The Burning Alphabet

by Barry Dempster

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry 2005 * Winner of the CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award. The Burning Alphabet confirms and extends Barry Dempster's reputation as one of Canada's most respected poets. Underpinning these poems, as in his previous work, there lies an unswerving dedication to emotional and spiritual honesty, clear-eyed recognitions rendered without pomp. In one section, "Sick Days", he focuses on that "other place" of chronic illness. Other poems present arguments against suicide, and explore the tropical wonders of a woman's closet. The closing section renders, with great candour and poignancy, the powerful love-hate relationship with an aging father. Dempster writes as though it were simply natural to have speech and song cohabit with such grace. In the thick of night, when we're dreaming of
corridors and Dali clocks, the soft brown
bodies of bucks and does are basking
in our moonlight, nibbling on the last of our
lettuce leaves, scratching impressions in our sand.
They are the children we wish we'd had,
fleeting images of ourselves before
inner lives grew blotchy, eyes heavy with
10 p.m. cop shows and those blessedly
nonsensical dreams. ? From "Deer" "In The Burning Alphabet , mood, with all its elaborate subtleties and manifestations, both in sickness and in health, constitutes a metaphysics. I feel as though I've lived an entire inner life in these pages, wrenching, dark, and amazingly sweet." — Roo Borson

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2005

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Burning Alphabet starts strong but I don't like the direction that Dempster took. He's great with metaphors and figurative language. He juxtaposes ordinary things in such a strange and wonderful way, e.g. "finches the colour of whole wheat toast," "hydro lines bulging against dusk skies like body builder's veins," "my cats leaping out of nowhere like UFOs" (p.70 "New World"). He has a talent for drawing out ideas in unexpected ways, even writing entire series of poems centering around a theme. I also appreciate his diction and his knack for throwing in some subtle assonance and internal rhymes. From a technical standpoint, this is a superb book.

There were two parts of the book that I disliked. I only liked one of the seventeen poems in Sick Days—a series which, unsurprisingly, focuses on humans and their physical maladies. Each poem in this series has an epigraph, which is a pet peeve of mine. If you're a goddamn poet, you are the one who's supposed to come up with the beautiful, compelling words. The last section, The Crowd of Him, contains fifteen poems about Dempster's dead father. Yeah, yeah, the elegy is a classic form of poetry, but these poems were far too confessional for my liking. I would prefer not to read about his father's decline into incontinence and dementia. I'm not quite sure what his intentions were with some of these poems...maybe he thought that he's bold to break the taboos, but I found it to be in bad taste.

Dempster seems to have an obsession with the word "penis." I'm indifferent to this, but it's curious how often this word seemed to appear.

I'm still deciding if I'm going to keep this book. I admire the poet's mastery of his craft, but didn't like the subject matter of two of the four sections. Maybe I'd be better off reading one of his other books.

Poems that I liked:
"Explicit," "Dead Elm," "Unbelievable, an October Poem," "How to Forget You," "Suburban Poet," "Guardian Angels," "There Are Moods," "Shriek," "Where?"

=9/59 (15.3%) poems that I liked.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Burning Alphabet is filled with visceral and emotional poems that pick at topics individuals often like to leave unexplored. My favourite section dealt with chronic illness, particularly the author's frustration and anger. Gorgeous wordcraft and poignant messages.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrific collection. And while many of Dempster's poems were powerful and profound, I keep coming back to one about something more mundane, "Stormy Weather" (pg 29), and these lines in particular:

"At first the day's a leaky shower head
threads and threads of drizzle
sweat drooling down the back of my neck.
But then the skies begin crowding together
bench-pressed clouds
and a sudden torrent of rain
needing multi-syllables to do it justice..."