\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWmere voyeurs. Seldom has ritual been sounrighteously self-righteous.Lascivious in another direction, FrankDavey articulates the benign amours ofthe eponymous Edward and Patricia,comic characters whose romance andmarriage provide them with a forum fortwo decades of sexual expression. Althoughsome of their bedroom antics andacrobatics are farcically amusing, followingthe characters through thirty-ninevariations on the same theme is no morethan doing one's conjugal critical duty.Here the I-love-you-so-much-that-Icould-eat-youtheme assumes psychosexualassociations and casts the reader in avoyeuristic role, taking it all in, followingEdward and Patricia from their first datein high school, when "with her back /against the storm door, she would embracehim" and significant moments laterhe "would sag against the porch rail / &marvel at how the door never opened," tohis realization after years of variationson-a-thememarriage that he has quitesimply been seduced, that he has beenliterally had. His ultimate love note toPatricia, signalling his indefinite departure,is a curt "You ARE a whore" lipstuckon the mirror and punctuated withthe appropriate expletive greeting, suggestingthe consummation of their sterilerelationship and the reward of a kind ofautoerotic isolation that each of themdeserves.As we follow Edward and Patriciathrough their orgastic and orgiastic strugglefor synchrony, we recognize many ofthe sexual clichés of the past two decadesand acknowledge Frank Davey's ratherpathetic attempt to document the pathosof physical incompatibility and sexualinsurrection. But his insistently genitalpoetic is ultimately crude both in its contentand in its methodology and neithergraphically nor even pornographicallystimulating. By holding the mirror-onthe-ceilingup to nature, Davey offers usmerely the burning flesh and blood of consummationand invites us to consume thesexual act in cannibalistic fashion, as hestirs the fleshpots of what amounts tolittle more than pulp lit. Although thesepoems might provide readers with anaughty diversion from Davey's moreserious and innovative verse and fromhis role as a literary scholar and critic,they seem to lack aesthetic and mimeticlegitimacy, degrading men and women bycatching them with their collective pantsdown and denying the sexual dignity ofmankind. That for all their seemingfecundity Edward and Patricia should beunable to conceive a child points to one'shope that their poetic narrative too willdie without issue. In celebration of thedeath of bad taste, one can only passaround the cigars !In his first published book of verse,Roger Nash takes the metaphor of consumedpoetry and transforms it into ametaphor of inhaled poetry, his readers,like the whales of the title poem, revellingin their underwater imagery preciselybecause they must periodically come upfor air (for end-stopped lines, as it were).The delightful irony is that Nash's linestend to end without punctuation, andthus seem at once to surface and descend,surface and descend ; and to go on indefinitely(with no forseeable end and withsyntactical unpredictability). The poemsare less about whales qua whales thanabout images of threatened life, as thetitle poem suggests in the speaker's recognitionof whale forms in the geologicprotrusions of the Sudbury landscapeand hence marine forms on the shore ofthe prairie sea: "in summer outcropsbask in doldrums / as asleep as ovens aswarm as whales the children / hopscotchover their humps talk to them tease themtreat / them cruelly as alive." This poemis indicative of the collection in its encouragingthe reader to re-create the184