Stephen Morrissey. Girouard Avenue. Montreal: Coracle Press, 2009. 80 pp. ISBN 978-0-9687599-6-7. $16.95 (paper).
Girouard Avenue is Stephen Morrissey’s eighth collection and his first book in ten years. After a prolific period in the 1990s that culminated in a selected poems, Mapping the Soul (1998), he went silent for a while. With Girouard Avenue he has returned to print with a collection focusing on family history and origins. It is not a new subject for him – a collection called Family Album was published twenty years ago, and his own preface to his selected poems speaks to the issue – but I do not remember him self-identifying so deliberately as a “sixth generation Irish-Montrealer” before this, as he does here in his “About the Author” note. Such genealogical preening always makes me squirm a little, since after all many of the world’s horrors are perpetrated in the name of ethnic and national loyalties and irrefrangible dedication to place. But it is the poetry that matters here, not Morrissey’s feelings about his ancestors and his local pride which, needless to say, no one has the right to gainsay.
Girouard Avenue consists of a short prologue, four longish multi-part poems, and an epilogue based on the colors of the Irish flag. The poems traverse Morrissey’s childhood, the lives of his parents and other relatives, and some of the history of the Irish in Montreal. Morrissey’s father died when he was young, and his death haunts the book to a considerable extent. But it is his paternal grandmother who is the tutelary spirit. While she lived she held the family together, and the poet clearly remembers her with deep affection. Her house at 2226 Girouard Avenue is the site which many of the memories and lucubrations that inform his poems circulate around and inhabit.
Morrissey is a romantic poet. “Poetry is the voice of the psyche speaking through the poet,” he has said. One hears Keats and Coleridge in such a contention, but also Jung and other depth psychologists who prefer to speak about the collective unconscious rather than the more personal subconscious theorized by Freud. Morrissey’s poetics as reified in that statement suggest that the poet is a medium for something larger, some voice that is not just the private voice of opinion and experience but a voice from a much deeper level. His earlier work bears this out. There is an imagistic and musical liveliness in the older poems chosen for Mapping the Soul that is very attractive. The poems seem to look out on the world with an avidity and an openness that Morrissey has lost as he has gradually focused more and more on his personal life and eventually his forebears. Love was his intervening compulsion, and the poetry of his 1990s trilogy “The Shadow” (with its Jungian admissions) moved from the larger world to private experience in a relationship that clearly helped to rescue him from certain psychic wounds. As he wrote in The Yoni Rocks (1995):
You ended my exile;
you ended my banishment;
could my existence have been
more barren than it was?
There are moments in the trilogy when Morrissey’s attraction to mythology and quasi-religious ideas blurs the object of love and pushes her towards abstraction, with the result that he will talk about the God and the Goddess instead of the heart or the cock and the cunt, and those moments attenuate the poetry a great deal.
That attenuation, it seems to me, is even more marked in Girouard Avenue. As I read and re-read the book I began to wonder whether Morrissey’s admirable determinations as a diarist (he has apparently been keeping a diary for decades now) have perhaps let him down here in the poetry. For the poems in his new book seem to me more diaristic than poetic. He tells us stories, stories that are often moving but that, mutatis mutandis, could be anyone’s family stories. The language with which he tells those stories is the problem: there is an almost total absence of a compelling visual or musical imagination. Here, for instance, is a typical excerpt from “Girouard Avenue Flat,” the first of the sequences:
Let us not speak ill
of the dead,
they have their insistence
and to analyze the past
with fault in mind,
all one finds is fault
and guilt – let us not
speak ill of the living
or the dead
but ask forgiveness
where needed.
I can’t comment on the sentiments expressed here as psychotherapeutic or historical practice, but as poetry this strikes me as flat, apart from the third line, which tries to struggle out of bare language into something more demanding. It would be unregenerate and tactless to invoke the old complaint that too much post-Williams verse reads like cut-up prose; but all the same these lines do not seem to my ear to possess the strength and musicality, the formal quiddity, of poetry. Further along in this poem Morrissey contends that “all poetry / is the voice of the soul.” Perhaps so – this seems to be his essential poetics, as I have already suggested – but that does not mean that the soul always speaks in poetry, not matter how serious or fervent its utterances.
In his earlier work Morrissey often used a two-line stanza very effectively, and although he seems to have abandoned it in the trilogy, he reverts to it here for the second poem, “Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue.” I think his work moves more appealingly in this form, as it forces him to confront space and music more than he does in the less formal part of his work. Part of section “five” demonstrates this difference:
Mother, home from Boston,
announced Father’s death;
these are moments weighing
in the heart as lead,
and the heart sinks
to the bottom of the lake
where it is immune to feeling,
only the dulled sound
of someone’s voice or the slow
throb of my heart beating.
I fell into deep water
surrounded by darkness and cold—
O Father, the child weeps,
why have you deserted me?
Some of the wording here seems to me problematic – why “as” instead of the more correct “like,” and what lake exactly? – and I also wonder why he elides the poem’s voice from the personal (his mother announcing his father’s death) to the impersonal (“the child” instead of the first person singular). But at least the text has a particularity in the way the lines and stanzas are constructed that is often missing in the rest of the book. With “November” and “The Rock, or a Short History of the Irish in Montreal” Morrissey returns to the less shapely forms that characterize much of Girouard Avenue. The epilogue, called “The Colours of the Irish Flag,” again uses the two-line stanza to good effect, though this final poem is not as strong as the best parts of “Hoolihan’s Flat,” perhaps because of a certain sentimentality (“I will not surrender//the flag I carry/is for life and love.”).
You can’t tell a poet what to write about, and you most certainly cannot tell a poet what not to write about; but I think Morrissey’s subject matter in this book has not commanded him to his best poetry, and I hope that in his next book he will look further afield for a more demanding subject. Ancestors have a way of cowing a man, and that’s no good for a poet.
Bruce Whiteman’s The Invisible World Is in Decline Books I-VI was published in 2006. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is the head of UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
