blade Runner back into general circulation in 2017.  Who knows, it might have been the 30th anniversary edition DVD that got her into Blade Runner in the first place.  (Just writing 30th anniversary makes me feel so very old.  Granted I probably didn't see this in the theatre in its original run, though I'm not saying I didn't.  I saw Tron a couple of times and that came out in 1982 as well.  I definitely saw Blade Runner on early VHS a few times and then at a University of Michigan film society screening in 1988 or so (back when there was still the voice-over).  So I am part of the original audience in that sense.  Sorry for the digression...)

Since I have raised the Blade Runner connection, I will start with these two poems.  Going into these poems, I definitely had the warm fuzzy feeling that you get when something connects with a part of your childhood (or very young adulthood).

"Voight-Kampff" takes a slightly cynical take on the technology: "At first I liked the test because I couldn't tell what made the questions like each other. ...[but] I was pretty disappointed when I got there on my own: it was just empathy and violence, like everything else is."

Then the poem riffs on the line "I'll tell you about my mother."  Instead of unleashing unspeakable violence on the tester, the poet recalls her mother visiting her in Montreal, where she lived in a terrible apartment that had no interior doors and where the ceiling "was buckling in slow, beautiful waves."  Her mother brought her a bike, which the poet was then afraid to ride.  The poet then focuses on the tester.  "I wanted to ask him whether he thought that story was about guilt or clarity or debt. ... But he didn't want to hear it.  He was busy with his work."

I have to admit, this poem made me laugh as it wasn't too reverential about the source material.

I would have to say that "ESPER" is a little less successful, as it seems too faithful to the movie: "In this scene it's night, like always.  Our hero stares down at a handful of old photographs, picks at the keyboard, maybe dreams about a unicorn, etc. ... The sink behind her out of focus, piled with dishes, kitchen floor in black and white..."  That said, the poet does try to link to the earlier poem and make it a bit more personal: "Small trail of symbols, significance of the bicycle, all this glowing and pause. ... She looks good, caught up, flickering inside the question, almost there but not there yet."

The other poems I enjoyed were related to government bureaucracies in one way or another.

"Bad Dream" takes a somewhat apocalyptic view of government literally combusting: "The National Student Loans Service Centre not calling you, engulfed in flames. Bright, fast, on purpose. ... In the morning in one sense the country will wake and be lighter by one building.  Not you.  ... You will spend all of your life breathing letterhead in.  Old T4s, bills, receipts.  All that proves.  Your own balance outstanding."

For me the outstanding poem was really a series of linked prose poems, called N12, which the poet helpfully explains in the notes is a form that tenants gets when he/she/they are being renovicated.  This was and remains a major issue in Toronto given the sharp rise in property values (and rents) and the very low vacancy rate (under 2.5% in 2017, and basically the lowest in Canada).  Thus, tenants feel very much at the mercy of their landlords in Toronto.

I can only quote a few of the lines from some of the poems in the series, but I find there is a nice mix of the absurd, the humorous (at least from the outside) and the sheer anxiety that must be going through the mind of the poet (assuming that this is either inspired by real-life experiences or the dread of same...).

"The real estate agent plants his sign in our lawn like a flag, takes a key.  ... One night before bed, I lift my pillow and find one [business card] ... The real estate agent's gleaming white teeth are arranged in a neat, endless row, like piano keys in a nightmare."

"Our landlord drives a disappearing Lamborghini.  Each time we see it, the rust has claimed more ground."

"One day, his brother follows in a very large truck.  Together, in the bleak mid-morning light, they lean a ladder up against the shed and begin the complex ritual of removing years' worth of garbage from its roof."

"One day, there are no more first-time buyers.  The next, too, the door stays locked.  ... We all rush to the front window.  The real estate agent is grimly unstaking his face from the lawn. ... The next two months proceed in a complex silence.  It's dangerous to want, to fix, to ask."

"The first-time buyers return.  This time they're men alone in suits that smell like plaster dust and money."

"For weeks I bike and sweat between the city's smallest places, breathing in centuries of dust, trying to imagine a future underground."

"I go to a party in an abandoned condo sales centre.  Someone has wrapped all the showroom furniture in white vinyl.  It looks like the end of the world."

"On the water, a man sits in the province's last remaining swan boat, playing a mournful song on the trumpet while two civilians paddle him around the perimeter."

Throw in some shout outs to raccoons early on (and even a reference to air rights), and one could hardly ask for a more in-the-moment poem about Toronto and the impact this latest property bubble is having on the city. I can strongly recommend Stereoblind, and particularly the series N12, for anyone interested in contemporary Toronto life.

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