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The Ventriloquist: Poetic Narratives from the Womb of War
These are poems built to last, poems that dare to seek meaning among the chaos of war and its aftermath. ---Art Joyce, The Ormsby Review
The Ventriloquist gives us four fearless and seminal works by one of Canada's master poets and is a scathing indictment of war and its ravages. It's also a testament to the power of poetic narrative.
Gary Geddes is known for his first-person narrative poems and "seamless impersonations." He sometimes speaks of his poetry as rescue work , a term he attributes to Joseph Conrad, which involves "gathering the vanishing fragments of memory and giving them the permanence of art." For Geddes, however, it's not personal memory, but tribal or collective memory that most demands his attention.
Those figures from the past reaching out to be heard in The Ventriloquist include a youth in charge of horses on a doomed and bloody mission to the New World during the Spanish conquest; a so-called 'mad-bomber' who dies in a washroom of the House of Commons when the dynamite he is carrying explodes; a wily and outrageous Chinese sculptor and his legion of warrior subjects struggling against imperial edicts to conform; and POWs in Hong Kong and Japan in World War II doing their damnedest to survive, a struggle that continued back home in the face of shocking neglect.
Geddes finds that the phrase "the ventriloquism of history" perfectly describes his poetic process here and in other poems and jokingly admits that he's never quite sure if he's ventriloquist or dummy. His critics, however, have no doubt about his talent for giving voice , and have called his work "stunning," "wonderful," "breathtaking in its imaginative reach and verbal dexterity."
Of War & Other Measures Robert Kroetsch wrote, "It's the kind of poem poets are only supposed to be able to dream.... The sustained calibration is beautiful. I didn't know the long poem could be so taut.... The years of art and craft are in the book."
Hong Kong Poems prompted Michael Estok to say in a review in Fiddlehead : "It is a weighty and worthy and admirable undertaking.... [Geddes's] book of elegies puts him on the same level of poetic intensity (perhaps he even surpasses it) of Milton's 'Lycidas' or Tennyson's In Memoriam ."
These words of praise are reflected in the awards the books the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, Writers Choice Award, the National Magazine Gold Award, and Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region).
In this post-everything era, for a writer to seek meaning is practically a revolutionary act. Poet Gary Geddes has bucked the nihilist trend throughout his long career and the result is an impressive body of work with genuine staying power.... This collection compiles his long-poem series Letter of the Master of Horse , War and Other Measures , The Terracotta Army , and the Hong Kong Poems . By its very nature, war is an anonymizing phenomenon --- it subsumes the individual to the massing of social and militant forces. The role of the artist then is to restore the individuality of those lost lives, both the dead and those who (barely) survive. In that respect, Geddes in The Ventriloquist is taking back what the coercive state has erased, giving individual soldiers, nurses and others caught up in the maelstrom the voices and faces they lost. And it’s the poet’s defiant cry that no, war and mass death and maimed bodies is not inevitable --- history need not move in only one direction. ---Art Joyce, The Ormsby Review
The Ventriloquist gives us four fearless and seminal works by one of Canada's master poets and is a scathing indictment of war and its ravages. It's also a testament to the power of poetic narrative.
Gary Geddes is known for his first-person narrative poems and "seamless impersonations." He sometimes speaks of his poetry as rescue work , a term he attributes to Joseph Conrad, which involves "gathering the vanishing fragments of memory and giving them the permanence of art." For Geddes, however, it's not personal memory, but tribal or collective memory that most demands his attention.
Those figures from the past reaching out to be heard in The Ventriloquist include a youth in charge of horses on a doomed and bloody mission to the New World during the Spanish conquest; a so-called 'mad-bomber' who dies in a washroom of the House of Commons when the dynamite he is carrying explodes; a wily and outrageous Chinese sculptor and his legion of warrior subjects struggling against imperial edicts to conform; and POWs in Hong Kong and Japan in World War II doing their damnedest to survive, a struggle that continued back home in the face of shocking neglect.
Geddes finds that the phrase "the ventriloquism of history" perfectly describes his poetic process here and in other poems and jokingly admits that he's never quite sure if he's ventriloquist or dummy. His critics, however, have no doubt about his talent for giving voice , and have called his work "stunning," "wonderful," "breathtaking in its imaginative reach and verbal dexterity."
Of War & Other Measures Robert Kroetsch wrote, "It's the kind of poem poets are only supposed to be able to dream.... The sustained calibration is beautiful. I didn't know the long poem could be so taut.... The years of art and craft are in the book."
Hong Kong Poems prompted Michael Estok to say in a review in Fiddlehead : "It is a weighty and worthy and admirable undertaking.... [Geddes's] book of elegies puts him on the same level of poetic intensity (perhaps he even surpasses it) of Milton's 'Lycidas' or Tennyson's In Memoriam ."
These words of praise are reflected in the awards the books the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, Writers Choice Award, the National Magazine Gold Award, and Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region).
In this post-everything era, for a writer to seek meaning is practically a revolutionary act. Poet Gary Geddes has bucked the nihilist trend throughout his long career and the result is an impressive body of work with genuine staying power.... This collection compiles his long-poem series Letter of the Master of Horse , War and Other Measures , The Terracotta Army , and the Hong Kong Poems . By its very nature, war is an anonymizing phenomenon --- it subsumes the individual to the massing of social and militant forces. The role of the artist then is to restore the individuality of those lost lives, both the dead and those who (barely) survive. In that respect, Geddes in The Ventriloquist is taking back what the coercive state has erased, giving individual soldiers, nurses and others caught up in the maelstrom the voices and faces they lost. And it’s the poet’s defiant cry that no, war and mass death and maimed bodies is not inevitable --- history need not move in only one direction. ---Art Joyce, The Ormsby Review
182 pages, Paperback
Published November 20, 2021
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 13, 2024
Through the decades, Gary Geddes has been delivering vivid poetic narratives from specific wars. "These tragic stories of war and conquest demanded to be told, and as powerfully as possible."
He quotes Dylan Thomas: "Out of the inevitable conflict of images—inevitable because of the creative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of war—I try to make that momentary piece which is the poem." In this, Gary Geddes succeeds.
He quotes Dylan Thomas: "Out of the inevitable conflict of images—inevitable because of the creative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of war—I try to make that momentary piece which is the poem." In this, Gary Geddes succeeds.
Displaying 1 of 1 review