Guy Elston is naturally funny. There are many shades of funny, from the simplest
and most straightforward, guffaw-inducing, timing-based comedic to the subtlest,
most appreciative, and most times quiet intellectual-fencing sort of wittiness.
There is, of course, the uncomedic funny, the Alanis Morissette tone of ironic,
that inspires bitterness and resentment toward the situation at hand and usually the
people involved. Some people will equate this with Freudian uncanniness, but at any
rate, I think Alanis is always better than psychoanalysis.
Many people reading book reviews are consumers of literature. I don’t think
there’s any need for a reviewer, much less myself, to pen reviews exclusively for those
interested in pursuing writing as their calling. And if I don’t get around to the writer
in question pretty soon, you’re going to conclude that I don’t really know how to get
into it with this particular quillster and maybe he’s not worth looking into reading
after all, so I digress.
I am likely as new to you as Guy Elston is to me. The Character Actor Convention
is Elston’s debut full-length poetry collection, preceded only by his Anstruther Press
chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode (2023). He is a transplant from across the pond,
a support worker equipped with a Master’s in History and a knack for making an
appearance. Where there’s smoke there’s not always water, so I am happy to count
myself as one of Elston’s first reviewers, if I’m not already late to the party.
Elston loves Charles Simic and Wisława Szymborska and compares his work to
Michael Bazzett’s in terms of execution but not delivery. I think this confluence of
tastes shows itself best when Elston writes about God, as in the opening poem of the
four-part “Convention” (page 6):
The Stake
The night before,
and Joan is certain. As ever.
Do I want to make her wonder?
Or not? War
is not as divine as I first thought,
Joan admits. Our game of chess
lies unfinished. The bet:
loser says the one thing they never could.
How can these cassocked frauds judge me,
Joan sighs. Are you like them?
I watch a spider sit still.
I don’t know. I won’t exist much longer.
Aren’t you scared?
I ask, fiddling with my fallen bishop.
Oh, I’ll burn, Joan laughs.
I do every time. Your move.
It is hard not to conflate gentleness with timidness, so I suppose I will in this case.
Something about blank verse will always oppose a mixing of metaphors, but Elston
pulls it off nevertheless: the effigy, the spider, the game of chess, all on equal footing.
For the sake of conversation, the entire point of writing poems could be to mix
metaphors, but Elston’s influences seem much more like symbolists than surrealists,
with neat, tidy animals to represent self-contained allegories in each poem (i.e.
Szymborska’s Rimbaldian monkey).
The thing that becomes immediately clear after reading the first poem of his book
is his self-awareness. The title, too, speaks to the landscape of literary Canada, which
could be portrayed as a character actor convention of its own: each commercially
viable author with their advanced degree; each aesthetically superior counterpart
with their eschewment thereof.
But it is precisely because of the ambiguity of this metaphor that I reckon all his
metaphors remain readymades, ready to be discarded as caricatures of character
actors, from beginning to end. The spider may recur in another context, the chess
game, even, and Joan of Arc, too (page 60). Napoleon surfaces and resurfaces later,
as well.
In another very real sense, this is the stake of the debut author in Canada today:
Iphigenia marching to the pyre, destined for the priesthood of interpretation, or, in
Elston’s historically informed vision, Joan of Arc, who, less poetically, has no Diana
to rescue her. But gods aside, the archetype is the same and the allegory palpable.
Who is the speaker of the poem, this inscrutable first-person singular pronoun?
“I won’t exist much longer,” they intimate, but then the dialogue with spectral Joan
echoes this I, in order to address you, “Oh, I’ll burn, Joan laughs. / I do every time. Your move.”
This Joan is a recurring dream figure, then, a fatalistic ghost beckoning
the reader, the cleric, the confidante, to make their next move, as though we were all
complicit to fate.
So, if you’ve ever wondered if a punchline can have a cliffhanger ending, look no
further than his four-page poem “The Seasonal Industrial Complex” (page 16):
4) PowerPoint Slide at a Political Party Conference
Ideas for new curses:
cats can only say yes, dogs no.
A pen that can only describe
a perfect world nobody wants.
The love of grey skies.
Every star visible always, or never.
Fulfilling every ambition
by thirty, forgetting about death daily.
The most beautiful day of the year
in mid-Winter, mid-crisis.
I would hate to describe something as “not ha-ha funny” that somebody else
could find hilarious.
This fourth of four poems in a sequence opens with a turn of phrase synonymous
with “what comedians talk about,” cats and dogs. In the character actor convention
of a political party conference, perhaps this would qualify as platformable policy.
So Elston continues: “A pen that can only describe / a perfect world nobody
wants,” seems to elude to the fact that people read poetry to imagine a better world,
or at least, used to. This is the recurrence of his peculiarly wounded brand of selfawareness
(i.e. “lifeless as a history textbook,” page 20), as though if any pen could
describe an ideal world, he wouldn’t write. It’s an eloquent, if unintended, upsidedown
rhetorical formulation. I love it.
Then his newfound Canadianness creeps in: “The most beautiful day of the year /
in mid-Winter, mid-crisis,” not only equates winter to crisis, a familiar tune in these
parts, but again strikes that note of Alanis Morissette irony: the best weather coincides
with the least pleasant season, metaphysically and meteorologically.
Young writers who approach me for reviews usually ask me for one thing: be as
harsh and brutal as my craft allows. They’re unfamiliar with my approach and that’s
fine by me. I could never be harsh or brutal. It’s not my job as a critic to tear the
literary comrades of my generation down.
But reading Guy Elston’s debut, I sense an elongated bout of anxiety behind his
words, that if he doesn’t publish now, then he’ll never emerge from the pandemic
as a literary professional, but rather seeing a lot of repetition. As Stuart Ross once
said, “careerist” doesn’t have to be a dirty word, and Elston’s list of publications is
certainly impressive if not de rigueur. I can’t feign condescension, either; it’s a list
of venues any debut poet in this country would consider nothing shy of a boon of
domestic exposure.
So I’ll conclude this much: although I look forward to what poems Elston composes
next, it comes with my footnote that he go deeper with whatever context his
character actor imagination lands on next, whether it’s a more cavalier approach to
his relationship with Napoleon (if he were aiming for Leonard Cohen, unsuccessfully,
then why not try for Stendhalian next?) or a doubling down of his infatuation
with Charles Simic through his symbol of the spider. I think there are layers here that
Elston has yet to explore, for the sake of the reader, that he may not have experimented
with yet. And if literary careerism demands anything in Canada, surely that
thing must be commitment to the bit.
Elston concludes towards the end of the collection, “For A Good Time” (page 60):
“This summer I’m doing / my reverse Rimbaud – stop selling guns, / start writing
poems. This summer only // I’m doing my reverse Joan of Arc – stop / getting burnt,
/ and start hearing angels.”
