The Men
By Lisa Robertson. BookThug, 69 pp, $16, softcover.
Sometimes a book is funny or intriguing or mysterious, but every once in a while one asks you to notice how you think, changes the way your brain functions. Sometimes a book is all those things at once.
Lisa Robertson, a Vancouver poet now living in France, writes the things that get talked about all the time, things that have been the subjects of conversations throughout history. In a previous book, for example, it was the weather. In her latest book of poetry, The Men: A Lyric Book, she lyrically troubles and celebrates that most talked-about of subjects, men. To be clear, she doesn't write about men””not Gary from work, or Dave from last night. She writes Men. All men. So that after reading the book you can't look at them the same again:
The men find themselves happy insofar
As they gratify an inclination.
They are men of warmth and humour and
Acute sensitivity and if I choose
To speak of them it is no trifle.
Using a kind of classical diction, Robertson writes adroitly without buying into typical contemporary characterizations: no jerks or jackasses, no saviours or strong, sensitive types. No types at all. She allows the men to become something other. She also wonders what it would be like if she had written all of the men's poems throughout history:
Each man””I could write
His poem. He needs no voice.
But what would I take from it. Our facades are so
Minor. What would I begin to say
If his words were
My poem. I am preoccupied with grace
And have started to speak expan?sively”” as in
Have joys
Which look like choice
The power of the work is not only in the unique perspective but in the precision of the language and the line, taking everyday words and spinning them new: “You really love/The men./We do.”
Something as simple as a shift in pronoun announces a new way to thinking through the idea of men. Even if you stop thinking about men, the book offers so many other textual pleasures. Intellectually significant, yes, but such fun to read too.
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