“The Land They Gave Away: New & Selected Poems” and “Montage for an Interstellar Sky”

New Books by Andrew Suknaski

This pair of new books by Andrew Suknaski ushers us into a world we may not have expected from the poet of Wood Mountain. His three major collections, Wood Mountain Poems (1976), The Ghosts Call You Poor (1978), and In the Name of Narid (1981), reminded us of the pathos of human existence and the heroic dimensions of the individual. Suknaski’s was the voice of the sometimes forgotten, rejected or neglected people who, in the end, turned out to be our teachers.

The Land They Gave Away is a collection of selected and new poems. Stephen Scobie has edited and chosen from the poet’s three major collections to make up a little less than two-thirds of the volume. The final third consists of new poems. While we again get some of Suknaski’s best in the selected (“Homestead 1914,” “Jimmy Hoy’s Place,” “Philip Well,” “Ernie Hudson,” “Union Hospital in Assiniboia,” “Poem Written to Old Friends at Christmas Time,” “Suknatskyj Taking a Greyhound North”), they don’t seem the same when read in relation to the new poems. What is noticeable now is not so much the grandness of the human spirit, but the self-destruction that follows creation. In a manner, we find Andrew Suknaski “deconstructing” himself; his own work is refuted against the backdrop of a suicidal world gone insane. We are, finally, not allowed to have our myth of Suknaski, the common man’s epic voice, in peace.

The sceptical note that was sounded in earlier collections seems to ring louder when seen here and especially in Montage for an Interstellar Cry. We can recall these lines from “Union Hospital in Assiniboia”:

Yes father
i have written some dubious poems about you
said what i wished
yet the stern pride emanating from the darkness
surrounding your hawk’s eyes
refutes it all.

While the speaker is doubtful of what he has accomplished, there is more here than the suggestion that it was all a lie anyway. This is the artist’s constant conflict: to be, ultimately, disappointed with what you have achieved because it is only a fraction of what you saw.

The poet now inhabits a fragmented universe instead of one held together by the sheer strength of the human spirit. Nothing sticks together any more, not even a story. The whole world is sick to the heart and like Philip Well, we are all sleeping on a bench in the corner during a dance. Suknaski seems to have entered a phase of “second thoughts” in general, and things look alarmingly bad the second time around. The new poems, then, are loaded with visions of doom.

The motif of endings is everywhere. We are dying and we don’t know what to do. In Montage for an Interstellar Cry this theme is made universal. Here we have visions of nuclear holocaust, the “fire next time” that lodges in the poet’s “second thoughts.”

Kafka’s visions also come under fire in the new poems. What Kafka constructed as dream, Suknaski presents as the reality we are faced with. There is nothing literary about this. We live in a world where torture takes place, something for each of us to live through. In the highly skillful poem, “Betrayal Beginning in Dreams,” Jacobo Timerman describes what torture is:

torture? there is no description
you are blindfolded
you are in darkness
you are in pain
there is the breathing
of your tormentor
sometimes you sense his fear
time
seems endless
there are no points
of reference
your greatest
temptation
is suicide
the other
is madness….

Caught between madness and suicide, most of us choose a form of madness. We look the other way and are, consequently, traitors. The narrator admits this for himself in “Betrayal Beginning in Dreams,” which continues the line of the half-finished story, the broken poem, the stutter that takes the place of the utterance.

As the narrative voice struggles with its doubts, the speaker finds that in spite of everything he has done, he ends up having sided with the torturer. The persona Suknatskyj looks at his own past and tries to single out what remains. The result to him is very slight, and that slightness consists of a kind of self-betrayal: “what little/ endures/ clear enough/ suknatskyj/ traitor of spirit/ acquiescing/ to cruelty.” The title of this poem is “The Faceless Goodbyes,” which, significantly enough, sets the tone for the collection of new poems as a whole. And in case we want to fight the suspicion that Suknaski himself is saying goodbye (to whatever), we have the next collection, the long poem Montage for an Interstellar Cry, to further corroborate our alarm.

In Montage it is somewhat clearer what is being said goodbye to. It is a farewell addressed to the whole world:

goodbye the sound of crushed pebbles
goodbye the wagon rolling on iron tires
goodbye butch boyhood mutt
goodbye horses
goodbye milkcows
goodbye chickens and red rooster
goodbye garden
goodbye straw and mud shack
goodbye the byzantine icons
goodbye chokecherry wine and slavic canticles
goodbye the lost money buried in jamtins
goodbye children of the mute earth
goodbye willows poplars and oskar kokoscka’s roosters spurring one another into bloody earth!

Despite the humour, the farewell is ours as well as the narrator’s, for we are close to nuclear war, the final ending. Andrew Suknaski has not specialized in metaphorical poetry so far, and does not begin to do so here. The prospect of nuclear war, the presence of injustice and torture, are as real as the sunset.

According to Dennis Cooley, Turnstone editors David Arnason and David Carr did an excavating job to locate the long poem Montage. They were presented with a bulk of material out of which they “dug” the poem. It is tempting to see the editors as co-authors, for the selection of material in a long poem is sometimes as important as the parts themselves. It’s hard to say whether the poem would be such a despairing cry had we all the material to read ourselves. But the editors clearly have done a fine job in unearthing the poem. Worlds are destroyed; the rural writer has turned urban; the earthbound has gone interstellar.

In Montage the poet compares dreams again, but this time they are nightmares turned real. We come to the poem and are ushered in by flagmen, of all things. Right away the “new” human condition is presented:

the flagmen signal
the arrival of the first MX
weighing 190,000 pounds
carrying ten nuclear warheads
yielding 35,000 kilotons
add 199 of these to the integers
of your nightmare
exactly 150 hiroshimas.

In reflecting this world the poet himself takes risks: “what follows yves klein’s new realism/ at the risk of injury/ or even death.” In order to face the situation, to be a traitor no longer, he risks his own death. The poet, it seems absorbs the necessity for self-destruction. He cannot be like Sakamoto, who says to his poet-friend after walking around the devastated Hiroshima:

‘What happened here
was a man-made catastrophe
and has nothing
to do with literature.
I will never write
a single word
about it.’

Suknaski has to respond within his “new realism.” He has to write about it, and in doing so he gives us “the cry/ challenging/ the tyranny of abyss.” In that cry the creator destroys his own creation with an explosion as brilliant as a nuclear blast. Like the man who witnesses such a thing, “when he sees the flash/ his shadow burnt/ forever,” Suknaski seems to have purposefully burnt his own shadow. Telling the truth is just that costly. ■

Kristjana Gunnars is a Winnipeg poet and short-story writer. Her last book, Wake-Pick Poems, was published in 1981.