It’s All About Gravity

 

 

Like a satellite camera alternating its focus, the poems in Falling Body zoom in from the very moon to shoot tight views of ordinary life, then zoom out again giving the wide view of humanity and its ironies, but this is collection is the anything but distant. The poems are quietly eloquent and precise, working separately to lift up the banal episodes of living but as they proceed we see the connections being made between the observer and the observed. All this is strikingly punctuated with heart attacks, or more precisely heart events, the poet’s own in particular and those of others. The falling body of the title suggests age and mortality, a possible fall from grace, a necessary fall from the height of human arrogance: “‘What’s it all about?’ is a question with heft. It’s all about gravity. And lift-off.” As much as the literal equation that inspired it.

 

Life, death and the literal heart are subject matter easily overwrought, but Cavanagh tells it objectively and without flourish. In “CAD”, we are given a droll tour of the minutia of the poet’s heart problem, one of those life events meant to happen to someone, anyone, else, but Cavanagh comes away from it not perplexed or saddened or swearing off French fries but with the poetic drive enforced by a change of perspective. “Something has been taken from the everyday, a sureness revealed now as bogus but endearing.  Bravado. Gone. And something added, a stutter thought of what comes next.”

 

Falling Body probes the gaps between expectation and reality in viewing the self as an aging, mortal creature in a world of other such creatures. Cavanagh keeps us aware of the proximity of the observer because he is in the poems with his subjects: a brother in hospital,  the waitress who’s had corrective facial surgery, his elderly dying mother, the child he never had and even, hilariously, a city bus with its Yoda-like sign stating “Sorry I am” to name but a few. The having been and being of a couple real people bring their imagined perspective in the form of Neil Armstrong and Karl Wallenda, whose high wire is a sure thread from Cavanagh’s first book The Middleman. If The Middleman was the poet’s view from middle age, then Falling Body is his new look at life from the possibility of having taken the first tentative step into the third age, where he can say “I’m here now in traffic to choose, to get on with a certain wry amount of self” or “Now’s the chance to slow dance with essentials.”

 

And while the reader may be eager for instructions as to what comes next, we are not confronted with pat answers. In “The Wait,” Cavanagh reminds that what inner peace he may be willing to explore does not obscure the reality of the world, as ever, going awry:

 

New Year’s Eve and I’m waiting for some words

                to jump the barbed wire and throw off

their orange jump suits: liberal, feminist, intellect –

                dangerous felons all. I’m waiting

for grade schools to embrace children and lock up

                the tools of control, instead of all that

vice versa. I’m waiting for some intelligent design.

                I’m waiting for the body to howl

and the spirit to listen. New Year’s Eve and I’m

waiting for the war to be fought

with razor-sharp love, waiting for the battle to turn

                inner.

 

The final section of the book, a long poem sequence for which the book is also titled, is by far the best piece in the collection. It nearly caused me to declare this a book better read backwards. By its placement, this tightly controlled, non-linear poem gives the illusion of summary and outcome but its dreamlike quality resonates as the pool of imagery from which the rest of the poems might have been generated, and indeed, as the type of wandering reverie one might experience in hospital. Built of short sharp lines this poem holds the pleasure of language, the ironic turn of phrase that elevates the anecdote when it is reaching for the philosophical heights this poet is known for. In this sense, the poem presents as a newly altered, poetically incisive voice of a narrator hovering in a static zone somewhere between forward and back, leaving a wonderfully powerful echo in its wake.

 

 

 

Falling Body

David Cavanagh

Salmon Poetry, Ireland: 2009

78 pages

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Born in Saskatchewan in 1961, Lori Cayer has made Manitoba her home since 1969. A poet and editor of poetry, Lori has been a participant in Poetry in Motion, Poets in the Schools and, the MWG Poetry Tent at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She has hosted reading events, facilitated poetry workshops, performed poetry readings in more than one city and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a past member of the CV2 and Staccato Chapbooks publishing collectives and has served as chair of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild. She is the co-editor of poetry for the literary journal CV2. Her most recent accomplishment is that of co-founder of the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She works by day as an Editorial Assistant for a National Research Council Scientific Journal.