Changehouse by Michael Tregebov

Readers of contemporary literary periodicals will find this new volume of poetry from Turnstone Press something of a surprise. For some time now the dominant style of Canadian Poetry has been difficult to distinguish from discursive prose, and has been praised, too often and too loudly, for being “lean”, “spare” and “austere”; qualities which would probably delight John Calvin or Henry Ford, but which many poetry readers have been unenthusiastic about. None of these terms apply to the work of Michael Tregebov, a young, and very talented Winnipeg poet, who, like many of the more interesting poets of his generation have been slowly and steadily moving Canadian poetry into a new stage of development which is firmly rooted in reality, but not stuck there. Tregebov’s writing begins in the experience we all share, but moves, sometimes with brilliant metaphor and image, sometimes with sudden, idiomatic statements which have immediacy and compactness, sometimes with both, toward a more imaginative and lyric realism that opens rich patterns of association. There is an openness to experience, both perceptual and subjective, and an excitement about language which I find enormously refreshing. And he has been able to do this without abandoning that sense of a particular voice speaking in its own idiom which has been the earmark of some of the best Canadian poets of the recent past.

The title poem is a beautifully evocative reminiscence which is both a portrait of the poet’s father, and a record of a very specific time and place. It begins with a perfectly straightforward presentation of an experience common to Manitobans:

My father is a shy man
And he holds me by his hand
And we change our bathing suits
At the bath-house by the beach

The flat, nearly prosaic language is direct and clear, but lifted above the ordinary by its lilting rhythm the near rhyme (“man” and “hand”) and by the careful repetition of vowel (“ch_a_nge our b_a_thing suits”) and consonant (“_h_olds me by _h_is _h_and,” and “_b_ath-house _b_y the _b_each.”) sounds which will, at least unconsciously, heighten the emotional mood of the poem, and create, at the very beginning, a sense of music, of nostalgia, which the untrained reader might find hard to explain, but which can be felt and responded to whether one is aware of these techniques or not. But Tregebov doesn’t remain at this level of literal reporting for long. The next lines convey a remarkable sense of a child’s extravagant imagination and at the same time give us “hard” details:

And the changehouse is muggy
It is a Roman temple
And the echoes are carved in the wall
Along with easy lays
And good blow-jobs

The poem continues, repeating at more and more frequent intervals, the opening line, but always with subtle variations of tone and emphasis. This lyric technique provides the poem with an accelerating intensity, which builds toward this impressive conclusion:

And dressed as we are
We shuffle onto the beach
My father was the sunset
And all the wisdom that portends
Yet he never pissed in the sand with me.
He led me by his hand
Up to the edge of the copper shore
Where he dipped his hand down
And lifted the lake
Like the lid of a toy box
He would have given me everything.

These final lines, with their outward movement into a nearly surreal, but childlike and affectively appropriate image, are visually, metaphorically, and lyrically satisfying. Tregebov hasn’t given up the musical awareness of his words in the excitement of discovering the perfectly “right” image. And the rhyme (“Sand/hand”) and the four “i” sounds (“dipped, “lifted, “lid”, and “given.”) in the last four lines create (along with the many “e” sounds) a sustained pattern which ties the lines together and contributes a subtle nuance of delight. The last line, a flat, direct statement, brings us abruptly back to a powerfully conscious awareness of the meaning which resides so easily in the image, and this effect of sudden expansion and extension is characteristic both of Tregebov’s work at its best, and of the work of many of his contemporaries.

There are several other poems in this slim volume which have the same sustained quality, which give the reader that feeling of having read something which is fully realized, and which go on giving pleasure through many readings. “The Roofer Elegy”, and “Water Lilies” are two other such poems, written with a skill which I find rare for a first book of poems. “Forest Fire” has some remarkable images, among which the following stands out in my mind as one of the most vivid in the book:

The canker’s stringbridge of silk;
The spider’s fishnet;
Sizzle and go.

Of course, there are many poems which are only partially successful. “Puberty” for instance, begins with a marvelously lucid image:

Across the lake at night
Grand Beach gleams like a watch

But in the next two couplets the images are strained, the syntax becomes monotonous, and the poem never quite regains its momentum. Tregebov’s less successful attempts seem to lack direction, and he has trouble with the flow, the ease of syntax. It is as if the poem, or the impulse for the poem, were not quite clear, and his language, his skill, had nothing solid to drive it. Often, he resorts to the rather uninspired formula of creating metaphor and image by linking two nouns with the anaemic verb “is”, and when he repeats this two or three times in a row, as he does in half a dozen places, the effect is disastrous. It has the feel of a stuck record, or of a mannerism which destroys the poem’s glow like a nervous tic. The other longish poems, except for “1919” and “In The Sun” which I liked, also seem to become random and digressive. In the more successful, ones, like “The Changehouse” and “In The Sun”, this effect of prosaic disintegration is prevented by the repetition of a motif or refrain which tends to renew the lyric impulse of the poem, and add a needed sense of structure. But these awkwardnesses and eccentricities are to be expected in a poet who has chosen not to play it safe, not to opt for a minimal style which is a rather dull second cousin to the newspaper or the documentary film, with their sometimes pathetic imitations of a “scientific” or “objective” methodology. Tregebov, like Robyn Sarah and Lorna Uher in the west; and Pier DiCicco, Diane Keating, Jacqueline d’Amboise and Mary Melfi in the east, among otners, has taken the kind of chances, and used the kind of energy which has already brought Canadian poetry to the attention of many writers and critics in the U.S.A. and Great Britain. Changehouse is an important book by a new Manitoba poet who promises a great deal and has already delivered several impressive poems. The book itself is beautifully designed by Eva Fritsch, and the drawings by Dennis Nokony which complement “In the Sun” and “Walking in the City” are superbly skilful, though I found the others, especially those of human figures, excessively frivolous and messy. Even with the reservation I’ve expressed, I think that anyone interested in poetry or drawing will find this book very rewarding. It is not consistently good, but the best of it is also the best I’ve seen in a long time.

-George Amabile

Mr. Amabile is a poet, teacher and editor of the literary bi-annual Northern Light. His books include Blood Ties (1972), Open Country (1976) and a forthcoming collection from Borealis Press called Flower and Song.