Hard to believe I've gotten to 13 reviews this time around with just time for one more before "the polls close" out in B.C. I really left it all to the last month. I don't want to do that again. I think in general I would prefer reviewing not quite so many volumes of poetry or at least not all at the same time. I really need to get moving again on Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. And maybe this year is finally the year that I read Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I was thinking I would do a double review of George Stanley's After Desire and Vancouver: A Poem. But to do it justice, I need more time and another pass through Vancouver. I'll tentatively pencil it in for Canada Day proper.
After Desire was published in 2013. The poems all reflect the period after Stanley's return to Vancouver after leaving to teach up north in Terrace, with the exception of a relatively short section titled "1971," which appear to be poems written in 1971 that Stanley recently uncovered and naturally enough don't mesh with the rest of the book. Many of the other poems are about moving beyond desire, generally sexual desire, though of course one could also move beyond the desire for wealth or material goods. The loss of sexual desire hits Stanley quite hard, as it was so central to him identity as a gay man. However, some of the poems, such as "West Broadway" are just about live as an old man (in his 70s) living in the city, taking the 99 bus.
"Memories of Desire" is probably more accurately described as memories of the times desire led successfully to sex. "I am unable to focus. I don't want to focus / on desires I can no longer feel. / Desires for powers over /a younger, slender guy, a boy, / a son. A surge of anticipation / of the first touch..."
"Loss of Desires" explores what it means to no longer feel desire (or compulsion). "I don't miss it, I miss missing it. I miss the / lack of it, the failure, every time, to grasp anything but the / scum of, he edgings of the shiny spot, the passion wound up."
While the next poem, "Desire for the Self," is about taking the bus, somehow it doesn't strike me as quite appropriate (for my anthology), as it sort of feeds into notions of gays as predators... "Laugh at your freedom from desire. / The boy boarding the bus may even / flash you a smile: Thanks for not wanting me."
The nature of the collection generally left me a bit depressed and downbeat, as do most poems that meditate on aging, frailty in general and on-coming death. While in these poems Stanley is probably in the 6th Age (of Man) and on the cusp of the 7th Age, Souster had clearly arrived at the 7th Age in Come Rain, Come Shine. Maybe it is only my delusion that I am still in the 5th Age and haven't started down the slope to the 6th Age - and it is pure superstition that reading about the 6th or 7th Age will hasten their onset... But that's definitely a bit of a stumbling block preventing me from enjoying Stanley's After Desire.
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